This could be heaven ...
Having moved back to my childhood home, it's forgivable to be feeling a little nostalgic for a time and a place - and even a people - now vanished. For although Harold Hill remains Harold Hill, it's not the Harold Hill I remember with such fondness. It's changed. And not for the better.
To be honest, it was never a pretty place. A large, post-War estate on the far fringes of Greater London, Harold Hill was developed on 850 acres of formerly private land to house ex-servicemen like my father and those cockneys (as my mother always called them rather disparagingly) looking to leave behind the bombed-out ruins of the East End and start a new suburban life in leafy Essex.
Construction of over seven-and-a-half thousand new homes began in 1948 and was completed ten years later. The development, however, was fairly low density; mostly two or three bedroom houses built of brick with lots of open spaces, including woodland, parks, greens and, perhaps most crucially, gardens at both front and back that the original residents not only delighted in but prided themselves upon.
Needless to say, most of the playing fields and wild areas have now been built on. But it's the loss of the front gardens which has, I think, dealt a mortal blow to any sense of community and reduced the estate to stony silence.
It's not simply a case of no birds singing - a prospect which has long troubled poets from John Keats to John Lydon - but also of no insects buzzing, no flowers blooming, no frogs spawning, no hedgehogs hiding, no lawnmowers gently humming, no neighbours chatting, and no children laughing ...
The idyllic world above has been buried alive under concrete and gravel in order that the nation's 35 million vehicles can have space to park.
Beneath the crazy-paving stones lies the past. And future hope lies with the weeds that defiantly grow between the cracks ...
