As a young child who grew up on the estate during the 1980’s, there were quite a few familiar elderly Mile Cross residents whose friendly faces I’d regularly see as we made our way about. Quite a few of those gentle faces are etched into my memory, and now, when I’m wandering around the estate as a middle-aged man, on my way to the pub with my dad, popping to the shops, or simply out for a walk, usually wondering where all that time has gone, I’ll pass a particular house or spot and a memory will suddenly be triggered.
I love these little moments. They’re always unexpected and normally always a pleasure, and for a brief moment I’ll be dragged back to those hazy, rose-tinted days of innocent youth. Every now and then I’ll find myself wondering about those faces from the past and what there stories were.
What I hadn’t thought too much about as a child, when encountering these people, was that many of those elderly residents had most likely lived here since these homes were built in the 1920’s. They had probably seen a lot during their lives, growing up in a very different Norwich to the one I’d grown up in, and they must have watched Mile Cross, and the wider world, change around them.
One thing I’ve noticed over the years of researching the estate is that, until relatively recently, people around here didn’t move about very much. Families often stayed in the same home for decades, sometimes for many generations, which meant that many of these elderly residents had been here from the very beginning.
I have very vague memories of an elderly man tending to his front garden as we made our way noisily past on our way to school. I don’t remember much about him, but I do remember his face and the cheeky smile he’d give us as we made our past.
I later found out during the research phase of the ‘Mile Cross 100’ project that this particular friendly-faced old gentleman was Charlie George.
As a young man, Charlie was one of the hundreds of men employed after the First World War to build the new homes here on the Mile Cross Estate. He was as a bricklayer, who I think, rather wonderfully, eventually ended up living in one of the houses he helped to set out. A house that he would spend living in, not for a few years, but for the rest of his long and eventful life.
Charlie was born in 1904, while his parents lived in in an old cottage out at old Bowthorpe. Back then this area was the remnants of a lost medieval village surrounded by fields, rather than the 1970’s and 1980’s housing estate we know it as today.
The growing George family then moved a bit closer to the city and into one of the last of the Victorian-style terraced houses that are so prevalent throughout Heigham and Lower Hellesdon, however these last few old-style terraces were built in the early 1900’s, the very last of the old style of narrow terraces. The new George family home was located at the bottom end of Nelson Street, close to Heigham Street and Dial House and it was here that Charlie grew up.
He would eventually follow in the footsteps of his father, William George , who was also a skilled bricklayer, and had helped to build some impressive structures here in Norwich. Among other things, William had worked on the city’s Victorian sewer system and the impressively long wall that runs along Waterworks Road, which can still be admired today.
William had rather more stories to tell than your average bricklayer, too.
Continue reading “Charlie George – The Brickie who built his own Mile Cross Home.”
