Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Discovery on Discovery Drive, King’s Hill....

I went on a mission today to King’s Hill and West Malling and made a discovery. I was actually doing the rather mundane task of finding shop windows and notice boards on which to pin my book fair flyers, but that’s almost incidental. I’d been round several villages by this time and had easily found their parish notice boards and been able to (I think legally) place my posters. At King’s Hill you’d have thought that there would have been a news agents window or a post office for a paid-for poster and several willing shops who would put one up for me for free. Actually I did find a sandwich bar who didn’t hesitate to help out, but in the little enclave of shops next to the old WWII West Malling air station lookout tower there seemed to be a lack of anything else. I asked in the large ASDA store if they had a community notice board, or indeed if they knew of one in the locality. The look on the supervisors face said it all to me; there was no board in the store or for that matter within two miles of it. A discovery which I shouldn’t have been at all surprised about since in short there is no community there from what I can see. Sure there are people living there, and the street names are all rather quaintly named after types of apples, Braeburn Way, Bramley Road, Worcester Pearmain Square (Actually I made that last one up) but King’s Hill has become such a sprawling mass of nouveau rich apartments and luxury homes overlooking the golf course that the planners haven’t stopped to consider what the effect of all this would be in the long term. It has stopped being a village long ago and has turned into a sort of mini new town with no real sense of identity, no real heart and ultimately no real future. That was my discovery today. Thank God I didn’t buy a house there as I almost did around ten years ago and thank God I stayed in good old Tonbridge….

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