IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Derwent Grove, TAUNTON, TA1 2NJ

This short stretch of the old Ilminster Road out of Taunton is not open to through traffic, which means that motorists who wish to get from Blackbrook Way to the M5 junction or vice versa face a trip of 2 kilometres instead of 300 metres. I wonder how much extra petrol is consumed each day? Ironically, the longer route goes past far more residential housing than the shorter.

The discarded bedspreads etc. peep over the bank of tailored shrubs in the car park of the Holiday Inn. Parts of the skip and part of a car roof can be seen. In this image, there is, perhaps, a minimalist appeal as without the explanation, it might take a while to work out what exactly lies behind the undulating lines of shrubs.

The skip of discarded items from the Holiday Inn look like chairs and curtains, etc. On the outskirts of the town, this hotel is visited mainly by visitors in their own cars or by taxi, many of them members of organisations who are attending meetings. Consequently, the skip is probably safe from the attentions of the recyclers who would descend on it if it were more accessible to the general population. It is safe, too, from the tippers and waste droppers who seem to be generated automatically by the presence of a skip with some room in it.

Dull functional architecture, acres of brick panels, acres of "municipal" shrubs. Little boxes.

Square windows, square columns, tapered white pots and undistinguished plants. I can't say if this is a standard approach at all such hotels, but I guess it might be. The white theme picks up the colour theme of the porch roof and the mock tower on the building. Sitting amongst these themed objects, which make a deliberately unexceptionable background to which it is hard to object as one's aesthetic sensibility has been anaesthetised, there is a symbol of our changing society: the "ashtray". Those addicted to smoking tobacco have been driven out of public buildings altogether by law and this stainless steel column cringing against the grey brick background, trying to hide itself, signals the exile. Commonplace objects that are so commonplace that they evaporate instantly from the memory. They are not intended to be photographed.

The shrubs are essentially a form of topiary, fashioned into great sofas which envelope and accommodate the cars that doze in the bays. This swathe of snipped green upholstery has a rounded almost Rubenesque form and also seems to form part of a heart shape, out which springs the tree, which also seems to pierce it. We all pass it without a thought letting its smooth curved edges escort us blindly to the exit.

The Holiday Inn and the Harvester are to the right of the fountain.