Never underestimate the power of fashion and for that matter never underestimate the speed at which today's must have shoes, kitchen or ideology will have to be ditched when the trend takes a turn in the other direction. Be it the English upper class and their swift denial of ever having the hots for Adolf Hitler or all those ex hippies cutting hair and binning flairs when punk hit town, nothing is more Judas like than yesterday's trendy caught on the back foot. But what goes around comes around - again. Well, sometimes. During the great suburban expansion of the 20's and 30's the developers and speculative builders may not have had a huge understanding of the Arts and Crafts Movement but they knew a winner when they saw it and recognised that mock beams, leaded windows and anything that smacked of the rustic was the way to go when it came to impressing the new commuting classes. Mile after mile of semi-detached Tudorbethan spread like some terrible plague. For any piece of hard standing only one material was deemed quaint and rustic enough, crazy paving. These days, when it comes to front paths and off road parking, nothing is so unfashionable as crazy paving. Thousands of square miles of new block paving have replaced the old surface that could be created by one man, a heap of old paving slabs and a sledge hammer. We're hanging on to ours. It's bound to come back into fashion.
No comments:
Post a Comment