This morning I watched helplessly as yet another front
garden disappeared to make way for yet another car parking space. Just why
people do this I have no idea. Our once beautiful, well appointed, road is being
turned into an urban jungle by the very people who live there. The antique red
sandstone walls that have stood for over 100 years are being pulled down, the
front courtyards of tiny lawns, shrubbed borders, and flower beds ripped out so
that a car can be parked where once birds sang and bees and butterflies
fluttered.
This morning this was a garden with a front hedge, a side hedge, lavender beds,
and somewhere to sit on a summer's evening. This evening it is an unfinished car park.
How stupid, how totally unnecessary, how completely brutal.
Of course, it’s all part of the modern disease of ownership
and status, driven by the paranoia of ‘strangers’ potentially parking outside
people’s houses and the perceived need for residents to be able to park their
precious vehicles a few feet from their own front door.
How unnecessary, how totally stupid.
During the day parking in the road can be difficult. The
policy of the council to make it hard for workers to park in Altrincham at low
cost and to put parking meters on nearby residential streets, has led to this
problem. Add to this the ludicrous demand for residents only parking and the
issues are compounded, pushing ‘residents only’ people onto ‘non-residents only’
parking roads because they don’t want to have to pay for a second permit.
Altogether it’s a recipe for the destruction of the road’s character; the very
reason people moved into our road in the first place.
Until recently I could sit in my front garden and look out
on trees and flowers and watch other residents doing the same. Increasingly I
sit on my bench looking at cars and vans, hemmed in by lumps of metal squeezed
into spaces far too tight for them.
Did I mention how stupid and unnecessary this is?
There is plenty of on-road parking outside working hours
even with the less than thought-through actions of the council, or at least there
would be if the people who have destroyed their gardens actually parked in the
spaces they vandalised their frontages for.
But of course they don’t, instead they park on the road or
across those bloody sanctimonious white lines in front of their paved
open-fronted houses These same white lines further reduce on-road parking by
being a car and a half lengths long, and are guarded with heated blood and
threats. All a bit short sighted, selfish and bullying which is why I ignore
them; after all they are only advisory, not legally binding and not
prosecutable if infringed upon. Some residents even put cones out to protect
these spaces while they are out for the day, which is illegal so I carefully move
them to their empty drives.
It seems that the tiniest bit of inconvenience, sharing
space they don’t actually own on the public highway, has driven some of my
neighbours mad with ‘get off my land’ fever and they will do anything to
protect their pitch. I’ve seen neighbours arguing with parked non-residents as
if it really was their land and not the public highway. These are the same
residents who’d rather destroy what little space and land they had then steal
the road space in front of their house, marking it as their own.
I can’t understand why, given our houses are around 120
years old and each is part of a matching townhouse terrace, there isn’t a need for
planning permission to change the frontage. This type of uncontrolled radical change
is significant; unsightly at best, vandalism at worst and I would oppose it. But
of course I don’t get the chance.
I generally like my neighbours. It’s a nice community. But
when I see what has happened over the last 10 years, the negative changes these
very same people have made to the look, feel, and harmony of the road, I am not
at all sure that I like them as much as I used to or should.
