Everywhere looks more and more like everywhere else...

I had this dream- I was on the edges of the town- near the by-pass, in a retail park.one of those bleak hinterlands of DIY stores, warehouses, depots, dual carriageways with littered verges, clusters of unnameable shrubs catching the styrofoam, bubble wrap and pizza boxes. Neglected chain fences. Over flowing skips. Bottle banks.

A burger trailer, one of those insubstantial boxish looking caravans, parked in a huge car park. The name PORKY’S is painted on the burger trailer. Also there are paintings of burgers, cups of steaming tea and hot dogs. in front of the caravan, all in the space of a vacant parking space stand blackboards, a litterbin and some folding chairs.

We are sitting at a flimsy plastic table with tin ashtrays and my companion is saying over and over…

'...it's now a global phenomenon-this process of making everywhere look more and more like everywhere else...'
Where do I know this guy from? He's a couple at lunchtime drunk, looks a bit schoolmasterish, substantial, riled.
'... making everywhere look more and more like everywhere else...'

In 1955 , Ian Nairn (1930-1983) wrote an article for the Architectural Review called Outrage: On the Disfigurement of Town and Countryside (Architectural Review special June 1955; -your local library can get you a copy if you're interested unless you've got about £500 to spare). The essay was based around a journey along a line drawn from Southampton to Carlisle, and aired Nairn's grim prophecy that soon the whole of Britain would look like the homogeneous fringes of a town. He coined the term Subtopia to describe this anonymous hinterland.By the tame Nairn was making his TV programmes in the 1970's much of his prophecy had already been realised.

In the 2005 film, Three Hours From Here Andrew Cross retraced the extensive journey across England that Nairn took in order to research and write Outrage in 1955.