British suburbs

[eloise_herisson]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., "Melody" <Malady579 at h...> wrote:
> Given that we all know the house the Dursley's live and this 
question
> is not really about the movie, I have a OT question.  :)
> 
> In the beginning of CoS there was a wide shot of the neighborhood 
the
> Dursley's live in.  The houses were perfectly matching and went on
> forever.  I was actually shocked and wondered...do y'all have 
suburbs
> like that?  Are they full of the same house repeating over and over
> all the same color all the same style?  How terribly depressing.  No
> back yard.  Barely a front yard.  Is this normal for England?
> 
> 
> Melody

I was half annoyed and half highly amused.
Yes, there are a lot of boring suburbs, but the acres and acres of 
*identical* housing of that sort of vintage don't really exist , (do 
they, Dave?). Acres and acres of Victorian terraces up north, yes, 
but that's a different matter. Artistic license, I think.

Surely the point was the message it was giving about the Dursleys, 
people to whom to be ordinary, *not* standing out in any way is 
incredibly important, yet who can't resist being the only family in 
the neighbourhood to have a conservatory. Completely conventional, 
yet a cut above the rest in their own eyes. Hyperbole is the word I 
think I've been looking for. So although it wasn't accurate, I 
thought it got the message across pretty well.

I might be wrong, but I think that the masses of identikit housing in 
that quantity would be untypical of Surrey, which, on the whole, is a 
fairly pricey area.

I know precisely the sort of area they'd live in - there's one close 
to us, where in the original phase all the roads were called after 
varieties of fruit tree (spot the similarity?). It's a little more 
modern, but the houses are all individual (well, they don't tend to 
pput identical ones next to each other) and it's a respecatable 
enclave where the Durselys would feel incredibly at home.

Eloise