[Glice]

I think the thing for me is that I've known all of them. There's a quite complicated continuum from City-suburb-country for me. To the rural hamlet, I was raised in the suburbs; to the city-dweller (particularly London), I'm the backwater yokel.

There's diversity in suburbs, you see - there's a big difference between city outskirts and commuter belts. Outside Bristol, for instance, you have somewhere like Portishead, which I view as Avonmouth commuters and local industrial houses (largely 20th-century) while somewhere like Long Ashton is ex-country rarified commuter living. Further down the road - in fact, all the villages flanking the A38 - you get variable degrees of disconnection. Winscombe is suburban council house terror, Sandford is cider-drenched industrial commuters, Wrington the 'rural' idyll for people without farms, Churchill is authentic (but small) commuter suburbia, Banwell is a lapsed village community... in fact, I'm struggling to think of local areas that are authentically 'country' - the little hamlets outside Yeovil that aren't filled with Etonite hunt supporters or somewhere like Hewish/ Wick St Lawrence maybe?

Anyway. Long story short, this thread is further proof to me that Londoners very rarely have any meaningful sense of perspective on the world, with due deference to my esteemed colleague Herr Rail.