Elephants in commuterland

Today began, grimly, in Frimley, Surrey - a sorry little place, once a village, now a strip mall with attached business parks, its centre eviscerated in the usual way for ease of motorised access, its principal urban space a mini-roundabout, and everywhere the clutter and litter and all-pervading crappiness that the M25 hinterland does best. Let us never forget that full and happy lives are, no doubt, lived in Frimley, that it is the daily scene of kindness and courage and love and hope. But on any other analysis, it's an authentic hell-hole whose very existence seems to undermine the prospect of there being any good in this world, anywhere, ever.

And yet.... even here there exist possibilities of redemption. Walk down the despoiled high street with its token surviving old building, turn right at the grinding intersection of the A327 and the B3411, and in a hundred yards behold a scene of sheer gratuitous delight. An ancient, twisted oak tree stands at the centre of a mossy green, around which are clustered the eight blocks of the Apex Drive estate: broad-shouldered in pale grey brick, all overhangs and shadows and strange tubular protrusions, each black-framed window an upside-down semicircle, the shape of an eyelid. They gather round the tree like a herd of elephants seeking shade, and to be amongst them is to be sheltered and sustained by large, solid, friendly presences, by dignity and even an odd sort of ugly beauty, in the midst of what is otherwise a howling savannah of dreck. Someone (specifically the architect Lawrence Abbott and the Apex housing association, who built the estate in 1966-9) has thought and cared about this corner of the world, has worked to make it a fit dwelling-place for human beings. In an environment like Frimley that counts for a lot.