50 Years In Streethouse

A Memory of Streethouse.

I first moved into Streethouse in 1953 when I married a local girl (Iris Elliott), there were no houses for rent or to buy and all newly weds had to live in lodgings, we lodged with Iris's parents. I watched Netheroyd being built, hoping that we might be lucky enough to be allocated a new council house, but no such luck. In 1954 I was allocated a new Coal Board house at Featherstone on Girnhill Lane estate, the following year I exchanged my house at Featherstone for 126 Meadway, Streethouse, where we lived until 2006 when we moved back to Featherstone.
Over the 50 odd years I lived in Streethouse I have seen many changes and in the early years not too many for the good. Streethouse was a suburb of Featherstone and we always said it was the village that God forgot. The first major disruption to the village was the dreaded outcrop, it started in the early 1960s and lasted for 30 years, the dust went all around the village when the wind was in the east, and we had to keep all our doors and windows closed. I had a site meeting on the site with the local councillors and a government inspector to see for themselves the amount of dust in the air when the outcrop was operating. The answer I got from the inspector was "It would not have happend in Harrogate". The outcrop site did not finish until Sharlston Colliery closed in 1993.
The second upheaval was when Sharlston Colliery closed, most of the men in the village worked at the pit and relied on the pit for their living. After 12 months of the pit closing, people started leaving the village to earn a living elsewhere so the houses became empty. The kids got in and vandalised them, so the council boarded up the empty houses up and it became like a ghost town.

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