The House I Grew Up In

Writer and journalist Toby Young returns to his childhood in North London. The son of Lord Young of Dartington, a towering figure in post-war social policy making and the originator of many of this country's institutions, Toby remembers his father being a formidable over-achiever and workaholic. His mother, the artist and writer, Sasha Mooram gave up a career at the BBC to look after Toby and his sister full time, something the children remember as being very difficult for their mother.

Toby's father, who believed in comprehensive education, sent his son to two comprehensive schools. After leaving school at 16 with only one O level and on the insistence of his mother that he get a trade, he attended a work experience programme where he trained as a car mechanic, washer upper and a lavatory cleaner. But he decided the work of a manual worker was not for him. He was persuaded by his parents to go back to school and attended the sixth form at William Ellis Grammar school in London gaining 3 A levels. And it is the traditional education he experienced here, its discipline and high expectations, that Toby wants to provide in the new free school he is opening next month in West London. It is something he believes his father would be proud of.

In the House I Grew Up In, Toby Young takes Wendy Robbins back to the home and haunts of his childhood.

Jasvinder Sanghera is the founder of the charity, Karma Nirvana, which campaigns against forced marriage. She was also one of the influential voices behind the 2008 Forced Marriages Act.

Born in 1939, he remembers the constraints of being the son of the local policeman, where any misdemeanour from a young Terry came under scrutiny. His father Thomas, a highly principled man, was also a disciplinarian, leading to an ambivalent relationship between father and son. His mother Lena worked hard to keep the family fed, especially at a time of post war rationing. Terry's parents used their large garden to sustain meal times and even sold fruit and vegetables to supplement a policeman's wage.

As a child, Terry failed his 11-plus and left school at 16. Being a loner and finding village life too confined, Terry was eager to see more of the world and applied to join the navy, but he was persuaded by his father to stay at home and continue his education through evening classes and college. The Church of England played a big role in his life. As a boy he sang in the church choir and even learnt large parts of the prayer book by heart and it was the rituals, language and music of his faith which he says nourished and sustained him while in captivity.

Terry Waite takes Wendy Robbins back to the home and haunts of his childhood.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2011.

Shirley Williams, now Baroness Williams, returns to her childhood homes in London's Chelsea and the New Forest. Her mother was the writer, Vera Brittain, whose most famous novel - Testament of Youth - was a best-seller when Shirley was a child in the 1930s. Her father, George Catlin, was an academic and and an instinctive feminist whose own mother had been an early suffragette, ostracised by Victorian society. He was a frustrated politician who stood for parliament a number of times but was never elected. But these were not the only nurturing adults in her young life. Also hugely significant was her mother's best friend, Winifred Holtby, and the housekeeper and her husband, Amy & Charlie Burnett - a bright, under-educated working class couple whom Shirley adored.

The conversations in her childhood home centred on world events - the Spanish civil war and the rise of Hitler. Vera Brittain was a pacifist and, as such, found herself and her husband on the Nazis' blacklist. Had the Germans invaded in 1940, Shirley's parents would likely have been eliminated. Fearful of this, soon after war broke out and with the battle of the Atlantic raging, they put Shirley and her brother on a ship and evacuated them to the USA.

The programme focuses on the relationships she forged with the adults in her early life and what she learned from them all. She credits her father with giving her the confidence to pursue a life in politics, Amy with imbuing in her a practical understanding of the constraints of a class-bound society, her mother with a vision of nobility and Winifred? Winifred was simply fun.

Wendy Robbins accompanies Shirley Williams as she revisits the homes and haunts of her childhood.

Writer & journalist Peter Hitchens was born in 1951 and moved to Portsmouth as the sixties began and the navy (in which his father was a commander during World War 2) declined. He grew up with heroic tales - from Admiral Nelson onwards - of great men who had kept this island safe. His life-long squabble with his older brother, Christopher Hitchens, took root here as did his teenage rebellions - against God, against suburbia - both of which he still deeply regrets and may have played a part he believes in the fracturing of his childhood idyll when his parents divorced and his mother died. He takes Wendy Robbins back to the homes and haunts of his post-war childhood.

Sir William Atkinson, one of the country's best-known super-heads, first came to this country from Jamaica aged 7. His father met him, his mother and two brothers at Heathrow. This is the first memory Sir William has of his father who had worked abroad for a number of years. The other oddity of that day was seeing white people doing manual work on the drive from the airport. The only white people he'd seen as a young child, growing up in a small village, had been plantation owners.

The family settled in Battersea, South London. In the 1950s this was a white working-class neighbourhood and racism was endemic with room-to-let signs proclaiming: no blacks, no Irish. Despite a difficult educational start - Sir William must be the only person to have failed the 11+ twice - school became his saviour. Teachers, fired with a 1960s social conscience, put faith in him. He went into education to return the favour.

Television screenwriter Kay Mellor was born into a working class Leeds household in the 1950s and brought up single-handedly by her mother from the age of three. Her mother re-married when Kay was 10. She remembers a secure childhood. But money was tight, she did badly at school and was married, with a child, at just sixteen. The marriage has endured the intervening decades and the success she eventually found. She talks to Wendy Robbins about the loneliness of teenage motherhood, her uphill struggle to educate herself and her writing life which has always been inspired by the Yorkshire people she still lives amongst.

PR supremo, professional networker & businesswoman, Julia Hobsbawm, takes Wendy Robbins to London's Hampstead & rural Wales. Julia was born in 1964 and grew up among the country's leading intellectuals and communists in London's Hampstead. Her father is the Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, who fled Germany in the 1930s as Hitler came to power. Life at home in North West London was a whirl of dinner parties, "German" lunches, and mittel-European salons - hosted expertly by Marlene Hobsbawm whose parents had fled anti-semitism in Vienna. Despite this family history Julia says that she learned about the Holocaust from TV. Meanwhile, at her grandmother's appartment nearby she revelled in big Jewish family get-togethers and a different sort of politics altogether - here, people voted Tory and followed entrepreneurial paths.

Neurobiologist Professor Colin Blakemore was a war baby brought up in devastated Coventry. His two-up two-down home had the first TV in the street on which he lived next door to relatives and a family of ten. As an only child, his parents were able to cash in an insurance policy of £16 which enabled him to go to the local grammar school where he proved himself to be more of an artist and actor than a scientist.

Wendy Robbins presents a series revisiting the childhood neighbourhoods of influential Britons.

Playwright and actor Kwame Kwei-Armah takes Wendy to Southall, west London, to remember his West Indian childhood there in the 1970s.