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...

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. Jasvinder was born into a Sikh community in Derby, part of a family of seven daughters and one son. Her mother married off each of her girls one by one. But when it was Jasvinder's turn, she refused. So she was dragged to her bedroom and a lock was put on the door. She was told that she had brought huge...

Terry Waite, who was held hostage in Beirut for nearly five years in the late 1980s, returns to his childhood in the small Cheshire hamlet of Styal. 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 the family fed, especially...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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. Producer: Smita Patel.

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.

Wendy Robbins presents a series revisiting the childhood neighbourhoods of influential Britons. Campaigner, author and founder of the women's refuge movement, Erin Pizzey, explores her troubled childhood in post-war Dorset.

Wendy Robbins presents a series revisiting the childhood neighbourhoods of influential Britons. Biologist and author Professor Steve Jones takes Wendy back to his childhood in west Wales in the 1950s to uncover the passions that led to his life of scientific discovery.

Wendy Robbins presents a series revisiting the childhood neighbourhoods of influential Britons. Disability campaigner Baroness Jane Campbell takes Wendy back to her childhood home in New Malden, Surrey, where she remembers being dressed up as a Barbie doll and wanting to be no different from her able-bodied friends.

Wendy Robbins presents a series revisiting the childhood neighbourhoods of influential Britons. Baroness Mary Warnock has been a moral referee for 30 years. Her judgement has often been relied upon to steer a path through a tangle of controversies from human embryo research to euthanasia. She takes Wendy back to her idyllic childhood in Winchester, where she was brought up by her beloved nanny and an eccentric mother.

Wendy Robbins takes the novelist back to her isolated childhood home in Dartmoor, and an unconventional upbringing. From August 2008.

The politician takes Wendy Robbins to the boarding schools for the blind that he attended as a child. From August 2008.

Wendy Robbins presents a series revisiting the childhood neighbourhoods of influential Britons. Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic Studies at Glasgow University, takes Wendy back to her childhood home in Huddersfield. She recalls growing up in a literary family and her mother's insistence on living separately from the wider Muslim community.

Wendy Robbins presents a series revisiting the childhood neighbourhoods of influential Britons. She meets Sir Tom Farmer, Scottish entrepreneur and philanthropist, on his boyhood stamping ground of Leith.

Recalling a childhood in Glasgow which inspired her to write, the poet takes Wendy Robbins to meet her mum and dad. From August 2007.

Wendy Robbins presents a series revisiting the childhood neighbourhoods of influential Britons. Jacqueline Gold, Chief Executive of the Ann Summers retail chain.

The influential history professor returns to Finchley in North London to reminisce with Wendy Robbins about his 1950s childhood.