I remember, back in the early/mid 80s, driving to and fro in the suburb with my dad, on ordinary journeys, spotting the houses that had cart wheels in the front garden.
These were usually propped against the wall, underneath the living room window.
Often, the house had coach lamps, either side of the front door, too. And these are more likely to survive; the archaeology of the suburb.
The wheels are all gone, replaced by a rash of solar lamps evoking Greek or Floridian holiday apartment complex paths. Were the wheels a reaction to the dismantling of the narratives of life undertaken by the government of the day? A retreat in the imagination in time of anxiety to a pre or early industrial state? Is this what the solar lamps now represent, showing, too, that the imaginative refuges of the suburb are finally no longer instinctively the rural past but the TV and the dream holiday?
But the old ways still lurk; the place names, the irritating curve in a street to the 4x4 driver, the veneer of civilisations but thin.
I remember them! Perhaps they were supposed to be the wheels off gypsy caravans - another way of saying "Dunroamin", but with added nostalgia, as you say.
ReplyDeleteThat's a good point about the Dunroamin' aspect. It's a nice thought, the suburbanite seeing themselves as roamers of the lanes who have just decided, like, nothing permanent you know, to pitch up in a semi for a while.
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