Nanny knows best

[treecreeper]

I think this is relevant to the thread. It was written in 1971 by the late satirical writer Michael Wharton:

"Environmentalists, conservationists, anti-pollutionists: the dull, pseudo-scientific words, endlessly repeated - imports, like so much else, from future-crazed America - can arouse in certain moods a perverse rage to build oil refineries and cement works all over Dartmoor.

The latest thing to come to their notice, I read, is the view from railway carriage windows, on the outskirts of cities. They say these squalid breakers' yards, heaps of scrap, derelict industrial sites, overgrown back gardens and half-scorched cuttings are eyesores. They must be cleaned up as soon as possible.

To the official mind, the mind which has invented National Parks and Conservation Areas and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the mind which measures the colours of the Spring and assesses Wastwater and Ludlow by an index of aesthetic value, they are simply eyesores and that is all. To people who casually look out of railway carriage windows they may seem quite otherwise.

They are miniature wildernesses, places that men have made, certainly, but places which have the pathos of all things that have once been used but are now neglected and abandoned: tangled garden plots, rusting springs, shattered bricks, shards, books sodden by the rain and, blistered by the sun, lumps of newspaper that no one will ever read again.

The train, held up by the signals, slows down in the summer heat; the wondering eye looks through the glass into those suburban jungles and finds there, as in childhood, a mysterious poetry. Who knows what strange flowers - moly, nepenthes - may grow among that unloved, grimy undergrowth?

Perhaps it is as well this has not occurred to the official mind. Wouldn't it wish to institutionalise the sense of wonder, to incorporate it into its official system: tidy up almost all the eyesores in its own image but leave, for recreational purposes, a few Protected Areas of Designated Suburban Railway Squalor?"