NEWS CHANNEL
Published: 14/01/2009 00:00 -
Updated: 23/02/2010 13:35
Welcome to the Pickards' house, where the Home Front is home and modernity is rationed. Reporter JESSICA CUNNIFFE went to find out why this 2009 family is living like it's 1939.
On the edge of the new city, over a few speed humps, round a red brick estate - and back six decades - is the home of Amanda and Craig Pickard.
This couple don't just love antique chic - they live it.
And this passion for history has inspired them to transform their Old Stratford home, built less than 15 years ago, into a wartime timewarp.
wartime
By day they are parents-of-two Amanda, a 33-year-old curator at Olney Museum and freelancer for the Cabinet War Rooms in London, and Craig, 44, who works in IT.
But they are also Edna and Harry, who travel the country giving talks on life in the Second World War, dressing in the style, amassing the artefacts and preserving the attitude of the time.
Their home is like a living museum, where the CD player is a gramophone, the carpet runner is held to the stairs by clips, and when someone calls two silver bells clatter on top of the telephone.
They are two people, with two young children, two dogs and like everyone now with too much to do.
But they still find time to organise historical events, give educational workshops and even appear on TV.
And though they live in the late 'Thirties early 'Forties style, their knowledge and events stretch back to the Victorian and Edwardian periods.
Six years ago their home was magnolia with red carpets. So how did it, along with their lives, transform so dramatically?
Amanda said: "We were both interested in history and always have been.
"We met through a Civil War re-enactment, though it was not the history we liked as much as the re-enactment.
"Then at an English Heritage event we saw a group that did the 1940s and we thought that's the period that we really love.
"As we got more and more into this hobby people gave us lots of stuff, clothes and artefacts. And our hobby became our way of life. We are just really comfortable in this style."
At the point when they 'had two of everything' - a modern implement and its wartime equivalent - they decided to stick to the latter.
What MFI-hating Amanda loves is that her 40s furniture comes with a story - not just assembly instructions.
The Utility table and chairs, for example, recall a period when timber was in short supply and a Government scheme was set up to kit out the homes of newlyweds or people who had been bombed out.
Every object in the Pickards' home points to another age, with the LNER train poster claiming 'it's quicker by rail' seeming particularly archaic in a week when commuters faced long delays at Milton Keynes Station.
Amanda's wishlist differs from most women's: the things she is most desperate to get her hands on are the preservative eisenglass and wartime Vim.
Strangely enough, her parents first moved to Milton Keynes having been lured by the idea of a new city.
So why has their daughter chosen, conversely, to look to the past?
She said: "I think we're a lot happier in this lifestyle. We do a lot of recycling, we don't waste things. We don't want the latest things and we don't live up to an expectation that lots other people do so we don't feel the same pressures.
"I think we're quite laid back people anyway but we don't strive to want the same things as other people, so we seem less stressed and paranoid.
"It's not about materialism, it's not about having latest gadgets and getting yourselves in huge amounts of debt to get a bigger TV when your other one was fine."
It seems that living through the war was, in some ways, more peaceful than today's frantic lifestyles.
"It's a period when we nearly lost everything, but we all held on and people would give up everything to stay free and to fight. I think that's such a good British spirit that we shouldn't forget. Because our reserve line was old men and boys - and they would've laid down their lives."
Amanda is adamant their lifestyle is as 2009 as it is 1939. She says this is borne out by their anachronistic dishwasher, TV and laptop that sit alongside the sideboard and lamps.
However, she cannot help but let slip the laptop's main use - to search on eBay for the next artefact.
On the edge of the new city, over a few speed humps, round a red brick estate - and back six decades - is the home of Amanda and Craig Pickard.
This couple don't just love antique chic - they live it.
And this passion for history has inspired them to transform their Old Stratford home, built less than 15 years ago, into a wartime timewarp.
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By day they are parents-of-two Amanda, a 33-year-old curator at Olney Museum and freelancer for the Cabinet War Rooms in London, and Craig, 44, who works in IT.
But they are also Edna and Harry, who travel the country giving talks on life in the Second World War, dressing in the style, amassing the artefacts and preserving the attitude of the time.
Their home is like a living museum, where the CD player is a gramophone, the carpet runner is held to the stairs by clips, and when someone calls two silver bells clatter on top of the telephone.
They are two people, with two young children, two dogs and like everyone now with too much to do.
But they still find time to organise historical events, give educational workshops and even appear on TV.
And though they live in the late 'Thirties early 'Forties style, their knowledge and events stretch back to the Victorian and Edwardian periods.
Six years ago their home was magnolia with red carpets. So how did it, along with their lives, transform so dramatically?
Amanda said: "We were both interested in history and always have been.
"We met through a Civil War re-enactment, though it was not the history we liked as much as the re-enactment.
"Then at an English Heritage event we saw a group that did the 1940s and we thought that's the period that we really love.
"As we got more and more into this hobby people gave us lots of stuff, clothes and artefacts. And our hobby became our way of life. We are just really comfortable in this style."
At the point when they 'had two of everything' - a modern implement and its wartime equivalent - they decided to stick to the latter.
What MFI-hating Amanda loves is that her 40s furniture comes with a story - not just assembly instructions.
The Utility table and chairs, for example, recall a period when timber was in short supply and a Government scheme was set up to kit out the homes of newlyweds or people who had been bombed out.
Every object in the Pickards' home points to another age, with the LNER train poster claiming 'it's quicker by rail' seeming particularly archaic in a week when commuters faced long delays at Milton Keynes Station.
Amanda's wishlist differs from most women's: the things she is most desperate to get her hands on are the preservative eisenglass and wartime Vim.
Strangely enough, her parents first moved to Milton Keynes having been lured by the idea of a new city.
So why has their daughter chosen, conversely, to look to the past?
She said: "I think we're a lot happier in this lifestyle. We do a lot of recycling, we don't waste things. We don't want the latest things and we don't live up to an expectation that lots other people do so we don't feel the same pressures.
"I think we're quite laid back people anyway but we don't strive to want the same things as other people, so we seem less stressed and paranoid.
"It's not about materialism, it's not about having latest gadgets and getting yourselves in huge amounts of debt to get a bigger TV when your other one was fine."
It seems that living through the war was, in some ways, more peaceful than today's frantic lifestyles.
"It's a period when we nearly lost everything, but we all held on and people would give up everything to stay free and to fight. I think that's such a good British spirit that we shouldn't forget. Because our reserve line was old men and boys - and they would've laid down their lives."
Amanda is adamant their lifestyle is as 2009 as it is 1939. She says this is borne out by their anachronistic dishwasher, TV and laptop that sit alongside the sideboard and lamps.
However, she cannot help but let slip the laptop's main use - to search on eBay for the next artefact.
