|
The oddest thing about British house builders is their attachment to making new houses look like old ones. You get a feel for this habit driving along the A131 southwest of Braintree in Essex. The view through the windscreen is of a typical 21st century commercial landscape: a mixture of industrial sheds, business parks, motels and petrol stations, punctuated by unploughed fields across which crisp packets and children’s balloons occasionally drift. Then, past a junction near Tesco, a new housing development surges up from behind the modest cover of some gaunt trees.
Hundreds of immaculate houses, seemingly only just out of their packets, stretch out across the Essex flatlands. There are rows of low-slung cottages, imitating the forms of their 18th century counterparts, painted a variety of sweet pastel colours. There are more formal avenues abutting in Georgian style crescents. There is a village green, with ducks and a new-ancient bridge, and a Palladian-style country mansion, which, on closer inspection, reveals itself to be subdivided into flats.
|
