That census meme

[shewhomust]

Earlier this month there was a meme going round LJ which consisted in listing where you were on as many past census dates as were relevant. It kept popping up on my f-list from people in the States, without the stimulus of an actual census form to fill out, and (I'm assuming) as a result people wrote some introspective pieces about what their life had been like at these dates. I'm not going to do that - but since today is census day in the UK, here's my date / location list:

1951

Assuming a constant late-March date, the 1951 census would have been taken just before I was born (I was due on 1st April, but didn't oblige). My parents were living at 22 Bushwood. Shortly after my birth they moved to another address in the same part of East London, and when I think of myself as a child, that's the first place I think of: but it doesn't show up in this exercise.

1961

The family had moved to Theydon Bois in Essex (right out at the end of the tube's Central Line). Family tradition is that my parents had long wanted a little house in the country, and had moved into this bungalow without allowing for the fact that they had in the interim had three children. Perhaps this explains why their next move was to a 22-room mansion on the fringes of Harlow New Town.

1971

By now I was an undergraduate in Durham (and I remember that my ex-roommate had spent census night with 20 fellow geology students on a field-trip to Ballachulish and was hoping that they would have skewed the figures in an interesting way). But I recall filling in the form in the flat in Hampstead which my father had arranged for us to share with a fellow antique dealer. In the summer of that year I moved in with durham_rambler and his flat-mates, above the Budgen supermarket in East Finchley.

1981

By now we had moved into our current house.

1991

Here

2001

Here

2011

Here

I don't think of myself as having moved around a great deal in my life, and yet this once-every-ten-years grid fails to catch places that were important to me. Despite which, I do value the census as a snapshot of the country at a given moment. It leaves a lot of things about, but it is a truthful picture in its own limited way.

Which is why we both put some effort into answering its questions this morning. It wasn't the controversial ones we stumbled over ("What is your religion? If none, write 'nun'.") but we hesitated over the number of bedrooms. The form requires you to count as bedrooms all rooms which were built as bedrooms or have been converted to bedrooms, even if they are not currently being used that way* - which, if you are literal-minded, means counting every room which has ever been used as a bedroom (which includes our kitchen). This house was built in 1901: I don't know how many of its rooms were intended as bedrooms at that time. When we bought it, it was a student house, and although the density of occupation was nothing like what landlords achieve now, there were certainly rooms used as bedrooms at that time which we have since converted back. In the end, we made a common-sense guess (four?), sealed the envelope and dropped it in the post on our way out to the Botanic Gardens for a stroll.

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*Looking at the help page, I suspect what they want is the number of bedrooms which were intended as bedrooms when the property was built, plus any which have been converted and are currently in use as bedrooms.

Comments

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. For a start, most houses of this age weren't built with bathrooms...