15 July

I love villages, I think they're the healthiest and nicest form of human settlement. Everything at just the right human scale, not so small as to destroy privacy but not so large that people feel alone. And a balance of human and landscape. What destroyed villages was the car. Once people can travel anywhere with ease, everything else changes and suddenly food, education, shopping, social relationships, entertainment etc. can be had wherever people like. Once we had cars, human settlements became slaves to them and roads, rather than the other way around. Modern towns and cities are like huge car parks. The development of the suburb is a re-growth of the village, but cars make all spaces equally accessible to us. So we don't really occupy space, we don't nourish it and enrich it. And then we travel to try to find the beauty we've lost. The classic sign of this is how many houses now have 4-5 or even more cars, often parked even in the garden.