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For nearly 50 years, the Thomas Coram Research Unit (TCRU) has been integral to the IOE (Institute of Education), UCL's Faculty of Education and Society (University College London, UK). This article is written from the perspectives of four researchers who have served in the TCRU's formative years and over its lifetime. It chronicles the TCRU's history and meaning, situating these reflections within the wider and much changed context of academia, politics and society. It begins with an overview of the TCRU's origins as a dedicated government-funded research unit in 1973, the rationale and aims of its founder and first director, Jack Tizard, and the TCRU's subsequent evolution, and its work in the fields of childhood, families and children's services. This is followed by a consideration of some important features of the TCRU, which have created its distinct identity, for example multidisciplinarity, working with mixed methods, international collaborations, a convivial and collegiate environment and a continuing capacity to generate new ideas and directions for research. The article also reflects on some of the challenges faced by the TCRU and how it has responded to them. The article concludes by considering whether there is still a place today for a dedicated, university-based social research unit with a long-term and strategic orientation.

In this article, childhood is conceptualised in relation to the geography and materiality of place, the navigation of public space and the ways in which places and spaces are experienced. The article compares two middle-class girlhoods – in the 1920s and the late 1940s/early 1950s, respectively. The girls, Jo and Julia, shared a family ancestry (aunt and niece) and a similar experience of place; they lived in the same part of North London. Both were eldest children and both had parents in middle-class occupations though in different sectors. The article examines the geography and housing of the two girls’ childhoods at particular periods of history, their negotiations of, and mobilities in, public space, and the ways in which they experienced place and public spaces. To do this it draws on personal diaries written in Jo’s teenage years and on Julia’s memories of growing up in an earlier life course phase that are recollected in late adulthood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]