Trees

At the end of World War II in 1945 Oak Road, where I would later be born and would grow up, did not exist. A decade later would see it did exist, that my father had bought the indicated plot along it, and that he had designed and was in the process of building there what would become our family home, a safe distance from the pea-soup fogs that he had grown up with and that still persisted twenty miles away in London.

Without warranting photography in the area in the meanwhile, this next image is from the late 1990s and shows the houses along the road at their original as-built sizes. Though already forty to fifty years old, these substantial four and five bed homes were still deemed generous family accommodation in what was by then firmly established as the Stockbroker Belt.

Across the 2000s, hastened by the establishment in the village of Chelsea Football Club's training ground and the associated influx of the super-rich, predatory developers began out-bidding anyone who might like to live in a house as it stood. Character homes with space in their gardens were being bought up and routinely doubled in size, many addresses returning to market with their price tag doubled or more and thus permanently changing the demographic of the area.

By 2010, our family house that had sat comfortably among its neighbours for almost half a century had become dwarfed by them and we were surrounded by people with attitudes very different from our own, necessarily so to have achieved the wherewithal to buy the bloated residences the developers created.

Don't imagine I was jealous of the new neighbours' houses, nor of their lives, though I did become irritated when our lack of liquid cash and our tendency not to waste what we had drew disapproving glances from them at our scruffy cars and weathered, once-white Critall windows. After all, we were no less conveniently located than them, didn't have so far to walk from room to room as they did, and, most important of all, we had trees.

All the trees that were on my father's building plot before he built our house still stood in its garden when he had need of houses no more and it came to us to sell. A few huge oaks, sixty years bigger than when he first saw them, were surrounded by their offsprung generations and interspersed with beech and birch, sweet chestnut and holly, and myriad others the names of which I never knew. If nature brought its seed, there it grew. And there I grew, too.

Thus it was only the changes to neighbouring properties, not to our own, that saw the value of my father's plot having risen come his death to more than we could afford to pay to keep it in our family.

Yet, saddest for me was not that our house would be lost to us come its sale, nor even that it would be demolished and no trace remain of it.

My upset was that the trees would go, that every next child to grow up where I had been born would be poorer than I had been, never mind how much money their parents had.

______

[Images are from Google Earth except for the overlay of the new house which came from Wego as GE have not updated yet.  An image exists on GE of the plot taken after the developers had demolished our house, cleared the plot of trees and not yet begun the replacement build but it is of poor quality and looks especially sad.]