Enigmatically awoke
Last night and in my dream I visited once again the Co-operative stores on Mount Road. I did so after having visited all the shops around that circus there. I saw Mildred’s again; and the Newsagent’s shop; Mrs Doyle’s and Mrs Cowap’s. I smelt the paraffin oil from Mr and Mrs Hall’s chimney.
Over the road then to the little Co-operative Bakery, with Mary Jackson selling the bread and cakes, along with her assistant Margaret. I saw Freda Butler’s Greengrocery, and then hurried to the Co-operative store, but it was closing. The door was closing. I heard the door rattle in that way that it always did, but I saw somebody leaving, and they were coming out from a circular door. It went wrong. I was asked by somebody, what did I want. I did not know, so I asked if I could use the toilet please. No. They said. This is a Funeral Director’s.
I left and saw the houses. How many times had I walked along that road? Possibly every single day for eighteen years. I knew where the paving flags went up and down; where the triangular puddles lay the longest; where the thin ice formed in the winter; where the gardens were that had scented flowers; where the dogs were; where the people lived. This had been my home.
But not any more. No longer to touch the privet hedges. No longer to smell the cut grass of the Garden City. No longer to receive some apples as gifts. The small lights of distant living rooms and bedrooms. The scent of the late summer garden bonfire. The welcome (and sometimes unwelcome) visits from cats or smaller animals. No longer to hear the dog howl at the top of “The Passage”. No. All away.
But there was more to the place than that. It was speckled with surprising people. But it was a place of retreat. And I am not sure but that the oddest thing about that place was the lack of community. A total lack of togetherness. A lack of common endeavour. No common purpose. No seeking of a common good.
How strange was this? It was very strange. And, as I have thought about it many many years since, it was an aspirational place. Somewhere that my parents, and many more people before and afterwards had bought into. The so-say benign Garden City Movement. It has to have been one of the biggest experiments in anti-socialism imaginable.
Thus it is that lives were ruined and genuine aspiration – for the good of all – were killed stone dead. And, we paid for it many and many and many times over and over again. We paid the housebuilders for it; we paid the governments for it; and we paid with our loss of social facilities for it.
Of course, it is what we all were made to believe that we wanted. Individually we wanted it. We were made to want it. But what we were made to want laughs coldly at what we need. And what we were made to want, we didn’t need. We needed what we were made to not want.
It is so neat. Such a delightfully soft political trick. I doubt that anybody will read this; and I doubt that anybody will want to think about this. But it is what it is.
Garden cities; reification; competition; all things to aspire to.
Woodie Guthrie said “I hate a song that…” well go and find it, and more. We have been encouraged in the wrong direction.
No wonder we are where we are.
But I want a house that leans against another house; I want to share with the neighbours; I want to do that thing.
Africa, somewhere in Africa, a proverb came. It advises that “it takes a village to educate a child”. Hmmm… When we’re all being made to aspire to detached, and semi-detached, where is the village?
You know the answer. It isn’t anywhere. It’s nowhere. It. Isn’t.
“It got wrong”.
It certainly did.
After all, it was inevitable that Ebenezer Howard’s ideas and the concept of Georgism should have been hijacked and perverted by those who would have to have the most – as they saw it – to lose.
Well, if you got this far, then great. If you understood it, better. If you didn’t, then I’m sorry. But you can take solace in your boundary, and your phone, and possibly even your garden gate. As the gate notices used to advise (to those who dared venture): No Hawkers; No Circulars.
At its best my dears, at its best.
voxturturis 