Going, going 2
More London things that aren't long for this world...
Heathrow Airport villages RIP?
Sipson, the village earmarked for demolition to make way for Heathrow’s third runway, has a special place in my heart. As an apprentice reporter based in Uxbridge in the ‘80s, the Heathrow villages – Sipson and Harmondsworth – were my patch.
This is a part of greater London that doesn’t think it’s in London, despite being a few fields away from the capital’s major airport. At the time, the demise of Middlesex was still a sore point and the Middlesex Campaign, aimed at reviving the ancient country and headed by rotund astrologer Russell Grant, was hugely popular.
Searching for stories in Sipson
My job involved spending hours tramping
around the villages to find news stories to fill the paper every week. This was
a truly epic struggle. Pleasant the villages may be, but cat up tree was big
news there at the time – except, of course, when plans to raze them to the
ground to expand the airport periodically popped up.
The villages then were bucolic dots on the very edge of London.
Old (Harmondsworth boasts a 11th century church) and surprisingly
quiet, they coexisted uneasily with the airport – which was much resented by
old-timers for apparently never having had planning permission in the first
place. It started off as an airstrip in World War One and just growed and growed.
Fight for the future
I’d like to see Sipson survive. Shouldn’t London treasure its real villages? Plus, it’s comforting to imagine future generations of local paper reporters sweating to get stories out of the place. There’s also the small matter of the future of the planet. If you feel the same, check out the No Third Runway Action Group.
London front gardens RIP
Front gardens, once a defining feature of London's suburbs, are in increasingly short supply. Haringey, where I live, is falling over itself to follow in the concreted, crazy-paved footsteps of Brent, Barnet and Enfield with barely a whimper of protest from anyone. This is a great shame, because there's something very appealing about front gardens.
It's the sheer decorativeness of them that gives them their charm. There's something fanciful, even frivolous, about a little patch of lawn
in front of your house - and they can be marvellous (see the example above, not my garden, unfortunately).
But even if they're individually undistinguished, collectively front gardens can make an ordinary street quite beautiful – while the lack of them tends to do the reverse. Streets where every garden has been paved over look vile and, quite appart from the hideousness factor, this wholesale front garden deforestation is causing serious problems with flooding.
So why are so many people paving over like there's no tomorrow? Would they honestly really rather look at their 4x4s squatting on a patch of concrete outside their front window than a front garden? By the look of it, and as councils introduce more dumb parking schemes, the answer seems to be 'yes'.
