They're all made of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same

During our day’s caching we found ourselves strolling around several villages in North Oxfordshire, looking for the various locations to solve the clues to find the whereabouts of the caches. In two of these villages there were some new houses being built slap bang in the middle, some detached, some terraced. But do you know what, you had to look very hard to see if they were actually new houses or old ones being renovated. They were being built of the local stone, cut to the same traditional size and shape, the roofs had been properly constructed on site rather than the usual prefab sections, so they were steeply pitched to blend in. All the little local architectural features were there; in about five years time, when the stone has weathered slightly and has lost its rawness, you’ll walk past them and assume they’ve been there for a couple of hundred years just like all their neighbours.

So why, when you drive around the country, are all houses on all housing estates identical? What happened to vernacular building? No, they’re all red brick boxes crammed onto tiny patches of ground, with wavy roads (burglars’ paradise – easy to escape from view) linking them and, almost more damning than anything, no pavements. It seems people are meant to walk in the road – if they walk at all. What happened to the idea of community? It seems that you live in your house or you drive to somewhere else – you don’t walk, or push the baby’s pram to the shop (strike that idea, there are no shops on these estates; it’s house after house after endless identical house). You could be in Plymouth, Blackburn, Newcastle or Gravesend for all the local identity they have.

So hurrah to the architects, planners and builders in Horley and Shutford. More power to you. And a pox on Persimmon, Barratt, Wimpey and all of that ilk, for the rape of our identity.