Hightown flats

2 big blocks of ominous flats sat at the top of the road of my childhood home. Up there with a chippy aptly named Jacko’s Chippy and a shop named ‘How Convenient’, which my family referred to as Paddy’s, as Paddy owned the shop and was my Dad’s best friend. The flats were split into 2 main blocks, Gatefield and Napier Square. I never really explored Gatefield. Although Hightown is technically only a small area, my Mum's side of the family have lived and worked their whole lives in this tiny area. When parents of friends knew their child was coming out to play in Hightown, they would always say, “Go as far as Paddy’s but don’t go to the flats'' as though there was going to inevitable trouble with two 9 year olds on the swings situated in the middle of a North Walian council estate. A parent of one of my friends once said to my Mum when she came to pick me up, “Well, when he said he had made a friend from Hightown, we were worried but he’s actually really polite”. When I reached high school, my primary group of friends were from the council estate situated on the other side of the flats. We would spend a lot of time in Hightown flats and various other council state scruff hotspots and points of interest: The many faulty rope swings of Erddig, the black pipes which go over the gwenfro and the back of tesco where they keep all the trollies. We’d go to a floor of the flats and run down the corridor, banging every door we run past, in the hope of some sort of chase or even a “Fuck off”. I usually hate the cliche of ‘Life was so simple back then’ when people talk about their childhood but there was a genuine simplicity about Hightown back then. In the summertime people would come and sit in their front gardens and sunbathe with what little sun North Wales provides us with. Conversing with people for no other reason than that they lived on the same street or block of flats.

In 2011, the flats were demolished and people were rehoused across the county. The majority of the family who lived in Hightown moved out and the ones left we have little to no contact with, despite only being a couple of miles away from my current home. My Dad’s best friend died leaving the shop to be sold a couple of years later. What was the flats is now a quaint, quiet, anonymous housing estate. People will argue that it’s now a better place to bring up a child but I disagree.