ancestralvoices

I was reading about Lacock and understand that it is clear and clean of many "intrusions" that may taint it's atmosphere. I also read that Lavenham is similar. In the case of Lacock I assume this is due to the national trust. Are there other towns and villages like this? and does this sort of make them non working villages? I guess I mean not true living, breathing places but more like open air museums?

We did not have a chance to visit these 2 on our journey this past Summer, and I mentioned in my trip report that I particularly enjoyed Sowshill and Stanton in The Cotswolds---although they were not car free, the lack of people allowed us to walk anywhere we wanted with no worries.

Anyway any others like the above?

Thanks

ancestralvoices

Sorry, I meant Snowshill, not Sowshill(though what images that conjures up).

RM67

Lots of places get underground cabelling now (either new towns built from scratch or old overhead wires being replaced in older towns and villages). So lack of telephone poles is not necessarily a sign of being cut off. I live down a country lane with old mills, farmhouses, piggeries etc and we don't have any telephone poles. But we all have digital phones and high speed broadband.

For a no-car town (for the most part) see my pics of Clovelly below.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/4945230...7627676483344/

Morgana

Sorry to disillusion you but Lavenham isn't like that at all(and nor does it have cobbles). It's extremely pretty with its colourful timbered properties but I am struggling to think of anywhere where it is car free. Lavenham is a busy, bustling little town and definitely not preserved in aspic.
It's prosperous now - plenty of Hotels, B&Bs and upmarket restaurants, but it hasn't always been like that and no one would want to keep it the way it was in, say, Victorian times. I was born close by and have done some amateur ancestor research. My mid-Victorian ancestors lived in Lavenham (bootmakers) in what looks like pretty grinding poverty - makes me wonder what they would think of the place now with its visitors and teashops!
Robin Hood's Bay and Staithes (both on the North Yorkshire coast) are pretty much car free mainly due to the steepness of the main road down to the sea.

Nonconformist

Dunster in Somerset feels very unspoiled.

ancestralvoices

Oh Morgana, sorry I didn't mean that Lavenham was car free, I meant that I had read that the townspeople chose to have all the telephone poles, etc underground to make the town a lovelier place. I wasn't clear at all, I see in what I wrote above. I know that Lacock has some car free areas because of it being a National Trust proerty.

RM67---I wasn't trying to say that these places were "cut off", I was speaking about how some villages are trying to preserve their beauty as wholly as possible without scars to the townscape.

Wow I did a TERRIBLE job of communicating in my first post of this thread!

flanneruk

This really depends on your definition of "intrusion".

We don't tolerate car bans, not least because there's nowhere you could put them without destroying the landscape with hideous car parks. Visitors may wish we thought differently - but tough.

Many of us in this microtown (and now local planning officials) regard non-local roof slating as an intrusion. Personally, I think modern satellite minidishes intrude less than aerials (especially in areas with poor reception that need superboosted aerials). Nothing, IMHO, ruins a town more than a forest of aerials when you look down on it from the hill above. Few (?no) chocolate box villages get cable: the economics never work.

Rural England has an obsession with light pollution at present, so places are experimenting with different kinds of downward reflectors so you can see the stars without tripping over. Others are just switching street lights off.

Do buses "intrude"? Many of us argue they're essential if a town's going to function. How about trains (passionately opposed in the mid nineteenth century, but now in my town the main source of economic growth)?

Or what about disintrusion? Many of my neighbours believe the town's being ruined by the recent withdrawal of daily doorstep milk deliveries. Universally, the closure of a butcher's is seen as a catastrophe.

The real problem is: where do you draw the line? Post-medieval churches? Stone churches? Our pre-Norman forbears would be horrified at a church made from anything other than wood. Enclosed fields? Sealed roads? Growing potatoes or tomatoes?

Are cremation slabs in churchyards inauthentic (illegal till a century ago)? Or is grabbing more land for cemeteries better?

Most English villages bear traces of human life for the past 1400 years: many still have scraps of Roman life going back a further 500. We've still got records of the town's fury when an Elizabethan courtier introduced a footpath. It's now a prime local asset.

Villages and microtowns constitute millennia-old, perpetually evolving, communities: ultimately, we - not art directors on BBC costume dramas - decide what's authentic. And that's a community's collective view of what defines itself.

Dukey1

Years ago, before Flanner was born, when I first visited England I could have sworn that the SUN was an intrusion but have since learned otherwise, Thank God.

flanneruk

"the SUN was an intrusion"

It was. It was originally the Daily Herald: rivalling even US newspapers in pomposity, turgidity and headlines longer than an Obama speech.

Michael

<i>Personally, I think modern satellite minidishes intrude less than aerials (especially in areas with poor reception that need superboosted aerials).</i>

Really?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mksfca/...57622934223233

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mksfca/...57623437796997

ancestralvoices

Flanner, this visitor was impressed with so much of your countryside and villages already. The main "intrusion" we did not miss were billboards and advertisements. The next were telephone poles. Driving through Honister Pass in the Lakes we saw none. Not a single pole, sign, metal fence, and rarely even a barrier between road and valley. Also parts of our many drives through the Cotswolds were the same(around the lavender fields area), and around North Yorkshire. So to my 21st century American eyes---these were the intrusions I welcomed not having to see.

Granted, I did not save the money to spend 3 weeks in parts of England where I'm assuming these things are as common as they are here in the midwest, so my judgment is clouded by having visited perhaps "pretty" areas, but we did drive from London to East Sussex to Bath to Cotswolds to Shrewsbury to N. Wales to Lakes to Yorkshire and covering all that ground we saw much much less "tainted" land than we expected to see. This is part of our reason for wanting to return. Maybe we'll see more ads and signs in Devon or Suffolk or Dorset? To our eyes something very right is being done over there.

flanneruk

"Really?" (re dishes)
"Maybe we'll see more ads and signs in Devon or Suffolk or Dorset?"

Both come down to planning laws (or their lack) and how they're enforced.

In most of rural England, the scene Michael shows is outlawed. Picture 113 isn't Britain anyway: it looks to me a Mediterranean, Muslim, city: I imagine Istanbul or Damascus. The rules on microdishes in my town make them invisible in its historic centre: something that's a great deal easier to achieve with modern dishes in a hilly town while still allowing decent reception than with aerials. Galashiels town council(picture 90) - and its townspeople - have simply chosen to behave irresponsibly. Or Scotland's decided to assert its semi-autonomy by ruining its landscape the way the southern Irish have

In virtually all of England, the same rules (today at least) apply to signage. Right now, there's virtually nowhere outside the already destroyed parts of big cities where posters, advertising signs or oversized petrol station totem poles are allowed. They're no more likely along the dismal industrialised stretches between, say, Liverpool and Manchester than in Dorset or Devon

Our prime minister's trying to change that. He claims his attempt to turn England into a suburb of Cleveland won't apply to the AONB he and I live in, but he's vague about the details in the non-AONB countryside: even in the Green Belts that surround our major cities as well as Oxford and Cambridge.

Many of us are fighting him. But I'd go and see advertising-free rural England in the next two years before Cameron destroys it.

hetismij2

Burying cables is something which Britain has spent time and money on doing - even major cables have on occasion been buried at great expense to avoid the blight of pylons across the landscape.

It would be very hard to make towns or villages car free though. They are places where people live and work and those people need transport.

I'm not sure that billboards and advertising are allowed along motorways and the like in the UK - Flanner could no doubt confirm or deny that.

It is a pity the US don't invest in putting cables underground. Many a stunning view there is blighted by marching cables. It would surely cut down on power cuts too if the cables couldn't be blown down, snowed down or run down.
Add the billboards and strip malls and general urban sprawl and it can get a bit depressing driving across the US, even though it is one of my favourite ways to spend a holiday.

Michael

<i>It is a pity the US don't invest in putting cables underground. Many a stunning view there is blighted by marching cables.</i>

San Francisco is a prime example.