BROOKSIDE - For the past 22 or so years, life in the Brookside neighbourhood has gone on as the City of Surrey has changed rapidly around it.
Located literally across the street from Bear Creek Park, between 88th and 84th Avenue, the quiet neighbourhood could almost be described as a place stuck in time, a snapshot of a time when the city was just beginning to catch the eyes of young families.Built in 1992, Brookside was a concept neighbourhood designed with an elementary school at its centre and houses encircling it like rings on dartboard. The neighbourhood was typical for something from the early to mid-1990s with threeto-four bedroom houses, two-car garages and a nice bit of lawn out front and in the back. It was nothing spectacular and nothing extravagant.Fast-forward 22 years, though, and suddenly the ordinary has become the extraordinary.Unlike many of the neighbourhoods that would be built in Surrey in subsequent years, more than a handful of Brookside's houses do not have basements and secondary suites are not nearly asprevalent as you'd find elsewhere. As a result, density is not really an issue in the area and there aren't nearly as many cars lining the streets as you might find in some of the city's newer neighbourhoods.How do I know all of this? Well this reporter has been lucky enough to call the area home for the past two decades. And as I continue to see the rest of the city change, I find Brookside becoming one of those increasingly rare neighbourhoods in a city that seems less and less about creating communities and more about packing bodies in to as little space as possible.Which brings me back to Brookside.Having grown up in the 1990s, neighbourhoods like Brookside were simply the norm when it came tosuburban living in Surrey. Houses were not separated by mere two feet gaps and people knew their neighbours. The way the neighbourhood was designed simply encouraged a sense of community.For Surrey school trustee Laurie Larsen, who also resides in the neighbourhood, the community aspect is really what makes something like Brookside special."I've lived in a few areas in Surrey, mostly in Newton, Fleetwood, and I would say that this is the most that's unchanged," she said. "It's a well-established subdivision, and I would say that for the most part, it's very safe. People watch out for each other and know their neighbours around them. One day last week I left the hatch on my truck up and one of theneighbours came over a couple of hours later just to let me know that I'd left the hatch up."For Larsen, she's found that despite some of the newer developments literally forcing people to live in closer proximity to one another, the sense of community seems to be lacking in a lot of the condo and townhouse developments popping up today."My daughter and son both live in townhouses in Clayton and they know maybe one person on one side but you don't have the opportunities when you're outside mowing the lawn or doing yardwork anymore to meet people," she said. "I think you lose that neighbourhood connection."Key to keeping that sense of community alive is the school and park at the epicenter of the neighbourhood.On any given day, you'll find families, youth and seniors making use of the park's fields and recreation areas, not to mention the hundreds of students served by the building itself during the school year."There's a sense of pride in the community here, and you see that in kids in the schools and in the way people keep their houses and yards looking good, and I think it's just that people care," said Larsen."When everyone is walking with their dogs almost everybody will say 'hi' to each other, even if they don't understand English they'll still give you a nod and say hello."It's like you're stepping back in time. It's not just your modern subdivision with row houses, people here know many of their neighbours and everybody just seems to care."And with that sense of community seemingly missing from the city's newer developments, one can only wonder what Surrey would look like if they'd just kept going with the Brookside formula, rather than the almost painfully rapid growth that seems to be putting such a strain on the city today.cpoon@thenownewspaper.com