I think you mean ‘uninterested’ Tories, not ‘disinterested’ which means unbiased, having no interest in the selfish sense (e.g. financial interest)

The guy probably said ‘Beeching’ rather than Beecham re the trains.

And with respect, I’ve been reading pieces like this about Skem and Kirkby for more than 30 years. Indeed, from your report it seems to have improved immensely since the Guardian described how Mrs Thatcher’s government made the youth steal anything that wasn’t nailed down and vandalise whatever was. The point being that whatever ‘Tory cuts’ may or may not be doing, the problems here didn’t start when Cameron got elected.

Interesting bit about the Cornish fishing village. Alas if you swapped the population of Skem and, say, St Ives I think St Ives would rapidly become more like Skem. But architecture does tell us something. Drive round a 1950s or 1960s estate. The main road through the estate has houses on both sides, all facing the road and with no walls or tall fences (those optimistic planners had all read Robert Frost) between them and the pavement. So were all houses planned from earliest times up to very recently. It was the most convenient situation – facing the road – and there was no reason not to build that way.

Drive round a modern estate – say one built in the last ten or fifteen years. The design will be – one or two (usually one) main roads through, with cul-de-sacs off on either side. Smaller cul-de-sacs come off these. No houses face the road – instead high fences or walls hide the backs of the houses, each one of which now faces onto its own small cul-de-sac.

These too are built to be defensible – against groups of youths congregating outside one’s house (in a particularly grim 60s estate in Gloucester I recently saw about 30 youths sitting in someone’s front garden). They are built to encourage only the people who live on a street to be there. The roads and pavements of these cul-de-sacs are quasi-private places, gated communities without gates.

Meanwhile the few remaining public spaces on such an estate – the square of park, the small green with its chippy, shop and launderette, become the danger zones – the places of graffiti, broken glass, wire mesh on the “offy” window.

A location near a public park was for most of the twentieth century a selling point for an estate agent. Now it’s a drawback. It would be interesting to know at what point this change – and the change in estate design – occurred. I reckon the late 80s/early 90s won’t be too far out.