This song seems to mark the passing of time with a few snapshots from Damon Albarn's life.
The Hollow Ponds are in Leytonstone, London, where Albarn lived as a child. You can still hire boats there.
The next line refers to the development of the A12 dual carriageway through Leytonstone, which faced massive protests as it cuts right through the built-up area and prompted a lot of redevelopment, including at the Green Man roundabout.
By 1991, when this happened, he had moved on, grown up, and was now seeing that what he remembered as a child had changed completely, which seems to isolate your memories more, and gives the song a haunting quality.
There are other references to these changes in the lines about CDs to LCDs, horses to trains, and his own career progression seeing Modern Life Is Rubbish sprayed onto a wall and then using that for the album title which pushed Blur further into the mainstream.
This song seems to mark the passing of time with a few snapshots from Damon Albarn's life.
The Hollow Ponds are in Leytonstone, London, where Albarn lived as a child. You can still hire boats there.
The next line refers to the development of the A12 dual carriageway through Leytonstone, which faced massive protests as it cuts right through the built-up area and prompted a lot of redevelopment, including at the Green Man roundabout.
By 1991, when this happened, he had moved on, grown up, and was now seeing that what he remembered as a child had changed completely, which seems to isolate your memories more, and gives the song a haunting quality.
There are other references to these changes in the lines about CDs to LCDs, horses to trains, and his own career progression seeing Modern Life Is Rubbish sprayed onto a wall and then using that for the album title which pushed Blur further into the mainstream.