They say you know you’re getting old when policemen start to look young.

I say you know you’re getting old when the living room you grew up in becomes a period piece at Bradford Industrial Museum.

Changes in family life over a century are reflected in a row of terraced houses, originally at Great Horton and re-built at the museum as Gaythorne Row. The houses offer a window into the lives of working-class families from the 1870s to the 1970s, thanks to the Friends of Bradford Museums who have researched the social history of each period, and the stories of people who lived in the properties, and furnished the homes accordingly.

The first cottage has a Victorian parlour and bedroom, with gas lamps, rag rugs and a patchwork bedspread, while the second is a typical 1942 home, capturing domestic life during the Second World War.

I’m a regular visitor to the museum with my nephews – the Shire horses are very much missed by us – and my dad, who recalls growing up in a house similar to the wartime cottage.

Now I, too, have found myself recognising items from my childhood. The third cottage recently re-opened as a 1970s house and, with a garish living-room covered in bold print orange wallpaper and cheesy pineapple chunks on a glass-topped coffee table, it resembles the set from Abigail’s Party.

The clunky-looking telly is like the one I grew up with, and I recognised the dark-green retro coffee set, the box record player and the fake fur rug in the bedroom upstairs. While my childhood home wasn’t quite as ‘modern’ as this one, it evoked memories of domestic life in the Seventies, when a fondue set was the height of sophistication.

To my nephews, aged ten and 12, the 1975 house was from another world; as much a period piece as the 1940s one is to me. “We only had three channels, and we had to get up and press one of those buttons to switch over,” I told them, pointing out the TV. Expressions of shock, confusion and pity flickered across the boys’ faces. I might as well have been speaking Japanese; the concept of life before remote controls was too much for them to take in.

It’s quite sobering when you realise your childhood has become a period drama. The 1970s is now a slice of history, like my dad’s wartime childhood.

While dad’s early years involved foraging for shrapnel on bomb-sites and diving under the stairs during air raids, mine were spent dressing up Pippa dolls and watching Shang-A-Lang. Not quite so significant, in terms of world history, but to a child of the Seventies, they were happy days.