Imagine a geometric pattern of raw, red brick, made up of long straight streets of terraced houses criss-crossing each other, with a more or less central square fronted with shops and a war memorial in the middle; several churches and pubs, a large two piece block of "elementary" schools, and further away a smaller brick built secondary school; lots of little shops on street corners; a beautifully kept cemetery on the western edge of the town; its lowest side taken up by almost entirely the L.M.S. carriage works and McCorquodale's printing works; a cinema and post office, "science and art" institute; two highly superior houses belonging to our doctors; the whole plumped down in the middle of gently undulating green fields and cornlands with solid red brick farm houses; the town bypassed by the Grand Junction canal as one boundary, and the slowly flowing river Ouse winding its way through willow bordered meadows as another. Imagine all this, and you have a rough bird's eye view of my home town, Wolverton* in North Buckinghamshire.

* Now part of the new city of Milton Keynes