This seems as good a place as any to trot out one of my Pommy Pet Peeves.
The motor car has been a fact of life in England for a century or more, now, but the city planners seem to have entered into a conspiracy to ignore its existence. Streets in new estates are narrow to the point of absurdity. New estates also very rarely have anywhere to park on the road at all, the assumption being, presumably, that you will never want more cars than you have garage space for. The streets on the estate I currently live on, built in the early 1960s, are wider than modern ones. But they are still too narrow to have legally parked cars on both sides of the road, plus a space between the parked cars on opposite sides of the road wide enough to allow two meeting cars to pass.
Everybody therefore puts at least two wheels up on the footpath which is, strictly speaking, illegal.
This is just one facet of the anti-car official British attitude which I find inexplicable, given that the people who organise and run the diastrous railway network couldn't run a successful booze-up in a brewery.
