Old streets

Today was my annual Derby hospital visit. What fun. It all went well though - if anything this visit was slightly quicker than usual. However I’ll admit to a certain amount of viral unease about entering a hospital under current circumstances. There are so many ill people all over the place. Have you noticed that? Even the staff don’t look particularly healthy. Pasty-faced as my mother would have said.

Afterwards I took the chance to stroll through small part of the Derby suburbs, part of the area where I lived during my teens. Streets I haven’t walked in over fifty years. They haven’t changed much physically but in some ways they certainly have. Some areas near the ring road are beginning to look tired – not too far from borderline derelict.

The posher areas have hung on to their gentility quite well but busy roads and traffic roar don’t do them any favours. It casts a pall which wasn’t there fifty years ago. Hanging on to their gentility by their fingernails in my view.

Yet all of it would have been attractive when built and still attractive decades later - until the sixties or seventies probably. Then it all began to go wrong and slowly became uglier. It's easy to see, what it must have been compared to what it is now. Ugly buildings slotted into spare bits of land, building which were ugly from the day they were handed over by the builder. Boxy and cheap. Almost designed to be ugly one might say, because for some reason avoiding ugliness no longer mattered.

Then the roads became busier, louder, wider, more congested and more controlled by a profusion of signs, lights, white lines and yellow lines such that even the roads are now ugly. Everything that wasn’t ugly becomes swamped by everything that is. Even the most attractive, well-maintained houses have ugliness at the end of the road. Once there were lanes, fields and roads with no colossal lorries shaking the earth beneath gigantic wheels.

Towards the end of my short walk was a row of Victorian cottages near the main road which looked rather scruffy and neglected. When first built they would have had vegetable gardens backing onto open fields but those days are dead and buried. Sad really.