I lived at 7 Ings Avenue from my birth in 1957 to 1970, when we moved up Rainhall. Here's a pic of me aged 15 months with my older sister Janet, 3 and a half. My dad Harry is in the background.

 I believe Ings Avenue was built in the Thirties using Accrington brick, which is slightly unusual in Barlick as most houses are stone. I'm told it stands on a former cricket ground. The houses are all smallish semis and were much sought after in the Fifties. Next to Ings Ave they built a rest home (approx 1968?) on what we called the "Spare Ground", which was a haven for kids - an overgrown and exciting place to play, but which would be deemed extremely unsafe nowadays. We used to go chubbing [gathering wood, old furniture, anything combustible], and built enormous bonfires there every 5 November. I remember a Guy being thrown up on to an old settee at the top of the heap and flopping forward as though he'd given up all hope. I was devastated because he'd earned us quite a few pennies in the run up to Guy Fawkes night and I considered him to be one of my friends. The unlit bonfire invariably had space inside to hide and keep watch so that other gangs didn't come along and destroy it. We always checked that there were no hedgehogs hiding in there before we lit it. When the rest home was being built, me and my best pal Bryan used to play on the building site in the evenings - rushing round the empty rooms and half-finished stairways like we were in a cops & robbers film. I shudder to think of the dangers now, but I'm glad I had the opportunity to develop my imagination in real life instead of having to rely on a computer video game to get my kicks. Ings Avenue was beautiful in those days. There was a canopy of Laburnum trees which gave a blaze of yellow in summer and there was a mass of large trees at the bottom, one of which served as our self-constructed tree house. All cut down now. Me and Bryan would play football and cricket against the brick wall at the end of the avenue for hours on end, underneath the one street lamp. Nowadays it looks quite bare and forlorn to me - its gardens adapted to car parking areas and hardly anything but conifers and hedges. But whenever I walk past, I see the ghost images of my very happy childhood and remember it as it was.