Home grown...

I remember the first time I drove across the border into Scotland in 1980, I was aware of a change in the domestic architecture. I'm sure it wasn't as abrupt a change as memory suggests, but I recall the village houses lining the roads as being more severe/austere, greyer, harder up against the road edge.

Sitting alongside my pleasure in accent/dialect is my delight in the regional variation in building styles in the UK. In Yorkshire, particularly in (what I have so far seen of) the dales and moors, the village houses look as though they have grown out of the earth - organic. They are solid, boxy, generally unpretentious and often of a glorious creamy-gold, or darker. Sometimes the building material looks less like stone, which it is, than like rammed earth. These buildings seem to belong in and compliment their landscape in a way that much New Zealand domestic architecture (at least of recent decades) does not.

And here a touristy complaint! It can be very difficult to photograph little villages from a good vantage point because it is almost impossible to stop on  UK roadsides to take a photo. And then it can be very difficult to take a photo that is not jam-packed full of parked cars!!!  But I will persevere and, in the meantime here is a building in Helmsley that, although more substantial, has some of the qualities I am describing.