The new development, its builders will say, will look like an English countryside village. It will be called Mayfair – a countryside village bearing the name of very pricey but decidedly urban London neighborhood.
Except, it’s nowhere near the countryside. It will be on Rea Road, deep in the heart of south Charlotte’s suburbia.
In England, of course, country villages are in the countryside – and the countryside is protected from development by powerful planning laws that set growth boundaries around each village. Unlike North Carolina, in England developers can’t fling subdivisions into the countryside. That’s why Americans think the English countryside is so beautiful they’re willing to buy into ersatz England in south Charlotte. They just don’t want to let our government try anything to protect our countryside. We want picturesque England without any of the hard political work required to create and maintain it.
And it’s not a village. It’s a cluster of 59 townhomes on 11 acres. It’s about a mile down Rea Road from a shopping center, which is decidedly not the same thing as the traditional English cluster of small shops. An English village has houses, stores, churches, pubs, schools – all within a close walk of one another. An English village is not a clump of townhouses, no matter how cutely designed with faux half-timbering, marketed to the relatively narrow slice of society, who can afford $300,000 to $500,000 dwellings.
Oh, and just in case you wanted that neighborly feel – you know, the kind of warm welcome you usually find if you visit an English village pub or tea shop, a sense of being invited to be part of their community, if only for a few hours? The “English countryside village” will be gated. You are not welcome there. Prince Charles and Camilla are not welcome there.
In England, a countryside village does not have a locked gate around it.
The motto of the state of North Carolina is Esse quam videre – to be rather than to seem. And in Charlotte, people wonder why the rest of the state thinks Charlotte isn’t really part of North Carolina.