I agree and hope I'm not fooled. My geography teacher used to talk
about 'rurban' areas (Renfrewshire and Surrey are good examples). This
is aside from the point, as a Peter Riley poem states somewhere, the
countryside is often just a factory with large keep out signs (sorry,
that's definitely a misquotation). Hopper's rural paintings (goodname
Hopper! - you can see the bings and conveyor belts straight away) get
that feeling of industrialisation, but your point about the places
between rural and urban, about being nowhere in particular, I find
fascinating, suburbia that is a little embarrassed about itself
because it's dry and 'featureless' like hotel hydroponics, and falls
foul of both traditionalists 'Gentle Bombs fall on Slough' and highart
modernists (all caveats accepted) who suggest that if Kent is the
Garden of England, Surrey is the Patio (was it Iain Sinclair who said
that?). RP
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