Just started a bit of casual house hunting... not too far away but may be leaving the fen.
Been looking at places in small to medium villages this morning and I'm horrified how many places are ruined by car *collections* at nearby houses.
One guy has 6 cars under silver plastic sheets... one in the garden, two on the drive and three on the street. Another has three Land Rovers on the front inc a monster 101FC dwarfing the garage door. A smart house had the drive filled by two cars and a further 5 BMW/Audis along the kerb outside. Then there's a huge caravan parked in a gravelled front garden covering the living room window and half the porch.
And all this is at 9.30am so I assume when these folks arrive home in whatever they use to commute they'l be parking outside other folks houses.
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it seems to happen a lot in the fens but most other small towns and villages out in the sticks seem to have a collection of cars and sometimes bikes and tractors
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Seem that there are a few houses around here with "projects" in the front garden. Seen them in most places - sometimes the same car for years and years....I often wonder why !
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I've a house on one side with an old Vectra that hasn't turned a wheel in five years and on the other a caravan that's been there even longer. Pity about the 'van as it's probably less then ten years old.
Says the owner of an old KIA Pride. ;>)
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>>>it seems to happen a lot in the fens
Yes true... we've mostly a couple spare lorry containers, a boat and a caravan out here. But at least we have the big gardens to hide them away.
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If you ever end up here --> www.stravithiecastle.co.uk/ they've all sorts of old cars hidden throughout the grounds in the strangest places.
From memory there's a 2CV inside a hedge, as in the hedge has consumed the car. There's a bunch of other old stuff i don't know the names of. There's an original Fiat Panda under a bridge or something, actually i think it was under an up-turned large boat not a bridge.
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This stuff doesn't just happen in the suburbs. The only stately home I have ever stayed in, in the late sixties, had a hole in the centre of the roof that came down through two floors. It didn't matter much because there were plenty of other rooms equally grand. The paintings weren't up to much but the furniture was very fine, if in need of a bit of dusting. One wing of the house, which was more than 100 yards long, had suffered from subsidence and the front wall was held up by a couple of very large timbers placed as a buttress.
There were no sheets on my bed, no hot water, only one bathroom on the first floor, and the only working lavatory (but you had to pour a bucket of water down it) was at one end of the basement, somewhere under the chapel which contained one of the two organs in the house. The large neglected estate around it was littered with dead VW Beetles that the former owner had chucked away when they stopped going. His brother, last of the family line, didn't have a car but looked sharply at my old Bentley and said: 'I say, that's a nice piece.' I found a garage full of ancient bicycles including a Dursley-Pedersen. Under them were the remains of a turn-of-the-century single-cylinder Rover. When I asked about it the owner got paranoid and said: 'It's not for sale, it's not for sale!' Of course it hadn't occurred to me to try to buy it. He was just paranoid and thought I looked rich, which I did by his standards although he must have been worth millions on paper (and I was living hand to mouth then as now).
The house belongs to the National Trust now and has been tidied up. I imagine the Beetles and the Rover and the Dursley-Pedersen have all gone to new homes or the breaker's yard in the sky.
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In Wales and doubtless many rural areas it is common for people to keep the wrecks of every vehicle they have ever owned.
A local lorry repair business had until it was recently cleared a wood full of lorries going back to the 1920s. They were all rusting quietly into the ground, some had mature trees growing through them.
Up the road there is a Ferguson tractor inside a bramble thicket, and an orginal mini so rotted away only the engine is left, and a collection of windows and windscreens looked like a collapsed house of cards.
As AC says, all this stuff is jeolously guarded. 25 years ago it seemed a bit odd, but now I am well on the way to forming my own collection of "projects".
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They're coming at you though CP, wanting cars not only to have the irksome bureaucratic SORN in proper form but to have absurd and wholly unnecessary insurance.
I used to have three or four old cars here but everyone started complaining although they were useful for parts sometimes, so I had them taken away a couple of years back. At least the breaker gave me money for them which he wouldn't have a couple of years earlier.
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Accepting I don't want clutter in my front yard.... this is almost art...
www.flickr.com/photos/cupdegrave/2562849231/sizes/l/in/photostream/
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>>Accepting I don't want clutter in my front yard.... this is almost art...
www.flickr.com/photos/cupdegrave/2562849231/sizes/l/in/photostream/<<
Not almost - it *is* art!
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>> If you ever end up here --> www.stravithiecastle.co.uk/ they've all sorts of old cars hidden
>> throughout the grounds in the strangest places.
>>
>> From memory there's a 2CV inside a hedge, as in the hedge has consumed the
>> car. There's a bunch of other old stuff i don't know the names of. There's
>> an original Fiat Panda under a bridge or something, actually i think it was under
>> an up-turned large boat not a bridge.
>>
And you can stick the Continental Breakfast where the Sun don't shine.........AND I want BUTTER!!!!!!!!
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As kids these 'treasures' were everywhere somewhere, in fields, hedges etc. Seemed 'normal' at the time. Huh!
Why do I think that most were column change though?? HELP.........I'm getting old.
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As a child I got trapped in a neighbours Ford Corsair that he had parked in a corner of his field.
I was back in the area for family reasons last week and found things much gentrified, so no cars to get trapped in - or to pretend to drive.
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Next time in W H Smiths, have a look at Practical Classics mag. Usually 3 pages of vehicles snapped by readers, in the woods or up someones driveway for years.
Rust in Peace...it's called.
Ted
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Having viewed a few houses now I'm getting very frustrated at the lack of parking provision over the past 20-30yrs. The agents of course hopefully say *parking on drive for several cars* when in reality two C3s would only leave room for the paper boy to drop his bike and if you then wanted to open the garage doors you'd have to back a car up across the path.
So few places have the (ideal to me) down the side and round the back provision for vehicles which much reduces street clutter.
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Indeed. When we were looking at houses, we had to discount so many nice places because we wanted to be able to park both our cars off-road with room to spare, plus a garage.
Luckily we managed it and can fit 5 cars on the drive if we utilise the back patio and another in the garage. Fining a place with a garage big enough for a car was another headache.
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In my village a developer has applied for permission to build 5 flats with 7 parking spaces provided.
In the council planning report the officer commented that the parking provision met the council target of 1.5 parking spaces per dwelling.
Any more parking would have been refused as the council seek to limit the number of cars
J
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Where I work (L B Brent) developers only get planning permission if they accept that the new flat owners will not have on street parking rights (all street parking being controlled).
We have an old aerial photo of some of the streets near us. Undated, but would guess 1960s. Very few cars parked on the streets in thiose days - how did everyone get around??
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>> We have an old aerial photo of some of the streets near us. Undated, but
>> would guess 1960s. Very few cars parked on the streets in thiose days - how
>> did everyone get around??
>>
People worked closer to their homes, than we do today.
Most family's would only have one car, and perhaps a motorcycle.
Buses would be used when car not available.
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>> In the council planning report the officer commented that the parking provision met the council
>> target of 1.5 parking spaces per dwelling.
>>
>> Any more parking would have been refused as the council seek to limit the number
>> of cars
>>
>> J
>>
I'm sure I've read recently that the government was going to scrap that limit; but then what governments say and what they do are, as always, not necessarily the same.
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Cars ruining houses/streets. - nyx2k
