After a week of cold, rainy, miserable days I made sure I was prepared for delivering Labour newsletters today by wearing warm tracksuit bottoms and a thick ‘hoodie’. So of course it was a glorious warm morning and I ended up a sweaty heap after walking round half of Langley Green.

The intention was to deliver newsletters to every house in the neighbourhood. We arrived first and took about 500, and I hope enough others turned up after we set out to do all the rest.

I have not really been out in Langley Green on foot much, so it was interesting. You can certainly tell the difference between the older and newer neighbourhoods by the quality of the (mostly ex-)council houses. The older council houses just seem to be so much bigger than the newer ones, and have more space. A lot of them have quite large front gardens, and just seem to be more solid, often with nice brick garden walls and outhouses. When I first moved to Crawley I can remember looking at a place in West Green which had 4 bedrooms, a couple of attached brick sheds and an upstairs landing large enough to act as an office.

Along Martyrs Avenue there are a number of houses/maisonettes which use the same design as in parts of Southgate and Tilgate, where they are in a long block of four with two ‘front’ doors on each end. This means that the front doors face the front doors of the next block and inbetween there is a sort of courtyard effect, which is very familiar from delivering and canvassing in other parts of town, accentuated by the rear brick wall with gates to the back gardens.

I always found this effect to look appealing. Some people have made a great feature of this shared space, but then it occurred to me that this arrangement really does depend on having neighbours you get on with. You can see how some people use that space to mingle with each other, but if you don’t get along I imagine it is a hellish layout to live with.

We felt good about having got a load of stuff delivered, and then came home to see our own pile of Broadfield South newsletters (about 3000 of them) staring at us accusingly. About time to start on them I think.