NEAT AND TIDY..

For more years than I care to remember, I`ve taken our successive golden retrievers for walkies up around East Malling Heath, a couple of miles from home.   Years ago, it was a well tended market garden area, with extensive strawberry fields but for years now  the area has been left for nature to take its course.  As a result, there has been a large tract of natural countryside to explore with the public footpaths that run through it giving access to woodland, heathland and open fields - just the kind of areas that dogs love, as well as the dog walkers.

I hadn`t been there for a few weeks until yesterday, when Barney and I set off on our accustomed ramble.  What surprised us was that in the space of those few weeks, the natural environment has been turned into a more formal `wildlife nature area.`   Now for quite a few years , the `development` that is Kings HIll has been growing.  It`s a sought after residential development with an attendant business park, a shopping centre, community hall, cricket ground, leisure centre and all the other trimmings normally associated with the `built environment.`

It`s all very neat and tidy - manicured verges, manicured houses, no washing lines in sight, no litter anywhere, semi-mature planted trees maturing nicely - it`s almost Stepford-esque in its tidiness.  The latest `phase` of the development  now gives access to the natural countryside area which has been left untouched until now, but with that development has come the perceived need to `formalise` things.   So, there are now signs showing you where to go and where not to go, signs telling you to behave, to pick up any dog droppings (which I do anyway,) there are well defined paths with nice new kissing gates, there are whole areas of my former haunt that are now fenced off, there are litter bins, dog bins and all the stuff you would expect to see in a formalised inner city park.  Very neat and tidy.

But this is not the inner city.  This is an area in the middle of the Kent countryside.  What has clearly happened is that, in a pointless effort to remind the Kings Hill incomers of their former urban environments, the developers have turned an area where we used to ramble free, explore, get lost now and again but see nature as it really should be seen, into a controlled,  restricted, neat and tidy, risk-assessed adjunct to the controlled, restricted, neat and tidy, risk-assessed housing estate that has invaded this corner of the Garden of England.   Mr Fussy would love it.