ABSTRACT
Twentieth-century English people have lived through an age of rapid change when ancient country towns have sprouted industrial estates and ‘enterprise zones’, their high streets have become cluttered with cars and vans, traffic lights, ‘street furniture’ and pedestrian crossings, and their old-established road patterns disrupted by motorways and by-passes. The villages, similarly, have been strangely altered by an alien rash of commuters’ villas and unimaginative rows of drab council houses, while mellowed Tudor and Georgian cottages have been disfigured by the intrusion of modern shop-fronts and ice-cream signs. Such changes make one more prone to believe in a past which was unchanging, or at least more reassuringly stable. But, as Christopher Taylor has remarked, ‘all we have today is the latest phase of change, more violent perhaps than before, certainly faster than that in previous centuries, but a direct descendant of it, and merely part of the same ebb and flow of the tide of human occupation’. 1
