Alun Morgan's sharing of a personal outdoor space (mentioned in my previous post) got me thinking about one of my own. The first one which came to mind was the park on Millham Road, Bishop's Cleeve, Gloucestershire (marked in blue) where I lived from the age of two until I was eight. In constrast to the growth of the rest of Bishop's Cleeve, relatively little has changed in this area over the past 30 years.  Crucially the park still borders the fields between Bishop's Cleeve and Gotherington. Millham Road and the nearby Oldacre Drive are Post War (Confirmed by the 1945 OS map below). It is possible to see to the right of the current Ariel photograph what was a disused railway line in my childhood which is now part of the Gloucestershire-Warwickshire Steam Railway. It was possible to climb the steep bank and walk along the railway until the GWR laid the track. The station on Station Road is clearly marked on the 1945 map, but I don't think any evidence of it remains. The railway line forms an imprecise boundary between Bishop's Cleeve and Woodmancote.

I am not entirely sure why I thought of this location in such a way. The field was very uneven and people would walk their dogs on it without cleaning up afterwards. I also have strong memories of the rusty goalposts.

Want to reflect on your own personal spaces? You can get recent images from google earth and nineteenth and twentieth century OS maps from British History Online.