'Cos it's only a Northern town...

I'm expanding my building range to cover the kind of slum areas that existed in the UK until the 1960s and beyond.

The idea is to produce a few streets similar to the ones I spent my early years in complete with back yards.

Although I'm restricted to making semis I'm generally going to use them as terraced in groups of 3. Hence the need for the middle back yards to only have the dividing wall. 3 makes six households on each side of a street - in comparison, the street I lived on for the first few years of my life went up to about Number 140! These houses work for any time from the late Victorians up to around 1960-1970.

Size wise they are best used for 20mm-true 25 mm figures, seen here with some Airfix French Foreigh Legion figures for comparison. I realise now that I should have put the windows higher up on the wall - no matter.

They're quite quick and easy to make - this is my second batch of 3 backyards. I've completed 8 houses so far though 5 still need chimneys.

The houses were also quite easy to design. Firstly I used Publisher to download doors and windows clipart from the internet sized to the size I wanted. Next, I downloaded pictures of brickwork and roofing tiles, resized them and then copied and pasted the images and fitted them together to fill the page. On the bricks page I drew and cut out a template for the building, cut it out and pasted on the doors and windows. The template was scanned and used to make the basic houses. Chimney stacks are balsa.

 

Not sure how many of these I'll finally make - a decent looking setup would probably need about 12-16. I will need to do a corner shop or two as well. 

Quite pleased with these - crude, but quick, easy and (in bulk) look OK.