A Mishmash

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 28 Oct 2022

One of the biggest complaints made about housing developments in recent decades has been that they are too monotonous, involving street after street of identikit houses. Initially the developers responded to this criticism by incorporating a bit of stone cladding into the odd house here and there, and flipping the room layouts between houses - ie there were often two types of houses on a street, each a mirror image of the other. Things have rolled on from there and this image of three distinct house styles jumbled up on the one street is perhaps an unintended consequence of housebuilders responding to buyers' demands. The mishmash that these new developments are based on, and trying to replicate - present in most of our older settlements - resulted from different developers building areas of housing adjacent to one another on a far smaller scale than currently happens, and the fact that different areas of housing were built at different times. It is unlikely that streets such as this have ever previously come into being at the one time, and in a hundred years this pre-planned mishmash may even get its own name, and be a quick shortcut to dating an area of housing. (Thinking about it, it probably does have a name in the journals of modern architecture already!) The houses with the bits of wooden cladding are certainly the most jarring, and conjure up images of those big wooden American houses that most of us have only ever seen in films.

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