When I were a lad this was all fields In fact, I lived that experience a little as a child. Our estate backed on to a lot of fields. They all had nicknames that may or may not have been devised by our gang - inventive titles such as The Sandhills and The Backfield. Some were for making dens, others were for playing football. We were always, in some capacity, in a field somewhere not far from the house. Before I'd even entered my teens, they were all gone: replaced with mock-Tudor housing. Our only football field was the local primary school pitch that was, technically, out of bounds and so our final days involved being chased away by caretakers and police as we tried to complete a peaceful game of Knock-Out-Wembley. Our childhood was ending and the lack of free space represented that. None of that would matter to the children who took up residency in those mock-Tudor villas, as childhoods were changing and belonged to various screens in the house w