Everyone needs good neighbours, but some places are more neighbourly than others. The tight-knit working-class areas now vanished from our cities are often cited as examples of "community spirit", in contrast to the modern estates which replaced them.

When social history publisher Perilla Kinchin moved to Lonsdale Road, Summertown, 14 years ago, she discovered that middle-class suburbia was full of surprises. She had just produced two acclaimed books about life in the tenement areas of Glasgow, but she soon lost any preconceptions about the very different community she was entering. "Everyone was very friendly and I felt at home straight away," she said.

In the run-up to the millenium, Lonsdale Road joined forces with six other streets to hold a party. A history exhibition was included, as part of the "educational and cultural element" to meet the criteria of a lottery grant.

The exhibition was a big success and residents applied for more lottery money to make it into a book. Volunteers took on the mammoth task of tracing and interviewing about 70 people who have lived in the area since it was built at the beginning of the 20th century. A few years - and £14,000 - later, Seven Roads in Summertown: Voices from an Oxford Suburb has appeared.

The research revealed a period of huge social change, particularly for women, as well as challenging the popular perception of "boring" suburbia.

Perilla said: "My books about women in Glasgow tenements were very typical oral history. What's unusual about this is that it looks at a middle-class community, and how it has changed over 100 years."

The story starts with Francis Twining, a self-made Oxford grocery magnate who bought Hawkswell Farm - which later became Lonsdale and Portland Road - and Stone's Farm, where Victoria and Hamilton Roads were built.

Twining was copying his former employer, high-class grocer Owen Grimbly, who earlier had built houses on the other side of the Banbury Road.

The Seven Roads interviewers uncovered a cornucopia of reminiscences, and graphic accounts of everday middle-class life through the 20th century, including those of Francis's granddaughters, the Twining sisters, Gwyneth and Margaret, who still live in the area. One interviewee, Dorothy Bridges, died a few days after her 100th birthday on February 10, having lived for 94 years in the house where she was born. She told the interviewers: "We had two huge greenhouses - one for the plants, the other for tomatoes. And we had an allotment across the road, and the three houses next door, that was a field in my young days, and my brother and I used to play cricket on there."

Chipperfield's Circus horses grazed each year for two days on the family fields, until they were allowed into the city for St Giles Fair. Old Tom - Christ Church Bell - rang 101 times at nine o'clock. "It still does, but you can't hear it now because of the traffic," she said. "We could always hear the trains - and hear St. Edward's School clock, and Wolvercote had a peal of bells. We could always hear those."

Milk was delivered in a big can, and the postman came at 8 o'clock in the morning, and 11 o'clock, and three o'clock, every day. "They used to come down the road every day, I think every day, with a dustcart, and pick up the dust. And then another day they'd come down with a water cart, and all the water would come out the back, and they'd go down the street with that."

Perilla said: "She gave us fascinating information about life in the roads from before the first World War, and is a good example of how valuable the project was in capturing such memories before it was too late." Although the stories could be echoed in similar streets across the land, Perilla was staggered at the variety of people who have lived in the area.

"The influx of academics into what was earlier a largely town' population - a process beginning with notable refugees from Nazi Germany in the late 1930s - has made these unassuming roads unusual - and cosmopolitan, too.

"Secretaries and surgeons, firemen and Nobel Prize winners have lived here in a neighbourly social mix."

She added: "When we were starting, someone suggested Paul Thompson might be helpful - it was typical that the founding father of oral history should be living in Lonsdale Road."

He writes in his introduction: "We have here a rare window into a community world whose significance has been too long neglected.' Perilla hopes the book will challenge people's perceptions of suburbia. "It's a very successful community and people don't want to move." As for the future, she believes the main threat to the community comes from astronomical house prices - starting at £500,000 for the smallest homes. "There is a sense of social change. There are certain people living here now who would not be able to move here now - a Welsh couple who moved for the husband to work on the railways, for instance. Academics wouldn't be able to afford it now and the shops have changed from offering the basics to rather chic luxury goods."

Seven Roads in Summertown is published by White Cockade Publishing, 71 Lonsdale Road, Oxford OX2 7ES, mail@ whitecockade.co.uk, 01865 510411) at £12.99.