Extension No.1

As promised.  For this first extension I have selected this 60s/70s garage-lounge combination, with sunken garage.  There is something 60s about the flat roof and below-street-level garage, aswell as the faux-rustic stonework, while it is culturally redolent of the 70s suburb, when these type of extensions had bedded in to their laburnum soaked pavements, with a faint musk of Invisible Man-era USA.  Or what we imagined the USA to be like.  In the background of these, though, would be a view of a distant stone farm house, huddled in a circle of beech trees and crows.

Added either side of the garage door have been pre-cast chess knights - maybe reflecting a hobby of the builder/commissioner.
There is something Elizabethan about the commissioning of this detail, even if it is bought out of the builders yard, to reflect a life: and live on it does: verily the Folk Suburb indeed.

Also, in this view, is the germ of a future series in the 'doorside lamp', and the scaly aiming-at-a-Spanish-feel renderwork round the door is a remembrance of holidays in Franco's blasted fishing villages (see also the more Godzilla-like application of this style in a previously covered extension).

Folk Suburb #2

In the moment you are tired, dog-tired, but near no bed; when one world oscillates with another, and another one can be magicked, accessed through the tired sight of one object, the smell of one some thing, the temperature of something, that is when the folk suburb reveals itself: in the right circumstances, like catching the fairy ring occupied.

Beyond tired, I buy a packet of Tooti Frootis from the newsagents, to get change for something.  I bite a purple one and immediately I see a corner, clearly.  On my right side quiet, semi-detached houses, their small leaded panes reflecting unevenly the whitish light in the silence.  And a privet, in an unfelt breeze.  I know someone who lives in one.
But then opposite rises this giant suburb-megalith.  They came to the high castle where my lord he was sitting at meat.  "If you did but know what news I brought not one more mouthful would you eat,"  "What news have you brought?  Is my castle burning down?"  "Oh, no, your true love is very very ill and she'll die before ever you can come."  But then opposite rises this suburb-megalith, giant stone wall, grey, broken by a coach arch and a single doorway.  Like a castle wall.  Above this door, is a look out window, or a lantern window: its glass, in the aspect facing me, red; a red film or paint, peeling.
"Saddle me my milk-white horse, and bridle him so neat.  That I may kiss of her lily lips that are to me so sweet."
What callers found themselves watched from that window?  The place is occupied now by a mysterious Oz-like doctor, who, if he practises at all, practises a Victorian medicine, with Victorian instruments.  But the window is already now disused.  All kinds of spirits jostle.  Carts, and horses and bicycles pass; beneath it.  Before the suburb arrived, surrounding it with privets and ornamental cherries.  The last bone-shaking rider has passed, out of the village.
They saddled him his milk-white steed at twelve o'clock at night.  He rode, he rode till he met six young men with a corpse all dressed in white.  The roof is not visible, nor any building behind the wall.  A cloud passes another shadow across the wall and a woman in a pac-a-mac walks out of the arch.
Then the sweet is finished, and the wall; and with it passes the street, and the wall disintegrates
once more.

Postscript: I passed the original of this at the weekend and was astonished at its smallness - I remember it as high; featureless.  It is now hemmed by 90s houses.  It does retain the two X ceiling supports (I suppose they are) which I had forgotten in the earlier picture, but were definitely there. 

Quick! Run! I don't know what it is!

It would be all too simple to mock this almost certainly self-designed and built extension, extraordinary in it's proportions, and by all conventional measures an ugly thing; but I think there are a couple of things in it's favour.  When passing it, it gives a fleeting, jolting, impression of being a 1950s-style earth-invader (a Quadropod?), with its long tentacles and scaly finish.  In its homemade DIY-ness, and blatant refusal of the off-the-shelf, it is an example of almost punk-suburb architecture and what might be termed Folk Suburban Brut.  Memories of passing it becomes the material of Folk Suburb.

Secret Garden

When I was but small, and a ball playing centre half in the primary school team, the pitch of one of the suburban primaries we used to play was got at through a door much like this.  Obviously it had a door and not stones, but the effect was the same, and it was truly like stepping in to a secret garden, not dispersed by actually going through, where the scene was like that of a Thomas Hardy novel.
Corners of an earlier time are a key to Folk Suburb.

Front Gardens Series No.1 - Tarmacadam Lawn

For the first in this occasional series of Front Gardens, I have selected this. 

Unlucky Thirteen

I only hope that Friday 12th is alright for this.  While returning my library book the other day I noticed that, in the street adjoining ours, number 13 was missing.  Obviously the house was there, but it was numbered 15 not 13.
I understand that certain aircraft manufacturers do not label the 13th row 13, but had unobservantly not noticed this in the suburb before.  Well, now I had, I thought I'd check a few other streets on the way to the station today, only to notice that they all didn't have thirteens.
I mentioned this to my dad and he said "oh, that's common."

Decorative Concrete Block #1: Castle

 What I am interested in here is the suburb, the suburb's relation to it's own past, it's own things; and it's relation to that that it is built on: the country, the rural (and not the town).  Here is a ruined castle of the suburbs, it's Norman concrete blocks, modish but prone to ruin, a-top its mound, it crumbles in the faint drizzle.  Note the filled in block towards the bottom left.  Unlike the ruined Norman castle, though, no booth to collect ticket or issue guide book, no gift shop or cafe, and all will soon be lost, to heritage, away; to be replaced by one of those reversible wooden fences - a retreat to the Saxon's wooden past.