A Gleaming Housing Estate

Reading through "A Gleaming Landscape", the collection from over a hundred years of The Guardian's Country Diary (...know your competition...), I found an interesting entry from as far back as 1918. Having some relevance to my own blog, it's worth quoting at some length;

"Many Parts of these islands would be troublesome to classify if one allowed only the two divisions of Town and Country. There are miles ... which certainly are not town miles, and almost as certainly not country, at least not 'pure country' [my italics]. For great heaps of slag rear their unnatural straight lines above the fields and great chimneys belch forth smoke and fire and the streams are polluted. Yet within a few yards ... ploughing is well on its way and the bloomy furrows lie with frost daintily picking them out."

The slag heaps and great chimneys might have gone, but they have been replaced by another twilight zone, neither 'pure' country nor town, and in its own way, as depressing: the modern housing estate. The Guardian correspondent looked to the country for escape to solace and beauty, yet I believe that there is another liberation from this, a process of 'seeing' that, even in this spiritually bleak landscape, restores a sense of beauty, hope and contentment to the resident. This blog will be such a process.