Writer opens the door to an ordinary street full of tales of the unexpected

North Parade, a short walk from York’s city walls, looks much like any other Edwardian terraced street. Tucked away off a busy main road, the small forecourted gardens are as variable as the owners and on a grey November afternoon when the only sign of life is the postman finishing that day’s delivery, it seems an unassuming, friendly place.

It’s also the street which 16 years ago became home to Elizabeth Sandie when she swapped rural life on the outskirts of Thirsk for a place close to the heart of a city. A lecturer then in English Literature at York St John University, she soon took advantage of having cinema, theatres and art galleries on her doorstep, but it was the street that really made her feel at home.

“As soon as I walked into this house it felt right,” she says. “It’s so quiet, but at the same time you’re just a few minutes’ walk from the city centre. I immediately knew I had made the right decision.”

At one end of the street was a woman who had grown up on a croft in the Isle of Skye. At the other, one whose childhood had been spent in Bombay and, as Elizabeth got to know more people it struck her that it would be a good idea to collect some of their stories together.

“Recent research shows that nationally fewer people today know the names of their neighbours than they did three decades ago,” she says. “What attracted me to this house in the first place, as well as its style, was that the previous occupant clearly knew her neighbours and had friends here. I was just really interested in what had brought people to this particular street, where they’d come from, what work they did and how their lives differed from their parents’.”

It wasn’t until Elizabeth retired a few years ago, that she was in a position to start the project and finally plucked up courage to drop a short letter explaining what she wanted to do through letterboxes in this street of 43 houses in February last year. Greg was the first to respond to her request for an interview.

He’d first moved to York as an eight-year-old when the family, originally from Barking, had decided to turn two derelict houses into what became Hedley House Hotel. As a student he’d lived in North Parade in another of his father’s properties and having since taken over the hotel he now rents out his old student digs partly for staff accommodation.

Elizabeth discovered he had already written something about his life, a personal account of his honeymoon to Thailand in 2004 when the devastating Boxing Day Tsunami struck. Elizabeth heard how he had clung to roof tiles as the water rushed past, and how in the hours that followed he faced an agonising search for his wife, Lou. Eventually he discovered that while Lou had suffered cuts and bruises she was safe and, seven years on, admits the experience completely changed his outlook on life.

Having listened to Greg’s story, Elizabeth knew that her hunch had been right. Everyone has a story to tell. During the course of her interviews, Elizabeth discovered that the mother of one interviewee had survived the Russian occupation of Poland; another had helped in the Belgian Resistance. The son of one neighbour had fought in Afghanistan. The sister of another had emigrated after the Foot and Mouth epidemic. There were others whose plans had been affected by the Mumbai Massacre, the eruption of the Icelandic volcano, the recession and changes in the housing market.

“I suppose it’s natural that in all the years that I had lived in the street, the people I had tended get to know best and become friends with were those roughly my own age. One of the pleasures of doing the project has been meeting people of different ages, the youngest interviewee was 14, the oldest nearly 90 and from many different walks of life.” Alongside those working in accountancy, health, and teaching, North Parade was also home to an actor and a motorbike fanatic, who also plays the saxophone. “It’s been good to meet my young European neighbours too. The book was about piecing together a detailed picture of the street and the random chance that brings such varied lives together in one location.”

Interviews with 30 people coming from more than two dozen of the 43 houses took place over a period of nine months last year.

“I feel very privileged to have heard my neighbours’ stories,” she says. “You can walk past people every day, even say hello, but unless you stop to talk to them properly you never really know what has gone on in their lives to make them who they are today.”

The street had a typical mixture of home-owners and those renting, but while York has a reputation for being a predominantly white middle-class city, in North Parade the links stretched as far afield as India, Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, Japan and South Rhodesia.

“I’ve spent all my life in Yorkshire, but it turned out only a handful of people living here today who came forward were born here and of those many have a connection with another part of the world.”

Elizabeth also began thinking about the street’s earliest residents. Built between 1895 and 1901, North Parade was completed during a boom time for York when the railway was still the major employer and when its chocolate factories were known throughout the world. She realised that the sketches she had written of her neighbours’ lives stood in sharp contrast to life in North Parade 100 years earlier.

“The 1901 census shows that almost a third of the men were involved in the railways, working as engine drivers or signalmen and there were also an awful lot of clerks,” she says. “Almost without exception the wives didn’t work, although by 1911 one did have the temerity to explain ‘she assists in the house’. There were also a lot more children and the families were substantially bigger. There was one house where a 51-year-old railway guard, lived with his wife and seven children aged between five and 24 and a lodger.

“I am sure they would have struggled to comprehend there would come a time when many of these houses would be home to just one person.”

Thanks to a commission from Creative North Yorkshire, Elizabeth has now turned the interviews and her research into a book, Just One Street.

“I hope the individual stories make interesting reading, but also that together they create a picture of life in this street at the beginning of the 21st century which captures the voices of the people who live here, something of the texture of their lives, and their main concerns.

“My previous book was about my favourite poet Ursula Fanthorpe. She was a great believer in the importance of ordinary existence and if this project has taught me anything it is that she was absolutely right.”

Just One Street, by Elizabeth Sandie, priced £9.99 is available from Janette Ray Books in Bootham, Birdie’s Perch in Clifton, The Little Apple Bookshop in Petergate and the Barbican Bookshop in Fossgate York. £1 from each book sold will go to Shelter, a charity for the homeless.