EVEN now, I can still remember the mud that surrounded the endless streets of South Korea Soccer Jersey Wholesale brand new houses. It stuck to your shoes in the winter. In the summer it hardened and cracked.
Looking back, there was something surreal about living in a smart new home in the middle of a wasteland of churned up fields.
Today, the mud has gone, replaced by roads, shops and play areas.
This wasn't Bradley Stoke, the housing estate featured in a series in the Evening Post this week, which examines its progress from the time of the property slump in the early Nineties, when it was nicknamed Sadly Broke.
The housing estate etched upon my memory is one in the Midlands to which my family moved from London when I was a toddler, when the then Greater London Council had a policy of moving one million people out of the city.
That was around 20 years before Bradley Stoke was built - yet there are noticeable parallels between the problems that once beset this South Gloucestershire new town, and those that affected the so- called London overspill towns and housing estates of the Sixties.
My parents saw an advert about opportunities to get a house outside London, and decided it would be better for bringing up a family than the flat they had in Putney.
They did indeed get a newly-built home of the type promised in the evening newspaper advert. But that was pretty much all there was: street after street of new houses.
My mother hated it so much that we moved after a few years, and throughout my adult life I've chosen to live in walking distance of shops.
The series about Bradley Stoke in the Evening Post noted that its lack of infrastructure resulted from the housing market crash in the early Nineties, which meant facilities in the estate were not built as intended.
led t5 tubeIn the case of the London overspill estate we moved to, the developers didn't go bust. Sports facilities and shops were simply low on their list of priorities.
The prioritising of housing above all else is something that affected new developments long before Bradley Stoke.
A while back I was talking to someone who moved to Hartcliffe in the 1950s, and whose memories of living in a new house in an isolated, muddy estate were the same as mine a decade later.
Nowadays, developers have greater obligation to provide an infrastructure, but while shops and community centres are included in plans it seems that roads remain a low priority.
They are no longer muddy tracks - but streets are often so narrow it's difficult for two vehicles to pass.
Presumably such confined roads ensure more land on which to build housing - even though
embroidered patches it's so difficult for some residents to park in the road that they put their cars on pavements.
Today it's often not so much a case of Sadly Broke on new estates - but rather one of Parking Joke.