Insipid little townships

Wilhelm

Well its white flight, isnt it Rod ? people are escaping '' the joys and delights '' of the multiculural society.

Ken Loach lives in a townhouse in Bath.
Billy Bragg lives in a farmhouse in Dorset.
Liberal twit Jon Snow lives in a villiage in Sussex, something out of Beatrix Potter

All far far away from the ghetto.
They all love ethnics but dont want to live with them. Strange that, isnt it ?

What happens in America , we get 10 years later.

Lungfish

Yes, Toytown with roundabouts, terrible desert of a place- few trees, flat noiseless place full of flat noiseless people.

Col Bloodnokk ex M15

Ah this takes me back to those New Towns of the 50s and 60s.
Harlow Basildon Basingstoke Milton Keynes.

Good to see all those indigenous folk having babies though, just like the 60s.

At least I hope they are indigenous.

Fergus Pickering

Oh come on, Rod, don't be such a snob. This is exactly the way a mining village would have been when it was first plonked down by the mine owners - except that it's much nicer. The people won't all be the same age in thirty years or so, and I expect there will be a sprinkling of local shops and cafes run by Patel and Gheorgiu and whoever it is likes being open all hours. And I'm sure the people, young, well-off, enjoy living there. What about the children? They usually cheer a place up. Well, stir it up at least.

Bob Blake

We don't all have six figure incomes. Cambourne is a much cheaper place to live than cambridge.
Snobbery is easier when you can afford it.
Don't bother coming back

Eraserhead

Sounds rather nice to me. Before I make the move, can you tell me if they have a choice of schooling there too, Rod?

Wily Trout

People will be delighted to move there. They will shop on the internet and spend all their time at home drinking cheap supermarket booze, texting their workmates and watching their widescreen. There will be no need to interact with real people. The perfect Stepford Economic Unit.

Anne Wotana Kaye

Oh dear Rod, Aren't you being a liddle bit NIMBY? I'm sure you don't live within spitting distance from an urban sink-estate. I agree with Col Bloodnokk ex M15 regarding all the babies. This I am sure must worry Nu Labour. Heaven forbid they should all be indigenous.

L-MS

As people who are looking for a house in which to raise a family (3 bedrooms, kitchen diner, local school without much knife crime etc.) my wife and I are finding it difficult to find a place in the South East with all of these at a price we have any hope of affording. This is why new towns are springing up, it has nothing to do with "choosing", it depends on your ability to raise cash. For the price of 2 bed flat in picturesque Chalfont St. Peter (Bucks) you can get a detached 5 bed house with 3 reception rooms in faceless, insipid Milton Keynes (Bucks). We can't all afford school fees and a townhouse in Islington, which is why these towns you moan about exist.

rod seacole liddle

Fergus - ok, point taken. But I don't think it's snobbery. And what differentiates it from the mining villages is the seeming lack of a sense of community. We are building an awful lot of these places, and yet there is never an attempt to build a community (local shops etc).

Bob Blake - I'll come back whenever I like. Put the kettle on, there's a good chap.

eraserhead

"...drinking cheap supermarket booze, texting their workmates and watching their widescreen. There will be no need to interact with real people." Wily Trout - you missed out blogging.

Chris J

At the end of the day people are people - mostly just getting on with their lives and facing the joys and hardships head on. Whether they're in Delhi, Kuwait Islington or Cambourne. But its worth remembering that many of our great artists came from blank housing estates such as this. Such characterless enclaves can breed a reaction. Its why punk comes from the suburbs - not KIngs Road.

Baron Pipin II

Rod, Lupus and Willy Trout have it spot on in one. But isn’t it what the pseudo-liberal ruling elites have always aimed for? Each of us in a shoe-box, preferably single, doors locked at dusk, glaring at virtual screens to satisfy our latent desires for everything from sex to a new pair of socks, munching crisps and, if the need arrives, being guided by an army of outreach for this or that.

Next time you are in any sizeable town e.g. Cambridge, have a look at the upper floors above the networks of Starbucks, Nexts and the rest. Millions of square ft of empty but perfectly livable space. If only we could find a way of utilizing it, perhaps L-MS and people like him could get an even better bargain, and the cities will get a fresher look, too.

Nicholas

No, it's not snobbery and Rod has a point about the lack of community - no doubt aided and abetted by all New Labour's guilty until proven innocent and "all males (and now women it seems) are predatory paedophiles" laws, regulations and bald eagle scare tactics which make everyone suspicious of everyone else.

The pub chains (Defeater, Spiritless, Old English Cons, etc) are just plain depressing and take (smokeless) bland mediocrity to new levels. I have a book from the 1920's 'The Taverns of London' by H E Popham and I weep into my beer whenever I read it for what has been lost.

At least they are not Germaine Greer's tower block townships - I suppose.

Fergus Pickering

OK Rod. Perhaps snobbery is unfair. I withdraw it. Mining villages had a sense of community. Why? because everybody had been living there for a long time, and their parents before them. But whe the mine owner opened the mine - was there a sense of community then? These things take time. And aren't you a bit sentimental about mining communities? The mining villages in Kent (yes we did have them) were/are pretty forbidding places. I'd rather live in Deal or Herne Bay, nicer places with plenty of community. The Mayor of Deal was a lovely lady who wore her chain of office to the shops and wrote poems to its pier, a concrete monstrosity, but to the eye of love...

Twitching curtains

Wot! No naughty vicar, church, graveyard, village hall, WI, village school, village green, cricket pitch or Miss Marple?

You wouldn't get the Speccie's Ambridge correspondent, Susan Hill, to go within 100 miles of it.

Sounds great to me!

Lungfish

Mixed urban use is what you want, different styles of architecture, different sizes of houses and flats mixed with retail and even light industry. Proper boundaries to each dwelling rather than these open to all front gardens and uniform tarmac drives. Small but many green spaces and as many trees as possible.
But before doing any of that we need to develop our existing brownfield sites and as Baron says utilise existing empty stock.
But before doing any of that we need to call a halt to about 80% of current immigration levels.

Robin

Hi there,

I live in Cambourne, and will happily argue with anyone about what it is like to live there.

For me it is a wonderful exciting place, my wife and myself were able to afford a 3 bedroom semi dethatched home something that I honestly didn’t think I would be able to do for years!

I am privileged with great neighbours and a strong sense of a community being born (no birth-rate pun intended), I live in upper Cambourne the newest part of the village and maybe we are just lucky but I walk less then 1 minute and I am in a park.

On what feels like a daily bases small minded people seem to be determined to attack Cambourne failing to realise that by doing so they are only making the perception of the area worse and so making the lives of those that live there harder.

Why must cityite’s bully their younger brothers and sisters? Yes we could do with more pubs, and shops and yes we have an incredibly high birth-rate but what do you expect when you encourage young couples to move to an area?

So please stop assaulting my home.

Robin

rod michael collins liddle

L-MS, no, sure i understand that. A good point well made. But it doesn't mean that we couldn't do these new towns a little better, with a little more thought and negligible outlay.

I'm a bit worried that this blog is a tad arcane and people might not be interested in it. So I'd like to add that my main gripe about Cambourne is the number of top o' the mornin' to yers bomb the bruddish imperialist uppressors people in green and white hooped shirts wandering around, apparently lost.

Winnie Madikizela Seacole

...and furthermore, these 'silent dormitories' might prove to be the only port of refuge for those of us who can't stand the cut and thrust of living a nosey-parker 'community' life. Viva Cambourne Viva.

Muppet Pastor

No statue of Mary Seacole? Perhaps not yet.
Don't all the kids on new estates turn into nutters? Oh...

GaryO

The picture looks like a Richard Diebenkorn painting.

Robin

Another point,

Whenever I have seen this sort of post on a blog or new-site I have seen replies from Cambourne residents usually decrying the absurd assertions of the person attacking their home. What more evidence do you need of community?

Robin

Lungfish

Right opposite my flat in Barons Court, West London on the junction of Palliser Rd and Comeragh Rd is a small marble piece of street furniture, its a memorial to PC Stephen Tibble. He was a 22 year old off duty and unarmed police officer shot dead by the IRA in 1975.

Ben Shand

Fergus

You first pictured mining villages as they were 'first plonked down' and then you state that 'everybody had been living there for a long time'.

Which way do you want to go here?

workie season ticket

Fair Fair mr liddle. cambourne fight global warming an' that. Look! a tree an loadsa grass an even plant in middle of roundybout.Cambourne is leader in Global Warmings Fighting.

Twin with Copenhagen I say.

Fergus Pickering

Oh my fur and whiskers! A LONG TIME AGO the mining bosses plonked down the villages. JUST LATELY chaps like Rod went on about their sense of community and all that. AND I SAID that was because they had been going for a long time - since A LONG TIME AGO in fact. Got that, Ben old chap. Not bloody rocket science. Mutter, mutter.

LJ

I confess I was hesitant to live in cambourne, but we bought our house 18 months ago after living in a luxurious flat in the centre of Cambridge and felt that the move here would be an ideal, safe, pleasant place to have a family and stay indefinitely. I can assure you by the various cars driving around there is wealth and there are people on low income as with any village or town.

Cambourne is just 10 minutes away from Kings College and the heart of Cambridge which boasts numerous historical buildings and we are not out in the sticks like alot of new builds you may be referring to. Schools here have received high acclaim and the people here are all just trying to live an honest, happy life and succeed in giving their children a safe environment to grow up in. My fiancee and I have a 4 bedroom home with modern facilities and high specifictions that will prevent us having to spend time renovating - time we do not have in the fast paced lives we live.

Can we really expect to afford the country villages or city childhoods we all no doubt grew up in? I think not.

You ask if we enjoy living in a place like this - then yes based on the statistics people here are happy.

Dixon

This article is eerily as empty , soulleess and not worth revisiting as its topic.

Amanda in America

Hi Rod,
welcome to 'the Bedroom Community': North America has had 'em for decades. If you want an example of emptiness, blank conformity, and lack of interest, how about the Club-Med-meets-AMLI-apartment type place known as Wyndham, just north of Richmond, Virginia? It's so uniformly planted and relatively sparse that even the birds avoid it: when we lived there in a company flat for a few months in the summer, it was eerie how we *only* heard insects -- not birdsong. (The birds all grouped together in a tiny patch of woodland that had somehow been overlooked in all the industrial clearing-out.) The houses were all sort-of McMansions, and there was a swimming pool and tennis courts and neighbourhood 'events', but nothing as real as a shop or a 'non-community' clubhouse or anything as potentially untidy as a pub. (But then again, Americans don't really 'do' pubs, which is part of their problem in places like this.) To get anywhere 'real' you had to drive: walking was out of the question.

I have seen it time and again: places that you drive home to sleep in but that have nothing to recommend them in themselves, and they feel like holding pens. Precious little physical charm, and no history, and a stringent anti-nature attitude where only 'manicured landscaping' is allowed. Wyndham in particular -- an egregious case, I'll grant you -- looked like something planned by a corporation and maintained by a corporation, like a theme park, like the work of one mind. Who wants to live in a place where everything has been decided on by someone named Bill? Or Dirk? Or Hillary? But the faceless Bill or Dirk or Hillary had decided on everything, with all the lack of imagination you can... imagine. Hence all the flowers that were planted throughout the streets (on their samey medians) were all of the same kind (two varieties only); all the houses were of this or that colour within the same McMansion style; nothing of the outer world was allowed to intrude, except cars; and all the water features were obvious man-made ponds (another thing that I'm afraid Americans do not do well).

We had to get out of Wyndham. Time was up, thank god, but we needed to get out anyway for our mental health!

Vija Pattison (from Australia)

I am so heartened to read the positive responses to this little (liddle) town of Cambourne. And it is true, Rod, you are a snob, but then you are a leftie!

Mickey "King of the bees" Maloney

Come friendly bombs, rain on Cambourne!

Susan Hill

Will people PLEASE stop referring to me and Ambridge in the same breath. Ambridge is run by BBC Lefties and the Politically Correct. And I have been to both Cambourne and Milton Keynes. I hate poverty boasting but I did spend 8 years of my life living in a council house on 2 different council estates. I am not remotely posh. And where I live is not remotely Ambridge, sorry.

logdon

eraserhead
November 11th, 2009 12:47pm

Wily Trout - you missed out blogging.

And shagging by the sound of that birthrate.

Eraserhead

Susan Hill, your comment has completely crushed my spirit. Not the bit where you confessed to having lived on, not one, but TWO council estates - admittedly that was bad enough. I mean the revelation that Ambridge is merely the figment of the BBC's left-wing imagination. I'm gutted.

logdon

Amanda in America
November 12th, 2009 5:07am
If you want an example of emptiness, blank conformity, and lack of interest, how about the Club-Med-meets-AMLI-apartment type place known as Wyndham, just north of Richmond, Virginia?"

Ironically John Wyndham wrote The Midwich Cuckoos.

Eerily prescient naming?

JohnAnt

Milton Keynes doesn't tick any of my boxes. I've never been to Cambourne, but I've just had at quick Google-look at the place - it's only about 10 miles from Cambridge, and conveniently near the A 428. It's close enough to other older villages, and it has practical amenities. Rod says 'only a giant Morrison's and almost no local shops' - but how many Cambs villages have several local shops? - and how many have a large supermarket on the doorstep, one that offers variety, quality and reasonable prices? Most would kill for that.
There's an NHS Medical Centre, a vet's, a community centre, pub, hotel, roads you can drive on and park in, and a park with wildfowl. And a fitness centre.
One of the clues to the high population growth rate must surely be the affordability of the housing. I've just had a look at that too - 4/5-bed detached houses for 300K or less.
Obviously, you wouldn't want to be stuck there during the day without a car. There's a bus to Cambridge, although it's slow and meandering, in the way country buses are (45 minutes).
But all those picturesque little bijou villages dotted around have the tiny, tiny defect that the housing is unaffordable to buy, rarely on the market even to rent, the amenities (except for equally bijou pubs with high prices) lacking or minimal, and the commuting time even greater.
As for Cambridge itself, if you want to live in rickety terraced cottages with traffic noise, parking restrictions and congested streets, fine, go ahead. (Unless Rod, you've got the next College Mastership in the bag.)
The average country village is a geriatric dormitory - in some cases one that sleeps for 9 months of the year. At least this one is actually providing a service to younger people who actually work and have families.

EyeSee

I notice the comments do the usual overall and fall into far and anti camps. I didn't read it as insulting. Having driven around Cambourne once in the middle of a working day, I was also struck by how empty it was, a sort of strangeness you couldn't put your finger on. But then, the initial need is the houses, so not a great surprise 'services' such as pubs etc haven't caught up. Then again, will they ever? Is Cambourne the model modern town in that it will never have a sense of community, because we just don't do that any more? And I'm as bad as any, so I know how it happens. The roads in Cambourne were too narrow too and winding for no particular reason. It is as if Gordon Brown did it; maybe the right thing to do but full of mistakes with carelessness underlying the whole thing.

rod liddle

Many valid points, JohnAnt. Apologies, mind, if it seemed I was having a go simply at Cambourne, or the people who live there. It's more about the sort of communities we are building for ourselves at the moment; Cambourne is simply a hig profile example.

Cookie

I’ve something of a professional interest in urban design. I’d love to see the country full of neighbourhoods that work; charming little suburbs where everything is walkable and you’re never more than five minutes from two good pubs, a restaurant and an independent deli. But a) this isn’t what people really want, b) this isn’t what people can afford, and c) there aren’t enough proprietors of charming little independent shops and restaurants to go around.
Places like Cambourne play a hugely important role in providing people in the south east of England with homes and lifestyles they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford. It would be splendid, of course, if they could all live in stylish Victorian townhouses in Cambridge instead, but there simply aren’t enough of those to go around. Places like Cambourne allow people to own enough of a house that they have space to bring up a family.
Developers know their market, and they know what’ll sell. This isn’t market failure, this is the market providing people with what they really want rather than what opinion formers – and indeed, what the likes of me – tell them they should have.

Merlyn

Robin, people, especially men, need a person/place/religion to pull down / compete against, because at heart we all feel so totally useless and can't think what positive thing to do in this era.
We have lost hold of the rudder.

Rajesh

Rod,
I've lived in Cambourne for almost three years and whilst it has it's faults it has been a great place to live.
As there are a lot of newcomers there is a growing sense of community. I strongly disagree with you about the sense of transience. Spend time living there, especially with a young family and you will find plenty of people who are planning to stay here as they like Cambourne and all it has to offer.
There are also a lot of people who are here for a few years and will then move on but that's part & parcel of modern life where people change jobs & locations with stunning rapidity.
There are football, tennis, cricket & rugby clubs, three good primary schools. There's also a country park with lots of space for running, cycling etc.
Obviously we could do with a few more shops and a concil sports centre as opposed to the expensive private gym but these are minor quibbles.
The main problem with Cambourne is that until recently there was a lack of police prescense so yobs tended to congregate but this seems to be less of an issue recently.

Terry Walpole

Don't be such a snob Rod.Everyone can't live in one of London's vibrant, multi-cultural arty enclaves as Spectator scribblers do. Cambourne may hum with Ballardian ennui but at least it's civilised housing.

I hear ya about the pubs though.
Christ alive! How do people live like that?

Martin

I'm no BNPer. But take a look at their website
(Don't tell your PC friends).
It features a five minute video of Wembley High Street.

A Ballardian dystopia, unbelievable to anyone who knew that area 25 years ago.

If I could afford a walled converted farmhouse next to Biily Bragg, I'd go, despite the music.

Mister Christian

I have lived in one of these townships and they are really rather delightful once you get to know them. We have a local fetish night for the under 60s and swinging is de rigeur!
The Morrisons is rather lovely as it currently has a two for one offer on Liebfraumilcha>

Ian

I enjoy living in Cambourne. Being here allows me to live in a 3 bedroom house with a garden rather than a studio ex-student rental slum on the Arbury. Cambourne offers several primary schools and the most successful comprehensive secondary in the area. My children will be well educated in a safe, social and ethnically diverse environment. OK we dont have chic bars or delis on every street but maybe my priorities dont demand the need of such things. Although if my previous urbanite feelings re-emerge then Cambridge is 20 minutes away and Central London is accessible in under an hour.