Today's post is about an entirely ordinary street somewhere in London. I picked it while I was out and about, thinking 'yeah that'll do', having never previously walked down it. It turned out to have fewer than twenty houses. It doesn't have an interesting back-story, having once been a field and nothing more. It's of absolutely no interest unless you live there, which only 0.0005% of Londoners do so I'm betting you're not one of them. Here's my attempt to write 1000 words about it.
Ordinary Street is a brief suburban curve, barely 100m long, with one telegraph pole and a trio of street trees. It's quiet, but within easy walking distance of two takeaways and a hairdressers on the main road if you fancy the high life. It's also a one-way street, unless you're on a bike in which case two-way travel is actively supported. Someone's even gone to the effort of painting separate cycle lanes at either end, plus the occasional bike symbol inbetween, not that the level of vehicular traffic generally requires it. The remnants of previous line-painting exercises are still intermittently visible.
The maximum speed limit is 20mph although I doubt you could easily accelerate past that in the space available given the bends, the speed humps and all the parked vehicles. Only a handful of houses have their own off-road parking spaces, so instead little rectangular fiefdoms for Hyundais and Volkswagens are marked out beside the kerb. One of the lucky ones has stuck up a sign saying "this driveway is in constant use", which is brazen cheek given their Lexus pokes out far enough to block the pavement.
Number 1 Ordinary Street is painted a drab shade of magnolia with red stains and several small cracks in the plaster. Whoever fixed a security light above the front door trailed three separate wires across the front of the house and left a large coil of cable inexpertly dangling. Nextdoor is pebbledashed, which gives you some idea of the age of the street, and they also have a large silver Hotpoint fridge freezer in their front garden. Someone's toppled a chest of drawers on the pavement, its individual compartments scattered separately at the foot of a Swedish whitebeam.
It's hard to judge what the original front walls looked like because they've almost all been replaced at some point, perhaps with a fence, a hedge or just a posher wall with wrought iron twiddles on top. Even the fences vary wildly, from regularly slatted to diagonal trellis. Some of those with hedges trim them with pride but most have been allowed to let rip, bursting out with yellow and green privet or exploding upwards to provide a burst of unkempt privacy. Only a few homeowners take growing flowers seriously, unless you count a clump of three foot dandelions as deliberate, but one display of red and pink roses is currently at its peak and the hydrangeas at number 10 are positively glorious.
Front gardens are often used as dumping grounds, or somewhere to store sacks of building materials before they're opened. I can see why the owners of number 3 got rid of that black and red leather chair because it was hideous, even before someone ripped the seat. I also reckon the pavement was originally much narrower with a stripe of grass verge alongside, but that this has long since been filled in. During repairs someone wrote Vicki TH 2010 in the concrete before it set, possibly the elusive HS whose initials are scraped to one side.
One of the houses in Ordinary Street has a 'Sold' board outside, courtesy of a local agent, whose website allows me to go online and peer inside. Their video reveals that this "lovely home" looks somewhat tired, that timber-style lino is never a good choice, that the "practical bathroom" could do with an upgrade and that "enclosed rear garden" is about the best you can say for a small corner patio surrounded by weeds. The "well-equipped kitchen" gave me the biggest shudder, so I'm not surprised that the new owners have bought themselves a Beko QSE222X Stainless Steel Built‑in Single Multifunction Oven & ceramic hob and dumped the packaging on their hardstanding.
Another home was recently on the market, the detached house at number 12, and that's another world entirely. A snooper's delight of a YouTube video, not yet taken down. reveals that this place has been immaculately kept with bright white walls throughout, an inbuilt woodburner and a thoroughly modern fitted kitchen (with artfully placed utensils). The biggest surprise is the large net-curtained conservatory, invisible from the street, because it didn't look possible that Ordinary Street could contain anywhere so intrinsically Home Counties.
The big house on the corner looked to be the most intriguing, with its sea-life stickers, Green Day poster in the window and a poorly-handwritten sign warning All The Times No Visiter CCTV Watch. The red-stains on the fence outside added a particularly unnerving vibe. But although the number looked plausible the house is officially part of the adjoining road so ineligible for inclusion. Instead I had to make do with wondering about the makeshift lattice of canes supporting number 9's roses, the silver tree frog clinging to the outside of number 11 and whether the No Canvassers sign on the door of number 13 ever has the desired effect.
(that's got me over the 900 word mark, so I'm on the home straight now)
Satellite dishes are popular here, often inelegantly cabled. Most of the houses have two steps leading up to their front door because they were built in an era when level access wasn't important. The kerbside is fairly clean apart from a discarded milk carton and a scrunched-up blue plastic bag. The yellow line at the northern end of the street needs repainting. The family at number 17 bought their house number from that generic company that advertises in the Sunday supplements. And perhaps most typical, given what I also saw in neighbouring streets, is that absolutely nobody has hung an England flag from their window, even in this week of weeks. That's Ordinary Street for you.
