We wanted to visit Studland Beach and the nature reserve which backs it, but before we commenced that walk we thought we'd take the ferry over to Sandbanks -- supposedly the most expensive piece of real estate in the UK -- and walk around it to see what money had done to it.
There are vestiges of what it might have been like between the two world wars, when it would have been inhabited by those who couldn't afford "proper" homes in nearby Poole and Bournemouth: older, run-down, often single-storey properties presumably still occupied by the artists, writers and other bohemians (or their descendants) who moved there decades ago and have resisted the pressure to sell up or move out. One or two were shuttered and had signs up announcing their demolition, but this appeared to have been "immiment" for several months. Perhaps for same economic reasons, since one or two of the new and seriously upscale developments with hoardings announcing their opening this month or next were clearly in stasis: nobody building, nobody buying.
Most of the new or newer properties which had replaced the original bungalows and terraces were relatively restrained: lots of Mediterranean-style white facades with huge picture windows, stainless steel verandahs and the like. But in some cases their owners appeared to be people who had more money than sense, and had handed their po-mo architects a brief which allowed them to do whatever they like, with results -- an enormous faux-Corinthian portico sticks particularly in the mind -- which shouted not so much "Look at me, I'm rich", as "I'm rich, fuck off".
All a far cry from John Brunner's observation, in one of his short stories the title of which I can't remember, that when the super-rich find the searchlight of publicity swinging in their direction they buy the searchlight and instruct the man behind it to switch it off. And the thought that rising sea levels will be lapping at their front doors within the next fifty or so years is a suitable corrective to the thought of the money wasted on such housing extravagance.
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