Am I the only one?
There have been people who have lived in Malmesbury who have reached the age of 100 or more. They possibly could have been born in the town and lived here continuously all their lives, but did they live in the same house all that time.
Think of the oldest streets in the town and they are all central to the town. All new streets, roads, closes etc. have been built attached and surrounding the town’s centre and its Abbey, spreading out from the core.
Now if you were born in any of the older streets, its highly likely other families occupied your house before it became your parents home or shop.
In general people were more likely than today to live and work in the same town, though moving to other parts of the country or elsewhere has always been necessary for some to find work.
Especially in more recent history, children on finishing their school years have found it necessary for further education or to find employment, to have to move out of town in early adulthood, many to never return.
What I’m getting at is people frequently have numerous reasons to move to another house somewhere else, making it that the majority of people will have lived in more than one house during their lifetimes.
Now here follows my question about myself.
The street I live in is Hobbes Close, building it commenced in 1950 by a small local building company of P.J. Hider employing local people from the town and surrounding villages. When the first few houses were completed, the trades people moved onto the next house and worked their way down the street until all the houses had been completed. The new residents moving in over a period of a year or so as house construction was a good deal slower compared to the present day, there being no modern machines/tools used back then, the foundations having been dug by hand.
I was born 3 years after my parents had moved into their new house in 1952 and have to date lived continuously there at number 13 for 70 years. That means I have lived in the street longer than any other resident of the street still alive or now dead. I think that it’s highly likely that no one will ever live in the street for a longer period of time than me as all the original families from the 1950s have already died or moved away, several having emigrated.
There have been other new streets built post World War II, but due to modern society their residents have come and gone as they follow employment across the country and further afield. So I think there is a strong possibility that I may be unique to this town in having lived longer in the same house and street than any other person in the town’s history and into its future, including any of the town’s other streets.
Taking into consideration wars, marriages, divorces, and the further back in time you go, houses being knocked down and rebuilt etc.
What do you think?