Why some foreigners in Britain build over back gardens, poach fish, kill swans and engage in fly-tipping on an industrial scale in beauty spots

It is a matter of common observation that many of those from other countries have a different set of values when it comes to some kinds of behaviour

Those living in England will probably be aware of certain things, about which they will not speak out loud. One of these is the propensity for foreigners who buy a house with a back garden to pave over this space and then perhaps to erect an annex. Sometimes, this serves as an extra bedroom, but it can also be a miniature home which can be rented out to fellow-countrymen.  A quick look on the aerial view from Google Earth will show that in some parts of larger cities, almost all the back gardens in a street have been built over in this way and lost for good.

     Then too, there is the fact that when looking at local news-sites about cases of fly-tipping on an industrial scale in some country lane or rural beauty spot, perhaps the contents of a house which have been ripped out, prior to redevelopment, the culprits always appear to be foreigners. Often, they are Polish, Romanian or Pakistani, but very seldom are they ordinary British names. The same applies when somebody is taken to court for illegal fishing out of season, killing a swan or picking 50kg of mushrooms from somewhere like Epping Forest, on the edge of London.

     Sometimes, our initial reaction is to mutter, ‘Bloody foreigners!’ and leave it at that, but a few moments thought will soon tell us that there is a little more to the case than just a bunch of greedy and selfish people behaving in anti-social ways. We ask ourselves why somebody from Bulgaria or Bangladesh will trash a nature reserve or destroy a back garden in this way, while the English, by and large, will not. The answer lies in English history.

     Three hundred years ago, any ordinary person who had a spare piece of land would use it for growing food or keeping animals. Land was a vital resource and cultivating it was a matter of survival. For the average person, a ‘garden’ meant a kitchen garden, somewhere that one grew vegetables and herbs to eat. This was not of course the case with the wealthy or aristocratic. They had plenty of land and it was an important display of one’s status and financial position to show that the land owned could be used for frivolous and unnecessary purposes, rather than merely to produce food. Peasants might have to use fields for growing crops like wheat or barley, but a rich landowner could afford to leave the equivalent of half a dozen fields around his home as grass and to cut them regularly to make an agreeable and aesthetically pleasing setting for his large house. In the same way, rather than growing useful things such as potatoes, beds would be given over to flowers.

     All this was what is sometimes known as ‘conspicuous consumption’, that is to say making a display of the extent to which one can use large quantities of something merely for show, or even waste it entirely. Lighting a cigar with a £10 note falls into this same category. By using valuable land just to grow grass and flowers, a man could demonstrate visually that he had no need for economy, that he could afford to be profligate and wasteful with  a resource which others were compelled to use to full advantage and husband carefully.  So it was that flower beds and lawns became symbolic of financial security.

     In nineteenth century England, the growing middle class wished to distance themselves from the rural peasantry and industrial working-class, and what better way to do so than to emulate those rich men in their country houses, albeit on a smaller scale? Of course, the average doctor or company director could not hope to have the rolling acres of the landed gentry, but they could at least show that they did not need to make use of what land they did have and could simply use it for show. So it was that the lawn in the back garden was born. It symbolised the grounds of a manor house.

     This kind of thing reached its heights of course with the suburbs. Those living there could aspire to live in their own, miniature country estate; in a Tudor-style manor house surrounded by its own little grounds. This was an attractive proposition indeed for bank managers and shopkeepers; that they might live in the style of Elizabethan landowners, rather than being stuck in drab and featureless city streets of identical houses.  This was of course the origin of the so-called ‘mock Tudor’ house.   The mock-Tudor style, more correctly known as Tudor Revival, was part of the Arts and Crafts movement of Victorian Britain. It was meant as a counter to the Gothic and Neo-Georgian styles which were so popular in the nineteenth century. Houses of that type in central London do not generally run to gardens. Tudor Revival harked back to the Elizabethan Age of domestic tranquillity and rural charm. The aim was to produce buildings which looked rather like Sixteenth Century manor houses or cottages; with wood beams showing against white, plastered walls, instead of brickwork. Of course, from the very beginning, a degree of deception and artifice was needed in order to reproduce the architectural style of that era.  The exposed, dark wooden beams that we see on genuine Elizabethan houses are actually supporting structures; they are necessary to hold up the building. Typically, the framework of the building would be wooden and the walls made of plaster and lathe. The distinctive visual appearance was no more than a by-product of the methods and material used to make the thing. In mock-Tudor or Tudor revival, such external features are typically a sham. The structure itself is built from bricks, like any normal house. Then a plaster coat is applied to the outside and planks fixed to the exterior walls. This results in a crude pastiche of a Sixteenth Century building, artificially manufactured for purely aesthetic reasons.

     Those coming to this country from Eastern Europe or the Indian sub-continent do not share this peculiar desire of so many English people to create a miniature version of a country estate in a London street. When they see land, they view it as a resource. It is something to be built on, if you own it yourself. Why on earth would you wish to spend the weekend mowing a lawn or pruning roses? Far better to have an extra room to live in or, better still, a small flat which can be rented out for a profit. Most foreigners buying houses in this country are bemused at the idea that they should just leave that patch of land at the back of their house to go to waste.

     In much the same way, the English like to visit publicly owned areas of beautiful land, whether Richmond Park and Epping Forest on the outskirts of London, or larger stretches such as Dartmoor or the Peak District. They revel in the idea that this is lovely grass, trees and hills which belongs to them and is solely for their pleasure, so that they can just look at it. This too is an alien concept for people from poorer countries, where any bit of the countryside is there to be taken advantage of; a resource to be exploited to the full. It is for this reason that a Romanian builder might see the verges of a lane in Epping Forest as the ideal place to dump a van full of rubbish. He is using a natural resource. A lake full of fish is similarly something waiting to be taken advantage of. The concept of a ‘close season’, when for a quarter of the year you are unable to fish by law is a bizarre one and will be disregarded. Catch and release is similarly not something to be observed. If you catch some big fish, take them home for your dinner. Large bird like a swan or goose? You may as well take that as well, it will make a change from buying a chicken from the supermarket.

     In almost all the world, attitudes such as these are the rule. It is the English notion of the garden and beauty spot which are the oddity and it is hardly to be wondered at that with so many people coming to the country from foreign countries, the conventions which have grown up here over the centuries are regarded as being quaint affectations, rather than anything which should be taken seriously.