Open space

I still remember the very first time I was given a site plan at work here. As I peered down at the drawing, I struggled to make sense of it. It seemed odd, this unfamiliarity with something that should have been completely legible to me, but I simply could not figure out what boundaries the lines were denoting: what was built and what was not, where the street began and the pavement/sidewalk ended , which square was house and which was garden/lawn. Obviously, I knew that things were different here, with towns and villages, as well as houses, typically more closely spaced. But that this difference would make me a useless employee for a few days, I had no idea.


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Now, well over a year later, I can make sense of a line drawing of a British street. A glance and I know which line in which color, dashed, solid, or dotted, indicates house, street, pavement, wall. I now suspect my confusion was partially due to unfamiliar architectural notation, but, more so, to simple cultural differences in spatial configuration. It's not that neighborhoods are planned differently here; they just are different. A line indicating a property boundary is more than likely something physical like a fence or hedge. Two boxes next to each other are probably two buildings with one shared wall. In fact, the average English home will have a tiny front yard, a larger, completely fenced in back yard, and probably one or more party walls. I think semi-detacheds (what we might call a duplex) are more common than detacheds (what we might call a house).

And then there are the rows and rows of terraced houses, townhouses or rowhouses, I think we'd call them. (This image is of Newcastle.) Josh and I had been told our house was large before we first visited it, but new to the country, I was surprised to find a terraced house standing at the given address, surprised that a terraced house could be included in the “large” category. It can. Terraced houses can be massive or miniscule, and they are found in big cities, tiny villages and all densities of habitation in between. The English grew up in and around houses with shared walls, so they're just not as strange as they probably are to most Americans. One commonality between the British and the Americans, though, is the desire to own rather than rent a home. People at work talk about other Europeans as willing to live in apartments and/or rent houses, but the English would rather pay a mortgage on a house. I think the same is true in the United States... we just assume our mortgage buys us our own four walls.


Does this make an English street more friendly? Maybe. Maybe not. It still depends on the people and the houses. The home owners around here tend to build huge fences or grow 7 foot tall hedges between their front garden and the sidewalk, and I have yet to see a back yard that’s not fenced in (see photo taken in Liverpool). It feels very much like children staking out their own space- this side of the line is mine, that side is yours, and ne’er do we cross. The reason for these boundaries certainly seems deeply ingrained, but I wonder if it has more to do with human levels of comfort when living in close proximity than cultural norms. Or maybe it’s quite simply the very British desire for privacy. In any case, I'd rather walk down a street where the houses are more spread out but the home owners can actually see the street from their living room window. Josh and I have also gotten ourselves in some awkward situations in the last year by assuming we could take a short cut from one street to another. Not possible when fences block every unbuilt opening. It makes the large number of marked footpaths around Durham, often bounded on each side by a 6’ wooden fence, that much more explicable, although it doesn’t make the partitioning of space any less irritating.

With all the houses clustered together, the landscape simply looks different here. Habitation comes in clumps and clots, often allowing for more green space closer to the center of cities. Imagine a school gymnasium full of people who barely know each other. They’ll probably stay fairly spread out, perhaps like marbles on an even surface, and the gym will more or less feel full. Now make the surface a little less even by putting in, say, a few tables of food. The people will cluster around the tables just as marbles will bunch together in any dips and cracks, leaving more space feeling unoccupied. This satellite image of a part of Newcastle shows such uneven settlement with its semi-detached houses, terraced housing, some allotment gardens- the type where you get your own 10'x10' plot to tend- and cow pasture. I suppose I should note that open space in Britain does not mean wild space. The green here is still developed; it's just gardens or farmland. Josh has commented before on the lack of what we'd consider truly open space or wilderness.

Honestly, though, I think this makes the British countryside more interesting. Sameness has its beauty and its place, but diversity can be intriguing. Most people will choose a painting with a variety of colors and shapes over a monochromatic color field; there’s something about the push and pull, the tension of difference, that appeals to us.


American development tends to be more even and spreads out like people in the food-less gym. Perhaps if the British had more open space, they would have done the same. (I suppose they did; it’s called colonisation.) Thick and thin places still exist in the United States. You can see it here in my sister's town in Iowa or in a major urban center like the Rockaway peninsula in New York City. But I'd tend to say that most American landscapes don't maintain this same level of density/non-density. It’s also true that some more populated (than the Northeast) places we’ve visited here in the UK seemed to go on and on just as a New Jersey suburb might.

The car, you say? That’s the culprit? Perhaps. And perhaps Americans will never be happy sharing walls or giving up some private space for public use, but surely we can be sensible about what and where we build. Surely Americans are known for their ingenuity- we haven’t dug ourselves into a hole we can’t climb back out of or, at the very least, turn into a community swimming pool.


(I hate it when people point out problems or irritations without offering solutions. Sorry. This is a typically light-hearted blog, and the post has gone on long enough... so I will be my own pet peeve!)