The Street Where I Grew Up
Growing up in a well-to-do pocket of rural England through the 1970s, 80s and 90s, I was surrounded by a culture that felt, at least to a very polite little boy, a little too polished and a little too restrained. Much of it was idyllic — roaming, rural and rustic in a way that now seems almost unimaginable. But even then, I knew there was something faintly odd about shops being closed on Sundays, men wearing jackets and ties while driving tractors, and orange juice being served as a luxury starter in hotels.
Luckily, I had a second home in Brooklyn, New York City. I couldn’t have told you the actual address; I seemed mostly to move between alleyways, trash cans, railings, external staircases and open windows. But I had friends there — flatmates, really: fuzzy, furry, silly and theatrical. Man, could they put on a show.
We were always doing stuff: learning stuff, counting stuff, eating stuff — mainly cookies. If you had posted me a letter addressed simply to Sesame Street, I’m fairly sure it would have found me. The Count would have passed it on for sure. “ONE postcard from England! TWO….”
I knew Sesame Street wasn’t a TV show. It was a real street: a place filled with people and characters who felt alive. Unlike the more sanitised worlds of British children’s television, Sesame Street felt gloriously unpolished, as if you could almost hear the distant honk of a taxi or smell the hot dogs just out of frame.
There is something revealing in the way Britain first responded to it. When Sesame Street arrived from the United States, it was not immediately embraced as the educational landmark it would later become. The BBC was wary of its tone, methods and unmistakably American setting. Naturally, it devided opionion in a way that we forget was as absurdedly divisionist as it is todayt.
ITV tested it more cautiously. A 1971 British report caught the tension perfectly: educators were sceptical, while children and parents responded far more warmly.
One reported criticism described the show as “brash and vulgar but utterly lovable” — which, to my mind, is almost exactly what made it feel so alive.
Today I find the origins of Sesame Street are as fascinating as the show itself. Developed in the late 1960s through the pioneering work of Joan Ganz Cooney, Lloyd Morrisett and the Children’s Television Workshop, it set out to use television as an educational tool, especially for children underserved by traditional systems of learning. With support from public and private funding, it blended entertainment with literacy, numeracy and social development in a way that felt engaging, urban and alive. It was media used not just to entertain, but to educate, include and uplift.
For me, America already had an otherworldly magic. My father worked across the United States in the 70s and 80s, particularly in New York State, including with Binney & Smith, the art manifacturer bohemoth behind dust-free chalk and Crayola Crayons. The things brought back felt like objects from another planet: a drawing pad with orange and brown swirling trim, rainbow-styled roller skates, a 6 tier family pack of chunky felt tips. Each one seemed to arrive from a brighter, looser, more exciting world. Something told me America was different. And America was cool.
The magic of Sesame Street drew me towards all things 70s and 80ss: its aesthetic, its grit, its warmth. The version of the show I absorbed in the 80s still carried the unmistakable imprint of the decade before. The brownstones, fire escapes and murals painted on walls were not the neatly manicured suburbia of other American shows. It was a real city, or at least it felt real to me, watching from my quiet English hamlet.
I was, and still am, obsessed with music, and Black American music from the 1950s onwards accounts for much of that obsession. I learned to play the 12-bar blues at around seven, fell in love with Motown through a “best of” double cassette I bought from Woolworths for £3.99 when I was eleven, and later took a teenage deep dive into Funkadelic, Sly and the Family Stone and, of course, Prince. Hip-hop fused all of these threads together. I loved working out what had been sampled, where it came from, and how I might find the original, somehow from within the musical desert of Buckinghamshire.
The Muppets were the heart of the show. They were anarchic, affectionate and often surprisingly sarcastic — far from the overly sweet, moralistic characters that appeared in other children’s programming. Oscar the Grouch revelled in his garbage, Cookie Monster’s hunger was a force of nature, and Grover, my personal favourite, was the patron saint of well-intentioned disasters. And then there was Big Bird: childlike, slightly melancholic, and somehow carrying the spirit of Sesame Street itself.
But the humans were just as fascinating. Gordon, Susan, Maria, Luis, Mr Hooper — these weren’t simply actors playing exaggerated roles; they felt like people. They had jobs, routines, relationships. They laughed, argued and celebrated. Seeing adults behave not as caricatures, but as warm, fallible individuals, made childhood feel less lonely and the outside world more within reach.
New York itself was a silent but omnipresent character. In my mind, Sesame Street and the real New York blurred into one magical entity. I didn’t yet know about crime waves, fiscal crises or urban struggle. I saw stoops where people gathered, bodegas where life bustled, and a city that seemed to belong to everyone. It was a place where children played freely in the streets, neighbours knew each other, and every background and language blended into one endless, colourful conversation.
As I got older, my interests shifted towards music, film and the mythology of 1970s New York, but Sesame Street never quite left me. When I finally visited New York for the first time as an adult, on an art school trip in 1996, I found myself instinctively looking for traces of that childhood vision. And in many ways, I found them. On a fiercely cold spring morning, the corners of Brooklyn still held echoes of those brownstone steps where Gordon might have sat and chatted. The rhythm of the streets, the energy of the people, still carried something of that Sesame Street spirit of warmth and camaraderie.
The show’s legacy is undeniable. Over the decades, Sesame Street has reached children in more than 150 countries, adapting to different cultures while maintaining its core mission. It pioneered educational television, introduced diverse representation before it was widely prioritised in mainstream media, and showed children from different backgrounds that they belonged. Even today, it remains relevant, addressing subjects such as autism awareness, displacement, family life and social justice in ways children can understand.
Looking back, I realise that Sesame Street was more than just a television show for me. It was a portal into a world that felt bigger, broader and more alive than anything I had known. It taught me that learning could be joyful, that kindness could be cool, and that the world was wider than my own small patch of England.
So many years later, I still carry that love for Sesame Street and the New York it represented. Though the city has changed, and the show has evolved, I still hold onto the feeling it gave me: that somewhere out there, beyond my quiet childhood home, was a place where people lived, laughed and learned together.
