I went to Derbyshire and saw some rocks. Some of the rocks were iron age forts, but they look much the same as the rocks that weren’t iron age forts.
45 minutes on the train, so it counts as local.
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That’s the Derbyshire people imagine when I mention I’m from there, not the ‘between Nottingham, Sheffield and Derby cheap ex-mining commuter town’.
It’s very lovely in the countryside
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I know it’s North-American-centric of me, but it still blows my mind that there is any “countryside” left in Britain.
I mean, where do y’all live!? Your island is the size of the Toronto, more-or-less! Okay, okay, maybe the Toronto-to-Montreal corridor, but… it’s small!
Beautiful pictures, though! And don’t mind my tiny brain’s inability to scale human habitation appropriately, but it is a constant source of amazement for me.
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Tiny houses (comparatively to the US) is the answer. My normal sized three bed is around 1000 ft3.
Lots of our land is completely unbuildable, and the NIMBYs make sure that houses aren’t built where they are needed but the countryside stays at least
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It is all in small pockets. This area is only really a single valley where most roads are hidden. Get to the precipice of the hill and the roads and towns are very apparent. The Peak District is quite broken up in that way into interconnected pockets of beauty. And even most of the protected park is active farmland (this area is grazed by sheep).
The Lake District is slightly better for ‘real countryside’ and the Highlands much more so.
The areas claim to fame is that a few valleys over from where these photos were taken is where the bouncing bomb prototypes were practiced. I’ll take some photos next time I’m down that way.
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It’s very expensive in the countryside 
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Can’t argue with that
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Depends whereabouts in the countryside.
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London alone accounts for almost 15% of the UK’s population
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Also, a lot of us do not live in houses but flats and those stack up quite nicely. I recommend playing The Estates 
In the imminent future, living is going to be even more concentrated in the cities over here. We even coined a new word for that: “Nachverdichtung” which means building ever denser where there is already no more country side in an attempt to protect what’s left of it. In Munich for example they have done experiments with building “living spaces” above parking lots…
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In those shots of the castle in Highlander, a friend of mine who played with some of the reenactors they got for the battle scenes insisted on pointing out where they’d matted out the motorway on the other side of the valley.
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London has a larger population than all of Scotland. Which still somehow seems wrong.
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Land with planning permission is worth a lot more than farmland. So much so that houses come with very little land, as compared to North America. Here’s a satellite view of the street where I live, which has quite a lot of green space by local standards. Pan around a bit, and you’ll see that many streets have less.
My first time in North America was in the suburbs of Boston, where I could not get over the way they wasted land. Lots of it around each building, not being used for anything!
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In Cat People (the one with Nastassia Kinski, which is one of my favorite films), there is a scene where the camera shows us that we are at the corner of Erato and Annunciation, a lovely cultural reference that quite fits the Catholic atmosphere of the film. But I looked up that location online and found that it’s about half a block from a freeway onramp that the camera angle carefully avoided showing us.
We’re in a three bedroom apartment (about two-thirds the rent of our last California apartment, which had one bedroom). It’s 890 square feet and feels fairly spacious; we have lots of art on the walls, which we were never able to find space for in California.
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I love it when people think that the UK is crowded. Coming from an island that is roughly 50km by 40 km, with nearly 1 million inhabitants (870.000 plus nearly 200.000 tourist ‘beds’) and considering that a good quarter of the surface is mountain/forest… I think the UK is half empty. Hardly any flats (!)
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I guess it’s a weird lens but I always assume American homes are massive, like 4,000 ft3 massive.
I guess that’s true in flyover states.
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As a resident of a flyover state, I can confirm. 1500-2000 sqft would be pretty average around here. The newer the house, the bigger, in general.
I bought a 4400 sqft, 20-year old house for about $106/sqft. We sold our old house that was 1500 sqft for about $175/sqft. In contrast, I happened across a south Greenwich Village (NYC) apartment listing the other day: 1500 sqft apartment for $3 million ($2000/sqft). My sister lives in a rural community about 40 miles away from me and her house is probably 900 sqft and probably $25-30/sqft.
Talking with a coworker the other day and he says my current house is on par with where he is in Rhode Island, near Boston
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London flats are absolute shoeboxes, and land around them is non-existent. When I was younger I stayed with a family outside Baltimore and they pointed out their neighbours… three fields away. I felt like saying “What are you, millionaires?!” (They very much weren’t, but a tiny bit of green land costs a LOT in the UK).
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