Strimmed into suburbanisation

Above: Precision mowing

The cliché that the Cotswolds is as picturesque as the lid of a 1950s cake tin still holds true – well, almost.

Those old lids that kept the fruit cake damp and the jam roll moist were universal in their depiction of our limestone hills as a bucolic idyll. Hills rolled, streams wound and the cottages were rose-covered and surrounded by herbaceous borders. The hedgerows were bounteous. The paddocks were filled with carthorses and fenced by dry stone walls and the pastures were cropped by well-fed sheep.

It was an image that non-cake-eating critics frequently complained was too picture-perfect. Nowhere could be that idyllic. Where were the fast food joints, crack dens and satellite dishes?

And then the strimmer, and its sibling the rotor mower, arrived to satisfy their cynicism.

This 21st century mechanical staff is the vulgar curse of the Cotswolds. Verges are shorn. Village greens are cut to putting height while cottage gardens resemble Las Vegas pool tables.

It is not of course the keeping down of the grass that anyone minds but the universal shortness of it. The Cotswolds are being strimmed into suburbanisation.
It is an irony that it was Stroud’s Edwin Budding who invented the lawn mower in 1830. The Cotswold engineer got the idea from a local cloth mill that used a cutting cylinder to trim fabric. In those early days the only people with mowers were those with big country houses, churches and parks.

However the rest of the country did not stand idly by while the rich, the religious and the local council embraced the machine. They too wanted a sward of sophistication. And when, after World War One, Atco made a mass-produced motor mower it flew out of the nurseries faster than a roqueted croquet ball. Its arrival coincided with the blossoming of the suburban garden and cutting grass quickly became the English townsman’s obsession. It mattered not where the green stuff poked up its head, it was swiftly chopped off. And as the years rolled by the shortness of sod became a sign of civilisation.

There is a popular theory that our love of the lawn is a throwback to our evolutionary past when we scampered about the grassy expanses of Africa. This notion however, does not explain the trimmed and manicured turf so beloved by suburban man.

His love of the perfect weed-free ultra trim supergreen grass lawn was spawned in the post war 50s and 60s, according to the American writer Ted Steinberg.
“With US consumers awash with consumer goods, manufacturers hit on an ingenious way of stimulating demand by appealing to the contemporary taste for conformity and bright colours,” he says.

“Lawn-care companies started selling grass seed mixtures that no longer included clover, a natural fertiliser. Instead the firms urged homeowners to buy expensive chemicals to make up for nutrient shortfall and achieve ever lusher effects. The supergreen lawn, like the hot pink car, soon became a status symbol.”

Britain followed in America’s footsteps, although it didn’t bother with the salmon Cadillac. We began to turn our woolly and frequently wild green and pleasant land into acres that looked as if they had been rolled out from the Axminster Discount Carpet Factory.

Cutting grass became a multi-million pound a year industry. The old push-pull mower with its friendly whirr evolved first into the coughing petrol machine and then into the drone of the rotor mower and the strimmer.
What started as a stroke of Cotswold engineering genius to replace the need for sheep to tidy up an occasional cherished piece of land has been eclipsed by a piece of twirling plastic string that is turning our unkempt countryside into a squaddies’ haircut.
 
For many years the Cotswolds remained aloof from this suburban vandalism. Our grass grew tall and free cheerfully competing for space with nettles, stitchwort, bindweed, brambles and old man’s beard. We liked our verges and greens untidy. Their untended nature offered the same rural charm as rusty corrugated iron and broken tractors. But as the Bonus Boys and the metropolitan downsizers bought up the farmhouses, barns, granaries and cottages they brought with them their plebian scythes.

Now the summer buzz of the strimmer is as common as the swallow’s twitter and the click of the Japanese digital camera. And as it noisily shaves our hills into neat, chlorophyll packages it is changing the nature of this cherished corner of England forever.

The only good news is that the decorated cake tin has, like the long grass, disappeared too. For if its lid depicted a Cotswold hamlet in 2007, it would be a sci-fi horror scene with a creature clad in ear defenders wielding his Darth Vader-like sword, busily destroying a timeless idyll.

Do you agree with David Tyler? Email mike.lowe@archant.co.uk