Once in the centre of Eastwood:
I very quickly found my way to the D.H. Lawrence birthplace museum on Victoria Street:
Where I had a look round the souvenir shop and found my wife a small book about the Eastwood of D.H. Lawrence's time.
At the souvenir shop, I was given a Blue Line Trail leaflet, which helped me to get round to see quite a lot of the Lawrence sites in Eastwood. This leaflet explains that the house on Victoria Street was the "original mining cottage where D.H. Lawrence was born on 11th September 1885", as the "fourth child" of Arthur and Lydia Lawrence.
For five pound, I was offered the chance to look round the museum but time was at a premium, with me only having about 4-5 hours at my disposal, so I had to decline the offer.
With Lawrence's birthplace museum (above) being on a street corner, it seemed to beam out from all the other red-bricked places surrounding it:
Taken all together, the red-bricked places still offered a sense of the working-class environment that Lawrence was born into. In some ways, all this reminded me of the red-bricked East Ward area of Bury, Lancashire where I spent a large part of my childhood.
The Blue Line Trail leaflet also led me to Princes Street:
Of which the houses where originally built by a "local Colliery company ... to house" an "increasing workforce of miners". For Lawrence, such dwelling-places were "sordid and hideous".
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