Dubrovnik Appreciation

Just Jane's pictures of Dubrovnik caused a stray thought to wander into my mind.

What would jolly old England look like, eh? If we hadn't been bombed to buggery in the second world war? Was the general sense that the whole place had to be rebuilt in the 1950s and 1960s responsible for the worst excesses of Town Council Road Improvements etc (qv. Dunstable, which looked quite nice until the mid-60s).

I'll always associate the name Cricklewood with prefab houses, because when I was growing up, you could still see them from the train (from Luton into London). Which I guess means that there really were whole swathes of the country flattened by bombing, which created a general culture of Demolition and Improvement in the name of Modernity.

But somewhere (in another parallel universe) is there an England that still looks more or less how it looked in the 1930s? Probably not.