great photos S.G.

The difference between where you live and where I live is that YOUR town has a sense of itself as a community and looks like it was charmingly planned. MY suburb is a post-WW II sprawling utilitarian zombie town, utterly devoid of any charm, community, history or pride. Everything that is here was built in the 1950's and is gross. My house is one of about only five different styles in the neighborhood and while there is an arts center and a lovely park (with made-made lake they had to drain once a little girl went permanently missing) at one end of my street (Rosewood Park) there is a low ceiling'd 1960's-style bowling alley round the corner of the other end of my street. It's a schizophrenic kind of place.

You live in Coventry?

Slough
by John Betjeman

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air -conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.

And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad,
They've tasted Hell.

It's not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It's not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren't look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

Not being rude about Aylesbury here, just Bri's comments made me think of this poem.

The responses of two other Brits speak volumes. Aylesbury is nasty, nasty, nasty. If you grew up here and therefore have no choice but to love it, you'd find flattering angles too. Visitors generally focus on the nasty though.

Picture Aylesbury as a country virgin. Pretty, unworldly, charming and innocent. Then picture the town planners as evil, spiteful, malicious rapists. There you go, that's pretty much the 60s situation. Okay, not really fair, but those of us living with the consequences would love to smack them upside the head.

Until now I've taken pics of Olde Aylesbury because I'm trying to show you what you don't have at home. And because I do love my home, despite everything. I'll take some Nasty pics though. Just to show how badly those that call themselves Town Planners can plan. And it is bad. From the 60s onwards.

Ahem ... "Not being rude about Aylesbury here," ...

Oxford is worse.
Because parts of it are so damned beautiful.
And modern parts are ugly enough to make you heave.

Do I really want to hold my home town up to ridicule?
Yes. Although I might start another thread to do so.
Rude About Aylesbury maybe ;)

I didnt say anything bad about aylsebury....I said something bad about Coventry

The problem with Coventry and Oxford is the don't have SG in residence.

I didn't think you did darlin'. You can say it after you visit ;)
You lovely chap.
Time your visit to match Dana's. Except the night time :joylove:

I have seen Aylesbury IRL - just not the lovely bits as shown here by SG!

All my bits are lovely ;)

The truth is I do live in a town hammered by the 60s. I decided overnight that I will show you some of the badness in this thread, after all it's not called "Lovely, lovely Aylesbury". I'm at the charity shop tomorrow (in the town centre) so I'll take some pics then.

But it has been nice showing some of our beauty. Many people that drive through or stop off here only see the bad parts. And we Brits do love a good moan after all. So I've felt very positive about showing the decent parts to people who wouldn't realise that the rest isn't like that.

I can beat all this; I am sadly now living in a dreadful city, if you can call it that by the name of Leicester. After living around the country and a few years overseas, I have ended up in Leicester, How….Why, what did I do to deserve this? The people are full of themselves, not to mention aggressive. Oh well, I have my little house, and the only other good thing I found in Leicester I married. Now where are those lotto numbers?

um....mike?

Sundae is from Leicester! Not originally! just lately.

She went from Leicester to London (Greenwich) and now is in Aylesbury. You'd count yourself lucky if you ever ran into Sundae, no matter where it was - she's a real gem.

what Bri said. Don't be dissin' SundaeGirl

Mike probably got run down by some crazy chick jumping off the bus and walking around with a camera in front of her face. :lol2:

Argh - too true, too true! I just hope he wasn't the man who randomly called me a cunt because we walked into eachother! (sans camera)

Mike I have to say I loved Leicester.
I was unhappy there, but not because of the city.
I did maintain she was most beautiful from the first floor up - a gorgeous concoction of red brick Victoriana and overwrought decoratin. And who looks at the fire when stoking the mantlepiece.... oh damn, wrong way round!

I have a Leicester thread here.

I'd be happy for you to post an alternative Leicester thread of course - but I doubt you want to give that much time and attention to a negative :) Anyway, it's lovely. Housing is cheaper, everywhere is walking distance, there are so many bars and restaurants - at near "Northern" prices, the public tranport system is great and people look at you and speak to you in queues! Come back to Leicester after a few weeks in London and you'll feel blessed, I promise.

This thread has brought back a few memories. I know Aylesbury quite well, many of my family come from Aston Clinton, just outside of Aylesbury. This photo is from a visit back to the area last year. Aylesbury is somewhere in the distance. It is taken from Coombe Hill overlooking Aylesbury Vale.

Lost some image quality in reducing the file size to about 1.5MB (original image 10.5MB)

http://img401.imageshack.us/img401/c...g/1/w19743.pnghttp://img401.imageshack.us/img401/9...norama1.th.jpg

Oh lovely, lovely!
No that's a view I'm familiar with. Thank you.

I once rented a flat in Aston Clinton. I got the bus (or walked) up the hill into Tring many times.

Beautiful Pic!

OH, I hope the pics arent all done...I was really enjoying it.

Yes, I was positively perplexed by the preponderance of peas, personally. (whew!) Seems like that's the most popular 'veg' they have -- odd, since in my house they're considered a starch, not a veggie at all!

I used to have this British guy as a cow orker, and he would bring peas in for lunch. Just eat them out of a tupperware container. I'd never seen anyone else do that before, or since. Not every day, but often.

Frozen, canned, or fresh?

Never mind. Different thread. :D

I've taken some pictures to document the Spring here for you. The Easter weekend seems an appropriate time to post them.

Cherry blossoms close to my home.
My walk to the day care unit.

Still walking in - the turn off down beside the prison walls.
The prison walls from the unit.

Horse Chestnut Spring
 

Now a series of a horse chestnut tree in the grounds.
I love horse chestnuts. They have fat and sticky buds, the earliest and freshest green leaves, then flowers like candles, they are huge threshing castles all summer then herald autumn by turning brown first of all the trees, then hand out conkers!

These were all taken on separate days. Spring creeps up on you, you know!

I'll continue the sequence tomorrow when I'm back there, and might even pop back at key points even after I'm discharged.

Moar

Last for now.

A couple more of my horse chestnut.
I swear I'm going to go back and take more pics as the year goes by. It's allegorical for me now.

The first two are a couple of days apart.

A close up of one of the "candles" in its infancy.
And a later blossoming tree also on my walk.

thanks, Sundae. I'm really enjoying this!

I found this;It was part of a list of misconceptions about England and I must admit I had some, like this one.

32 F to 43F is not bitterly cold. Sheesh, thats considered balmy during the winters in Indiana.

Meh, it was written by a limey. :lol2:

Thing is Pico, we haven't really got the hang of heating yet.
0-6 degrees with a gas fire on in one single room of the house can make you quite bitter.

The houses are all made of non-insulating stone, unlike the insulating wood that the US learned to use because it was plentiful in the new world.

Well that explains it. Being stoned makes the cold more intense. Having wood makes the ambient temperature irrelevant. ;)

Pshaw. Average rainfall across the entire US is a meaningless number. I'm sure Britain gets less rain than, say, Seattle, but compared to my neck of the woods it's still a completely sodden marsh. ;)

Yeah, but you live in the damn desert. :p

Never mind the US, different parts of the UK get hugely different amounts of rain. It does always rain in Manchester (on the wrong side of the Pennines), but when I moved 90 minutes South to Birmingham, they thought I was nuts for taking an umbrella everywhere regardless of the current actual weather or forecast.

It's been sunny here for a while, and set to continue into May, or so they say.

Here is my path. I think I took one from the same place in the snow, earlier this year. Excuse our neighbour having their recycling out early.
Second picture is just some tulips in our front garden, making a brave show of colour.

Yesterday, walking to acupuncture.

The first is the entrance - lovely and peaceful, although I am heading for a bungalow further down the path and the session is held in the Portacabin behind it!
Second, looking through the trees to the main unit. It's locally called Tindal, because it was originally built by the Tindal family as a hospital for the local area. It's not been a general hospital for a long time, it forms the backbone of the services for mental health and addiction counselling these days.

And my friend the duck.
I don't know where his wife was - they're usually together.
And I usually see them in a more inconguous setting - like the carpark at Cornerstone or walking along the Bierton Road together.

beautiful!

I wanna take a walk there!

:eek: Better get started. And bring a boat.

;)

I love ducks, nice pics.

Some photos I took on the Riverside Walk with Mum last week.
I'm sure the greenery has advanced even further since then.

We're having a scorcher of an April! It was supposed to rain all this week, but we've not seen it during the day. We're even having a BBQ on Saturday... will take pics of that if it comes off.

Here is the eponymous river - the River Thame.

Poor beleagured thing that it is, diverted from its flood plain, hemmed in by new housing, littered by louts. Still, the walk allows people to enjoy what little free flow it still has. Even if (for safety) it's been made nigh on impossible to get to. Not like my childhood, running wild alongside it - over it on tyre swings, dangling feet in ot from a cow-bridge, taking home sticklebacks from it with sunburnt shoulders...

And here is a lovely ground cover, which frothed like water around the trees in this clearing. No idea what it is, never seen it before.

Oh I forgot I filmed this!
This is from the bus I got home from MK the other weekend.
We come into Aylesbury via Bierton, which is where I took pictures earlier in this thread.
It's a bouncy bus, and I only filmed on a whim, so that quality of the filming will not win me any prizes.

But for anyone interested, you can see two of the churches, the Red Lion pub and catch a glimpse of the Eagle not-pub. I had to stop filming because my stop was coming up fast and I had all my belongings to gather together.

now I'm all suspicious about where that duck's wife is... ;)

nice stuff, SG! I love to see it!

OMFG - He's on the wrong side of the road! lol

Looks like parking is at a premium.

Bruce - yes.
As with many villages spread out along a main road. The houses are too old for cars to have been thought of, and land is at too much of a premium for people to have room behind their houses.

A couple of pics to show how Spring has progressed.
Pretty much Summer now.

Same walk as previously.

Moar

Coming out of the walk, I was greeted by the sound of a big dog barking.
You know the heavy, deep, almost subsonic ones?
And arcing merrily over the top was a hoarse woman's voice, "Shaaadddup yer barking!"
Lovely, I thought, you can tell I'm on Quarrendon.

Quarrendon is where we lived just after I was born. We moved to the house I am sitting in now when I was a couple of months old. It isn't the worst of the council estates, it's just not the best.

Recognise anyone?
I think this probably reflects the date the estate was built, because it's never been called anything else as long as I know.

This is what is known as an estate pub.
Very different in appearance to the other pubs I have taken pictures of.
Different in feel too. Obviously their core drinkers are people living in the immediate vicinity. They seem to attract more trouble too - perhaps because people are living together, socialising together, getting drunk with neighbours? I might be being unfair - I'm going on reputation rather than hard facts. I've never been in the Kennedy.

Walking home along the Bicester Road I saw something to make LJ's blood run cold... There used to be a whole line of car salesrooms, but they seem to have been hit by the current economic climate. One closed and one closing down.

Still - one obviously open. I've zoomed in so you can check our second hand car prices.

Oh! I wish my camera was working. I went for a walk in the woods today. Oh but the bluebells looked beautiful; carpeting the woodland floor, dappled by sun light. Lovely.

Gorgeous pics Chez :) very lovely