TBT My Old Hoods

brannkyrkagatan

Photo: ©nini.tjader

(TBT Throw Back Thursday) I grew up in this quarter, from when I was born and the thirty (30) first years of my life. Then I, like so many others who grew up in this area, moved to the suburbs. Population in these blocks has changed a lot. These were workers blocks. Not so today.

brannkyrkagatan

Photo: ©nini.tjader

This was the entrance to the house. I lived on the second floor towards the back of the house. All we saw from our windows was a wall without anything at all on it. The houses behind us, in the next block were higher up on the mountain than our house. To see what the weather was like outside you had to open the window and lean out… Which season we could not see, as there was no greenery at all in our backyards.

brannkyrkagatan, stockholm

Photo: ©nini.tjader

The next block, east of us in the direction of Slussen, looks like this. Cobble stones. Old houses, regarded as picturesque today, but was far from it when I grew up. Today they are modernized, but when I was a kid they had no hot water indoors, only cold, no heating other than a wood-burner, no WC, only outhouses behind the houses. Very primitive. Our house was one of the most modern ones in these blocks.

Those cobblestones… my knees remember them. We ran there daily, me and the boys I played with, and sometimes fell.

brannkyrkagatan

Photo: ©nini.tjader

This is the beginning of my street, Brännkyrkagatan. Brännkyrkagatan once was the longest street in Stockholm. But that didn’t last. It was changed in the 60-ties when it was cut off and renamed at certain points.  Very steep ascent. Cobblestones again. For a while they had them covered by asphalt, but they returned it to its initial state and removed the asphalt when it became interesting to keep old areas as they once were. I’ve passed here many times, particularly during my youth as to the right from here there was a passageway beside the railway-bridge that led to the center of town and the Old Town. This was the closest way to where things happened…

(Pictures are from 2004).

Below map of the area

södermalm

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