Big houses
This story, of a women whose 'chocolate box' cottage has been surrouned on either side by two modern houses, interested me as the setup reminds me slightly of a similar thing I saw in Pett Level, nr Hastings, and also as I have just come back from the Hemingfords in Cambridgeshire, where there is a similar mania for knocking down old houses and building new ones. It seems to me the problem is not one of attractiveness - the cottage in the pictures is not a pretty one, and the houses that were knocked down in Pett Level were decidedly substandard, whilst the new ones usually have some merit - but the rather gargantuan scale. Perhaps huge houses are common in parts of Surrey but I was astounded in Hemingford just how large some of the new ones were. One in fact was just wrongly sized, with everything about 7/5ths too large. It was the scale that jarred rather than how they looked or their modernity (in fact most of the new ones are in a rather old-fashioned style). I think it's perhaps the same with these houses in the Mail article.Labels: houses
posted by Matthew @ 8/25/2008 09:30:00 AM
Comments: 1
