Odds and Evens

These signs have been on the Middlefield Lane estate since its inception, and so they are forty-five years old at least. Some have weathered better than others:

This planning of this estate was based to some extent on the 'Radburn' principle gleaned from an experimental 'New Deal' settlement that was developed in Radburn, New Jersey. This involved the fundamental separation of the car and the pedestrian, where cars gained access to the houses only via culs-de-sac roads that were situated 'round the back' of the short terraces of the houses themselves. The other side of these houses - 'the front' as we called it - had the main living area (the 'living room' to us, and NOT a 'lounge') which looked out onto an individual although unfenced or hedged 'private' expanse of lawn which led onto a public green space and a network of pavements, or 'Walks' that connected Dunstall Walk to Aisby Walk and so on. 

I hesitate to take Alison Ravetz to task again, but she notes how 'it was difficult to distinguish the backs from the fronts of houses: in a conventional sense they had neither'. In fact it was easy - the 'front' led to a garden; the 'back' to the road - and no different surely (albeit with the situations reversed somewhat) from any number of terraced houses. 

'Signs with arrows pointing to runs of odds and evens were provided ... Visitors, even residents themselves had difficulty locating addresses.' Hmmm ... odds on one side, evens on the other, except with an expanse of grass separating the two rows instead of a road? Again, not difficult to grasp, although not exactly conventional either, but wasn't that the point at that time? So what was there not to like (apart from those other signs forbidding kids to play ball games on these 'greens', but that is another story).