Brookhill Close is a semi-fictional merger of my childhood upbringing at the bottom of a cul-de-sac in the late 80s/early 90s, whilst growing up watching the soap Opera Brookside on a very similar type of cul-de-sac.
Watching the soap set in post-industrial Liverpool felt like looking into somewhat warped mirror of my own world, watching people live out a life in a very similar context in another part of Britain.
This cul-de-sac, on the fringes of my home town, was sandwiched between more fancier new-build houses for an emerging commuter class using the nearby M1, and the council estates built for the disappearing coal mines.
It was all too easy to identify with the stories of fictional Liverpudlian families, in the new post-industrial 1990s, struggling to find their place in a new build estate of new social class dynamics. Whilst the times were still haunted by the spectre of the Old, in the shadow cast by unemployment, disaffected young people, the panic over drugs, sharply contrasting with the new shiny out-of-own shops and exciting new consumer world.
John B Ledger 