Tuesday, 26 January 2010

...wondering about the niceness of suburbia

Has the idyllic but superficial nature of the appeal of the suburban neighbourhood been ruined with the boom in local council's use of the wheelie-bin?
In other words:
Is the wheelie-bin the modern blight on the wafer-thin gloss of suburban aesthetics.

So many Victorian terraces, Barratt-built modern toss and everything before, after and in-between has be compromised by the introduction of the one-size-fits-nothing wheelie-monster.
The idea of Victorian housing, whether terrace, flat or house, was to have the best parts of life showing. The best room; the Sunday-only front room was, well, the front. You sit there in your best clothes, watching everyone else's sitting there in their best, looking back at you. All was well in society and at least  on one day, you knew exactly where you where in the grand scheme of your street. You, in Victorian society, knew where you were in every other aspect of life all the time anyway.
But today, there is no front in the same fake 'all is well' sense. So many houses of the past are now flats, flats are now studios. Fit it in, it's all introverted living anyway.
When you now drive up and down any suburban context in Britain today, it's not the houses that you first see, it's the bins, the masses of bins. Wheelie with many various coloured recycling boxes on top. Don't get me wrong, I recycle like a nut myself. But it's strange how the rubbish now controls the area between the front door and the pavement. What next, we literally do the laundry in the gutter outside, in the street. No, that's just silly, we have machines in the kitchen, integrated and hidden, for washing and drying that lot. No, we, as modern-lifers, seem to be proud of our shit, the waste of our- until quite recently- prosperous lives.

It's really bazaar why it's got like this. But until some bright-light a few years ago thought of the wheelie being the answer to the question no-one asked, the back alley, the back passage, the rear run, was thought to be a thing of un-need. Now, it would be the thing to make the wheelie work without the visual blighting we have at present. The trucks could run up or down them, with the technicians or whatever, working behind. That would work right?

I don't know, I'm asking you!

No comments:

Post a Comment