The Park
I took a short travel writing course at City of London University in May 2023 led by the formidable Susan Grossman, a travel writer of immense experience with the BBC, Telegraph Media Group and many other respected publishers. I wanted to learn how to write travel articles ‘properly’ as I had a vague ambition to turn this into a paying hobby once retired.
I came away unconvinced this was for me: after a career of pitching, selling & negotiating, I’m looking for a change. But what I did discover is an enthusiasm for being educated that has evaded me for half a century so thank you Susan for this, and also putting up with me doing ‘extra’ assignments voluntarily.
One of these is below:
My Parent’s House
Known simply as ‘The Park’ to those that lived in the adjacent village, it was three acres of a local brewing magnate’s estate, sold to pay death duties or gambling debts, depending on which version of local lore you favoured. The Victorian pile itself was now re-imagined as a country house hotel, the mould of which causes women of a certain age to speak as though auditioning for a bit-part in Downton Abbey.
But The Park now hosted about thirty, single-story dwellings in a uniform architectural vernacular of early 1970s modernism. Resembling a collection of flat-roofed cereal boxes, the untrained eye would claim a child could design them. But that same eye would miss the linear, elongated facing bricks of fine texture in a range of subtle hues, each laid with care and precision and visual harmony that only oblongs of perfect size and proportion can create. We lived in one of them; number eleven.
From the quiet B road that passed the entrance, icely polite signs reminded visitors that the land beyond - unless you couldn’t guess - was indeed, private. A praetorian guard of ancient, intimidatory trees flanked the single access road of smooth, unworn tarmac.
From there, the road divided into three, like a trident, with each tributary leading to an expanse of shared parkland, dotted with relics from a previous life. A remnant of kitchen garden wall here; a stone folly there and a few artfully converted cottages, stables and a coach house.
No homes had front gardens as such, but all enjoyed access to the parkland either directly or through discrete, un-gated openings to private courtyards. All in all, an architects’ model of communal living for comfortably-off misanthropes
Beyond the courtyards and inside the dwellings, floor-to-ceiling windows and glass accents in the ceilings flooded the interiors with light, creating an illusion of grand space. Terraces to the rear offered seclusion with unrestricted, individual views over surrounding farmland or - in the case of the most enviable plots - a gentle slope down to the small, ornamental lake.
No children played or music was heard much in The Park, other than the occasional sound of parentally-enforced after-school piano practice, shimmering and dying in the late afternoon heat. Just the silence that is the product of modest good fortune, punctuated occasionally by the diesel death-rattle of a tradesman’s van or the quiet hum of a cleaner’s hatchback, as they visited to go about their business, keeping everything as it always was and should be.