Why are British towns so ugly?
If you ever decide to spend some time in rural and small-town France, you’ll notice a distinctive feature: there are flowers seemingly everywhere.
Large parts of France have the cool wet climate that is more closely associated with Britain. If you look at the image above you’ll notice that the sky is filled with grey clouds, but the image is still a bright one. The only things littered on this street are flower pots and the buildings resemble traditional chalet-style architecture: symmetrical and clean, without any hint of blockiness or monotony. Colour is splashed everywhere, both artificial and the vibrant green of the forest on the hill in the backdrop.
St-Gervais-les-Pains is an utterly unremarkable village of under 6,000 people in the French Alps. Wikipedia rather diplomatically describes it as
“one of the least busy ski areas of its size”.
Apart from a deadly flood in 1892, it is of no real historical or cultural significance.
By way of contrast, this is a similarly unremarkable British village: Tidworth, in the county of Wiltshire. I picked it because it was a mid-sized village (9,500 people) in a county of fairly average wealth which I know utterly nothing about. Visually, at least, I think it’s fairly good approximation of a typical English (and British) village.
