Questions to ask about a childhood home

"What was it like growing up?" is too big a question to answer well. The house someone grew up in is small enough to actually remember — which room was theirs, what the street sounded like, who had the first television on the road — and those details are exactly the kind that don't survive being asked in general terms.

Britain's housing in the mid-twentieth century varied enormously by where and when someone grew up — a council estate built after the war, a Victorian terrace, a prefab put up as a stopgap after the war, a Scottish tenement, a prewar semi. None of that detail turns up unless something asks for it directly.

Start with the house itself

“What was your childhood home like? Which room do you remember best?”

This is the broadest useful question on the subject, and it works precisely because it asks for one room rather than the whole house. A kitchen that was always warm, a bedroom shared with two siblings, an outside toilet — the answer tends to arrive as a specific memory, not a floor plan.

What kind of home, and what's changed

• Was it a council house, a rented terrace, a prefab, a tenement flat, or something the family owned? Ask plainly — people are rarely precious about it, and the type of home shapes everything else in the answer.
• How many people lived in it, and who slept where?
• Was there an outside toilet, a tin bath, or anything else that's hard to picture now?
• Did the house have a name or just a number? Was it the same street the family lived on for generations, or a new estate?
• What was the one thing about the house they'd have changed, if they could have?

The street and the neighbours

“Was there a bomb site, an old shelter or a row of prefabs still standing where you grew up? What did you make of it as children?”

A street holds as much as a house does. Who had the first television and what everyone crowded round to watch it, which doorstep deliveries turned up — the coal man, the pop lorry, the rag-and-bone man — and where children were sent to play, and by what time they were expected back. Every one of those is a specific, answerable question; "what was the neighbourhood like" is not.

Questions worth trying

Why the specific version beats the general one

"Tell me about your childhood" produces a summary — a sentence or two, the kind that's been given at family gatherings for years. A question about one room, one street, one habit produces a memory, because it's small enough to actually picture. That's the whole method behind every page in this questions to ask your grandparents list, applied here to one specific, often-skipped subject.

StoryPrompt sends one question like these by email every week for a year, and compiles the typed answers into a book. One of the 52 weekly prompts asks about the childhood home itself, and several more ask about the street — the neighbours, what came to the door, where children played, and what's gone now. £25, once, for the full year; not a subscription, and the finished book stays downloadable afterwards.