Family cricket in the park is finally losing its edge. Favorite toys lack their usual animation. Even the enduring appeal of the swimming pool is fading fast.
As another drizzly British summer holiday draws to a close, the children are getting bored, and the school term hangs brightly over the horizon.
I’m looking forward to the end of the summer break next week. More time and space to work from home. More time to spend as I wish in those in-between moments currently stolen mercilessly by my son for a quick kick-about in the garden.
But more than anything, I am looking forward to the walk to school.
British society seems to be ever splintering. Faster travel, the Internet, and globalization have brought those far apart closer together, and pushed apart those close together.
What used to knit a community together is fading.
The notion of the quiet old village is an enduringly British one—they are the homely hobbit towns, which inspired Tolkien’s innocent, vibrant, and sociable Shire, and which ultimately breathed their spirit into so many towns and cities.
The streets in the cities here don’t lie on grid systems. Even the main roads can meander wildly, tracing old bridleways, manor-house boundaries and farm tracks, skirting around long-gone coppices and streams, checked only occasionally by a ramrod Roman road.
Many towns and cities grew organically as villages grew and merged, and the local communities still evolved around centers that had been there for hundreds of years.
But eroded over the years, the sense of community has taken more and more of a hammering in recent decades. People travel further and further afield for work, and the local shops, banks, and services are increasingly displaced to developments on the edge of town, to call-centers overseas and to the Internet.
Yet the primary schools are in many ways the remaining villages within the cities. Not because of some sentimental or charming historical reason, but because of stubborn geographical entry requirements that by and large refuse to pander to overly-ambitious parents.
Before the children went to school, we had plenty of friends. We had all the social contacts we could ask for. And yet, I would never have said that we part of a local community.
Since the children have gone to the local primary school, the houses, shops, and streets around us have slowly uncloaked into the community we thought didn’t exist.
Stepping out of the front door next Monday, in a few strides I am sure to greet a friendly face, falling into step as we share news of the adventures of the summer, gathering children and parents on the way.
At the school gates is a bubbling social melting pot that no networking site can match.
Our walk home is a delight of spontaneity and community. I never know which children we may pick up (or lose) en route for a quickly-cobbled play-date and chat over a cuppa.
Even the charming villages that have thus-far escaped the grasp of expanding cities are losing their sense of community. The more charming a village the more it will become the target of well-off commuters, who want both the charms of the village and the buzz of the city. Local villagers often can’t afford to live in the places they grew up, and perhaps have to live out of town, commuting to work in the local pub to serve customers who live in a flat in London during the week.
The Shire’s last stand, it seems, may be at the school gates.
As another drizzly British summer holiday draws to a close, the children are getting bored, and the school term hangs brightly over the horizon.
I’m looking forward to the end of the summer break next week. More time and space to work from home. More time to spend as I wish in those in-between moments currently stolen mercilessly by my son for a quick kick-about in the garden.
But more than anything, I am looking forward to the walk to school.
British society seems to be ever splintering. Faster travel, the Internet, and globalization have brought those far apart closer together, and pushed apart those close together.
What used to knit a community together is fading.
The notion of the quiet old village is an enduringly British one—they are the homely hobbit towns, which inspired Tolkien’s innocent, vibrant, and sociable Shire, and which ultimately breathed their spirit into so many towns and cities.
The streets in the cities here don’t lie on grid systems. Even the main roads can meander wildly, tracing old bridleways, manor-house boundaries and farm tracks, skirting around long-gone coppices and streams, checked only occasionally by a ramrod Roman road.
Many towns and cities grew organically as villages grew and merged, and the local communities still evolved around centers that had been there for hundreds of years.
But eroded over the years, the sense of community has taken more and more of a hammering in recent decades. People travel further and further afield for work, and the local shops, banks, and services are increasingly displaced to developments on the edge of town, to call-centers overseas and to the Internet.
Yet the primary schools are in many ways the remaining villages within the cities. Not because of some sentimental or charming historical reason, but because of stubborn geographical entry requirements that by and large refuse to pander to overly-ambitious parents.
Before the children went to school, we had plenty of friends. We had all the social contacts we could ask for. And yet, I would never have said that we part of a local community.
Since the children have gone to the local primary school, the houses, shops, and streets around us have slowly uncloaked into the community we thought didn’t exist.
Stepping out of the front door next Monday, in a few strides I am sure to greet a friendly face, falling into step as we share news of the adventures of the summer, gathering children and parents on the way.
At the school gates is a bubbling social melting pot that no networking site can match.
Our walk home is a delight of spontaneity and community. I never know which children we may pick up (or lose) en route for a quickly-cobbled play-date and chat over a cuppa.
Even the charming villages that have thus-far escaped the grasp of expanding cities are losing their sense of community. The more charming a village the more it will become the target of well-off commuters, who want both the charms of the village and the buzz of the city. Local villagers often can’t afford to live in the places they grew up, and perhaps have to live out of town, commuting to work in the local pub to serve customers who live in a flat in London during the week.
The Shire’s last stand, it seems, may be at the school gates.
