Lockleaze is another of the city’s wards dominated by a large amount of parks, recreation grounds and open space. This may account for an above average score on a range of environmental indicators. The ward is not without its problems. There is a low level of local jobs and whilst unemployment is not a serious issue there is an above average percentage of lone parent families and households with no earners.
There is a high level of OAPs and this may account for an above average percentage of those suffering limiting long-term illness. Many other health indicators are below average but there are significantly high incidences of early deaths. There are two schools in the ward. 37of students at St Thomas More Secondary achieved 5 or more grade A to C GCSEs in 1998/9 whilst only 23of those attending Lockleaze Secondary achieved the same. Following the 1999 ward boundary changes Lockleaze now encompasses the new Eastgate Centre and the rather mixed blessing of the Ikea store.
The following photographs of Lockleaze and Purdown are published with the kind permission of Michael Houlden
Photographs taken from the garden of 4 Haydon Gardens Lockleaze in about 1949. My parents, Eddie and Vera Houlden moved in in November 1947 and lived the rest of their lives there, Eddie dying in 1994. The farm house in the pictures was demolished in about 1955 and Fairacre Close, Lockleaze now covers the site. I used to play around these buildings as a boy.
The weekly rent was 14/6 (14 shillings and six pence) and the rates and water 7/6 in pre-decimal money.
I left Bristol in 1963 to study Physics at Liverpool University and I'm still there, on the staff now!
My great-grandmother Rhoda Palmer picture was taken on 27 Jan 1953 when she was 90 years old. So she was born in 1863, she must have come to live with us in the 1950's and died around 1960. She had the parrot for more than 30 years; when it died in the mid 1960's she died soon after of a broken heart. The skin by the edges of her right eye was pock-marked with parrot pecks; it would make a sudden lunge for her eye, and she would move her head to avoid it!
I think she lived alone on St Michael's Hill until my mother Vera Houlden took her in to live with us at 4 Haydon Gardens in about 1958 until her death in about 1965.
The tandem bicycle has David Johnson in front (30 Haydon Gdns) and Bernard Houlden (4). It was scratch built from scrap and spare parts, as were most of our bikes in those days. On the open ground behind them (between 4 and 5 Haydon Gardens, where the farm house was and before Fairacre Close was built) we used to have huge bonfires on 5th November. These often used big branches of trees 'acquired' from the trees along the road (Sir John's Lane ?) on the top of Purdown. A memory is that these open spaces around Haydon Gardens and the old farm house were full of grasshoppers, butteflies and sky-larks; these used to rise, singing, to incredible heights.
The Anti-aircraft AA gun site on Purdown was a favourite play area for the children of Haydon and Orpen Gardens in the 1950s. We used to get chased off by a ranger who patrolled Purdown. We made friends with the children of the squatters who moved into the barracks on Purdown after WWII, before they were demolished. One can see the water tower of the camp in the background of one of the pictures with the farm house.
During WWII my father told me that when the guns fired in unison it sounded like one big gun and was called 'Purdown Percy' by the people in Fishponds.
The picture of Black Rocks Stapleton is scanned from part of a postcard. On the back is written that the lady on the RHS is my grandmother Louise Houlden, and the small boy seated on the extreme right, image badly smudged, is my father, Eddie Houlden. The date would be during WWI (~1917) as my father was born in 1911 and his father spent the entire war away in the trenches. He survived with only a minor face wound. I think the family lived at that time in Fox Terrace, Lawfords Gate, near St Nicholas Catholic Church and school. The street (a lane really with a set of steps half way along it) is long gone now, but my father took me to see it once when I was very small.
The farm house was at OS coordinates of 360880,176450. On old Victorian maps that can be found on websites such as http://www.old-maps.co.uk/ there is a farm called Purdown farm, to the NORTH of the end of Sir John's Lane that runs along the top of Purdown. The puzzle is that on modern maps the site of the farm is to the WEST of the end of the lane. I think all would be explained if the lane had been extended by about 200 metres to make access to the AA gun site in WW11.
So it seems that Sir John's Lane originally stopped at a path that ran to the north west that I think was called Snail Creep Lane. In the 1950s there was a track behind numbers 17 and 18 Haydon Gdns that led up to the lane and was lined with hedges along part of the way. It's been ploughed up and grassed over now. Perhaps someone else could check this out this idea in the local archives.
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