My part of London doesn’t have many tower blocks. Most of the housing stock is terraced Victorian / Edwardian houses from the time when the area was a bastion of artisan / lower middle class respectability. With the onset of inner city decay, most of the larger houses have been divided into flats. Other purpose built flats have also been built on some sites that would previously have housed industries now disappeared.
But whatever the form of housing, one un-mistakable feature on all of them is the proliferation of those fucking hideous satellite TV dishes.
An apt symbol of our post-Thatcher times; the age of the homeowner-democracy myth. Spurning anything that smacked of collectivism, in the ‘eighties we were told that we would be empowered by each owning our own home. Greed was good and there was no such thing as society.
Now in the ‘noughties, we are bombarded with 24 hour access to multi-media, mind-numbing, dumbed-down, celebrity/reality bollocks.
Put the two together – and the result? Every house has its own individual satellite dish and in the case of multiple occupier dwellings, several dishes on the one house.
A visible reminder of quite how shallow our lives have become and a fucking ugly blot on the urban landscape too.
Would it be too far a stretch to think that we might have communal satellite dishes for which we paid a rental fee to access?
Maybe it’s the inevitable march of progress and the rot set in when we abandoned the communal well.
But whatever the form of housing, one un-mistakable feature on all of them is the proliferation of those fucking hideous satellite TV dishes.
An apt symbol of our post-Thatcher times; the age of the homeowner-democracy myth. Spurning anything that smacked of collectivism, in the ‘eighties we were told that we would be empowered by each owning our own home. Greed was good and there was no such thing as society.
Now in the ‘noughties, we are bombarded with 24 hour access to multi-media, mind-numbing, dumbed-down, celebrity/reality bollocks.
Put the two together – and the result? Every house has its own individual satellite dish and in the case of multiple occupier dwellings, several dishes on the one house.
A visible reminder of quite how shallow our lives have become and a fucking ugly blot on the urban landscape too.
Would it be too far a stretch to think that we might have communal satellite dishes for which we paid a rental fee to access?
Maybe it’s the inevitable march of progress and the rot set in when we abandoned the communal well.
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