Charney Chapter 2016

1. 23
Oh, what a night, late December back in ‘63
What a very special time for me
As I remember what a night!
(December 1963 (Oh what a night) – Lyrics: Gaudio Parker, 1975)
I was born in late December back in ’63, in Listerdale maternity
hospital a few miles outside Rotherham in South Yorkshire, with
a distant view of the snow-capped Derbyshire Peak District from
the road outside. My father was a steelworker: a draughtsman
and engineer working at the time for Steel, Peech and Tozer (1)
and my mother had a number of secretarial/personal assistant
jobs at the time, making the most of her skills in shorthand and
typing.
My parents secured a mortgage (for £2400) (2), to buy a
new-build semi-detached house on a rapidly expanding estate
in the village of Wickersley, four miles east of Rotherham, on
high ground above the town. The new estate, whose streets were
named after trees (3), would eventually expand across a valley
towards an area optimistically called Sunnyside, and a short
walk would take you to open fields. There was a path running
through recreational fields, which took you to the main Bawtry
Road, where there were shops and the ‘Masons Arms’, which my
grandad helped to build. We bought freshly laid eggs from Pear
Tree Farm at the crossroads (now a large roundabout on a busy
dual carriageway). My mother’s parents lived a few miles away in
Whiston: my grandad was a pit deputy, working underground.
My mother was thirteen years old when they had electricity sup-
plied for the first time. My dad’s parents lived in an area called
Herringthorpe: my other granddad was a steelworker (4). There
were lots of aunts and uncles around too, as my dad had four
brothers. He met his workmates at the Working Men’s Club, and
played crown green bowls on summer evenings (5).
I was wheeled around in a ‘Silver Cross’ style pram, and so be-
gan my exploration of the ‘place’ that would help to define me,
even now as a teacher and father myself (Figure 1). The estate
grew rapidly; some houses were rented, and others were owner
occupied. I wasn’t aware of any particular signs to identify which
were which, certainly not to the extent of those in Cutteslowe
(6), that I later read and taught about (Hanley, 2012). My friends
and I explored the area on foot, by go-kart and by bike (a Raleigh
Chopper in time).
The estate was still being built as I grew up, and expanded
through the late 1950s and 1960s (7). Later periods of growth
saw the gaps and edges filled in, sometimes leaving temporary
wildernesses that were colonised by groups of young people (Ma-
bey, 2013) (8). This was a period of dens, sitting around fires (the
seductive power of a box of Swan Vestas) and exploring on bikes.
I wonder how much of that kind of activity still goes on now in
many similar estates?
I started Northfield Lane Infants School as a ‘rising five’ in
1968. By then, I had a little sister, who was two years younger
than me, and ten years later a brother (9). It was a newly built
school, which had two sets of buildings on the same site as the
Junior School. There was a large (for a 4 year old) playing field
surrounded by the new-build estate, which kept its classes fed
with children. At the time, the estate was pushing out into the
surrounding fields, and there were fairly large class sizes.
There were two tarmac playground areas, each of which had
a high brick wall at one end (perfect for British Bulldogs), and
a long grass mound about five metres high, presumably made
from building spoil. There was no uniform, as shown on my Year
1 school photo in Figure 2.
The buildings were glass and concrete, with wood cladding in
bright colours, all on one level. The entrance hall housed the li-
brary and displays of student work. Offices ran off to left and
right, and straight ahead was the assembly hall.
I remember plenty of activity, and time spent outside. I was
good at maths, and was also an avid reader. I loved puzzles and
problem solving, and enjoyed art. I don’t remember a great deal
of explicit ‘geography’ lessons, but we certainly had a nature
table, and went on fieldtrips and nature walks. I remember de-
veloping a creative writing streak too.
‘You can take the boy out of Yorkshire . . . ’
Memories of a northern primary education and suggestions
for using technology to explore the local area
Alan Parkinson
(left) Figure 1: Exploring from a
young age
Figure 2: Year 1 School photo

2. reflections on primary geography
24
I started out having school dinners. Hexagonal tables were
pushed together, and the food arrived in metal trays with lids
containing the meal of the day. I have good memories of the
meals, particular sponge puddings and chicken pie. In later Pri-
mary, we were allowed to walk home at lunchtime. I remember
assemblies being timed to coincide with radio broadcasts from
the BBC on Radio 4 (10).
There would be a hymn – somebody played the piano - and this
was an era of ‘newer’ songs including ‘The ink is black the page
is white . . . together we learn to read and write’, and always the
Lord’s Prayer, which you had to recite with your eyes screwed
tight shut. I remember school discos with the music of Slade, The
Rubettes, The Sweet and, er, Gary Glitter. I was also a performer,
and played the lead in the school’s production of ‘Aladdin’ – no
Instagram pictures of the performance exist, sadly.
Every Wednesday evening, I would walk up to the mobile li-
brary, which was parked in the car park of the ‘Masons Arms’
to browse the stacks. The bearded librarian stamped the books,
and I always took the maximum number, and probably read most
of the books in there at some point. I remember picking up The
Lord of the Rings while about 10 years old and devouring it, and
saving up to buy my own paperback editions (11). For a while, I
wanted to be a mobile library driver when I grew up. One book I
took out of the school library repeatedly was called The Map that
came to Life. The illustrations were by Ronald Lampitt (12), and it
told the story of two children and their dog and their adventures
on an OS map which ‘came to life’. The moral of the story is that
being able to read a map is important.
Geography starts with our own stories, and we write the earth
as we travel. For school trips, there were journeys by Powell’s
coaches (their daughter was in my class). One of the trips that
we took with school was to Newlands valley in the Lake District
for an activity holiday in 1974. I remember the bus journey up.
We were given a map of the route and various other maps and in-
formation in a bound book created on a spirit duplicator (banda)
machine (13). I think I may have been one of the few who duti-
fully filled in the roads we took, and other aspects of the journey,
along with the daily diary (I kept a diary for about 15 years; today
I blog and tweet instead – will future biographers struggle to find
original documents to work from?) While in the Lakes, we stayed
in the Newlands valley, climbing Catbells and other peaks. I re-
member visiting the Bowder Stone (possibly an erratic, or just a
boulder that had rolled down to its current position), and expe-
riencing the views and landscapes of the Lakes for the first time
and wanting to learn more. In preparation for writing this piece,
I joined the village’s Facebook group, and one of the first pictures
I saw was the one in Figure 3, which I never knew existed. My
face stared out at me from 42 years ago (14).
As I gained my independence, I was able to use the subsidised
public transport which provided a bus into Rotherham town cen-
tre for 2p, or Sheffield for 4p. Years later, on a climbing trip to
the Isle of Skye, I got into conversation with a shop owner and
realised we’d been at Northfield Lane school at the same time,
and we shared some memories. A reminder of the power of coin-
cidence, or that it’s a ‘small world’. (Massey, 1994)
In recent years, I have become more involved in the notion
of Young People’s Geographies, being involved with the project
as a teacher, before leading the project to its conclusion while
working for the Geographical Association (Biddulph Firth,
2009; GA, n.d.; Pike, 2016). This reminded me of the importance
of these early experiences in shaping my identity (15). I won-
der about the ‘disconnect’ between young people and their sur-
roundings, and how their mental map of their neighbourhood
might differ from my own at the time, and consider my own chil-
dren’s childhood (Witt, 2013). Rodenburg Monkman (2016)
provide some figures for this disengagement:
• 2,500 – the number of advertising messages a child encounters
each day.
• 2,738 – the number of hours the average North American child
sits in front of a glowing screen each year: a little under a third
of a year’s hours, almost 114 days!
• 183 – the number of hours a child spends outside in
unstructured play per year: that is just more than 7 days!
• 300 – the number of corporate logos the average child can
identify.
• 10 – the number of native plants and animals the average child
can identify.
Back then, our childhoods felt as free-range as the eggs on the
farm at Pear Tree corner. I left the house in the morning and
came back for tea, or with the instruction to ‘be home before it
gets dark’. We walked alone to school, and there were no queues
of cars at the school gate and ‘parking rage’ (16). We filled in the
spaces in our mental maps and knew every snicket (17), and
woodland trail in the surrounding area. Daniel Raven Ellison and
I started Mission: Explore almost ten years ago, as a response to
this idea that young people might not ‘know’ what to do if they
found themselves in an (un)familiar place, and provided activi-
ties to help them explore and (re)present it (The Geography Col-
lective, 2010, 2016).
Fast forward to 2016. I now live in Norfolk, and work in Cam-
bridgeshire. Memories of Yorkshire are strong, and I consider
myself to be a ‘Yorkshireman’, and a ‘northerner’ (Russell, 2004)
despite having lived in Norfolk for more than half of my life. My
primary experiences feed into my teaching about urban change
in Sheffield, the landscapes of the Lake District, StoryMaps of
the local area and geographies of consumption.
Figure 3: Fieldtrip photo from
1974

3. alan parkinson | you can take the boy out of yorkshire
25
Alongside my teaching, I am involved in EU projects. At the GI
Forum conference in Salzburg in July 2016, I led a workshop on
how to teach about the local area, and the new digital tools which
are now available (18). An academic poster (Jakobi Gryl, 2016)
shared research exploring young children’s representations of
the world, and was a clear winner of the prize for the best poster
against stiff competition: a reminder of the enduring appeal of
young people’s geographies.
Endnotes
1: Steel, Peech and Tozer had a workforce of around 10,000 people at the
time, which was before the nationalisation of the industry in 1967. The
Templeborough mill is shown in the aerial photo from 1949 at: http://
www.britainfromabove.org.uk/image/eaw024147, and is close to where
the Meadowhall Shopping Centre now stands (which was also built on
the site of an old foundry). I remember the ‘canyons’ of rolling mills ei-
ther side of the road and the sparks from the blast furnaces at the top of
the hill out of Rotherham, towards Tinsley.
2. This is not too far off my current monthly pay, which puts the increase
in the price of property into perspective. How could social mobility influ-
ence young people’s connection with their local area?
3: This reminds me of Bill Vaughan’s quote about suburbia being where “the
developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them”.
4: Both grandfathers were to die comparatively young, when taken against
life expectancies today. The notion of risk and mortality (and the impact
of their employment, and smoking) was something that returned to me
recently when teaching about coronary heart disease and risk factors.
5: When I moved to Snettisham, on the Norfolk coast after I was married, I
was invited to play bowls for Old Hunstanton Club, and it was an intro-
duction to a whole new set of friends of all age groups that I would never
have met otherwise. Visiting coastal villages to play fixtures revealed hid-
den paths and ‘secret’ communities: the ‘psychogeography’ of the bowl-
ing green.
6: The Cutteslowe walls were built to separate housing in an estate on the
edge of Oxford in the 1930s. They remained in place until 1959 (see: J.
Steane, 1996, Oxfordshire. London: Pimlico, 246). For more on the walls,
see Lynsey Hanley’s Estates (Hanley, 2012).
7: CRDC mapping by Ollie O’Brien shows the age of dwellings, and can be
used to chart the growth of any settlement. The village of Wickersley is
at the centre of this map view: http://maps.cdrc.ac.uk/#/metrics/dwell-
ingage/default/BTTTFTT/14/-1.2694/53.4196/.
8: Richard Mabey describes the patches of ‘wilderness’ that remained as
housing was built in Metroland during his childhood, and the edgelands
that were slowly colonised and occupied by housing. Read more in his
book A good parcel of English soil.
9: Our family therefore exceeded the 2.4 children which at the time was
the ‘default’ family size. At the last Census, this was down to 1.7. Source:
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/http://
www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/family-demography/family-size/2012/family-
size-rpt.html. Replacement level is 2.1, so my parents did their ‘duty’,
although my brother, sister and I all stopped after 2 children (so far).
10: Some research uncovered details of these broadcasts. http://www.broad-
castforschools.co.uk/site/Schedule:Summer_1971. It is possible to find
out what was on BBC on any given day using the Genome project site:
this was the schedule on the day of my birth, for example: http://genome.
ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbctv/1963-12-29.
11: Today’s focus on literacy hadn’t yet developed, and there was also the
need for patience – sometimes having to wait weeks to get your hands on
a particular book. Convenience affects much of our lives, and also shapes
local communities and services.
12: A piece I wrote about using H.J.Deverson’s The Map that came to Life (Ox-
ford University Press, 1967) to explore the local area was published in the
Ordnance Survey’s ‘Mapping News’ in 2009. The whole book can also be
read online here: https://www.fulltable.com/vts/aoi/l/lampitt/map.htm.
13: Banda machines were still in use in the first school I got a job in: supply
teaching in a school a few miles from Wickersley, in 1987.
14: I’m the blonde one 2nd row from the back, 2nd from the left in the image,
shared by Diane Willingham in the ‘Wickersley The way we were!’ Face-
book group. Similar groups are a very useful resource for local studies.
15: The Young People’s Geographies project at http://www.young-peoples-
geographies.co.uk/ was funded by the Action Plan for Geography 2006-
11. One of the schools involved was Wickersley Comprehensive (which
I moved up to), and which still had the same uniform when I visited in
2010.
16: The National Travel Survey England showed a great decline in the num-
ber of children walking and cycling to school since 1995. See: https://
www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/
file/342160/nts2013-01.pdf.
17: Also known as an alleyway, cut-through or ginnel depending on where
you live: local vernacular descriptions of landscape have been explored by
Robert MacFarlane in Landmarks (Penguin, 2016).
18: The presentation, with ideas and tools for exploring the local area, and
the thinking behind the approaches, can be seen at: http://www.slide-
share.net/GeoBlogs/gi-forum-workshop.
Postscript
With effect from 1st November 2014, Wickersley Northfield Primary School
became part of White Woods Primary Academy Trust.
References
Biddulph, M. Firth, R. (2009). Young People’s Geographies. Teaching Geog-
raphy, 34(1), 32-4.
GA [Geographical Association] (n.d.). Young Geographers Go Local. An Online
CPD unit from the Geographical Association. Available at: http://www.ge-
ography.org.uk/cpdevents/onlinecpd/younggeographersgolocal.
Hanley, L. (2012), Estates. Cambridge: Granta.
Jakobi, E. Gryl, I. (2016). Universität Duisburg Essen: Institut für Sac-
hunterricht
Academic Poster – viewed here http://agitposter2016.blogspot.
co.uk/2016/06/24-lions-hunger-and-sea-monsters.html (Last accessed
August 2016).
Mabey, R (2013). A good parcel of English Soil. London: Penguin.
Massey, D (1994). A Global Sense of Place. Available at: https://www.unc.
edu/courses/2006spring/geog/021/001/massey.pdf (Accessed 14 August
2016).
Pike, S. (2016). Learning Primary Geography. Abingdon: Routledge.
Rodenburg, J. Monkman D. (2016). The Big Book of Nature Activitie. Cana-
da: New Society Publishers.
Russell, D. (2004). Looking North: Northern England and the national imagina-
tion. Manchester: University of Manchester Press.
The Geography Collective (2010). Mission: Explore. London: Can of Worms.
The Geography Collective (2016). Mission: Explore National Parks. London:
Explorer HQ.
Witt, S. (2013). Chance encounters of the playful kind: exploring places.
Teaching Geography, 38(3), 114-5.
Witt, S. Barlow, A. (2014). The joy of the little journeys. Primary Geography,
85, 30
Alan Parkinson is an award-winning teacher, and freelance ge-
ographer, who has worked in schools, for the Geographical Asso-
ciation, and with the Open University. He has completed writing
projects for numerous organisations including the BBC, Google,
and most major publishers. He also works across Europe on Eras-
mus+ projects including GI Learner and GeoCapabilities. Alan is
a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and Royal Scottish
Geographical Society, and a Chartered Geographer. He is Head
of Geography at King’s Ely Junior School, Ely.