11 JUNE 1994, Page 21

TIME TO END THIS MOTORWAY MADNESS

The weekend cottage is a sham, a snare

and a delusion, says Nicholas Coleridge,

who has given his up

A COUPLE of weekends ago we had Sun- day lunch with three other couples and our respective children in the garden of a Greek restaurant in Notting Hill. Towards the end of this long, sunny lunch, while the children charged happily about between the tables, we celebrated an interesting coincidence. All of us had recently given up our weekend cottages. Two years earli- er, we variously rented or owned second homes in Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Suffolk and Shropshire. Since then, with- out collusion, we've quietly let them go, and there was a collective air of relief.

`Do you realise,' reflected one of our party, 'it's ten past three now, and if we still had the cottage the next four and a half hours would be spent packing up and on the motorway?'

`Not from Ludlow,' replied another. 'If we wanted to get back into London not too late for the children's bedtime, we had to start loading the car before lunch.'

For 30 years it has been the ambition of every doing-OK British couple to have a weekend cottage. No sooner has the Lon- don home been purchased and decorated,

than a second, much less comfortable bolt- hole must be procured in which to spend all available leisure time. In 1991, accord- ing to the most up-to-date Mintel report, there were 220,000 second homes in Britain, predominantly weekend cottages for Londoners. Ideally, these Cotswold stone or Tudor-beamed havens are situated within 90 minutes' drive of Marble Arch, close enough for an effortless sprint down the dual carriageway on Friday evening and back up again after tea on Sunday. Once arrived, there is little to do except relax in a deckchair and admire the hollyhocks and sweet-peas, before returning invigorated to the Big Smoke. It is a myth that persists even when almost a decade of personal experience has exposed it as a sham, a snare and a delusion.

The Friday-night escape from London now takes about half again as long as it did in 1984, making a mockery of the 'distance from London' estimates in estate agents' advertisements, and also the travelling times handed out to friends by weekenders themselves. If anyone tells me the journey takes two hours door-to-door I automati- cally allow three. If they admit to three hours, I interpret this as five. Unless you are heading for Berkshire, it is now pretty well impossible to arrive anywhere in time for dinner on Friday night, unless you leave your office straight after lunch. The Al2 to East Anglia is a disaster, and after two hours in the car you probably haven't even reached first base and are stuck in Rom- ford, or crawling past the landmark furni- ture store that specialises in leather sofas and footstools.

The A20 to Kent takes the prize for the worst route out of London. In our car we kill time counting the ethnic restaurants through Catford and Bromley and accruing points for certain different nationalities. The great M4 is hell to get on to at Heston and large sections are currently single-lane for mile after mile. The A40 is bumper to bumper as far as Denham, ditto the M3 approach road to Sunbury. (If this article is reading like radio traffic news, then so be it; at least it doesn't involve the Dartford Tunnel or the Hanger Lane gyratory sys- tem.) The M1 1 is sheer hell, even assuming you can find it, ditto the Al which has been single-lane between cones for much of my adult life. Even the A3 to Liphook and Portsmouth, dramatically improved in recent years, is a curse to get on to unless you're briefed about avoiding Putney High Street, and has converted weekender terri- tory into dormitory villages for commuters.

These days it is not unusual to spend a total of eight hours on the road simply get- ting to and from a weekend cottage. This takes a tremendous slice out of the week- end itself. Blanking out Friday evening and most of Sunday afternoon for travelling, you are left with only 37 hours. Of these, 18 (Friday and Saturday night) are spent asleep. This leaves only 19 (the whole of Saturday, plus Sunday morning and lunch), which brings me on to loading the car and how another large tranche of time disap- pears into a lacuna.

By the time you arrive home from the office on Friday evening, change and embark upon the loading it is probably already 7 p.m. and dark. Since there's never anywhere to park outside your house, the car is double-parked with the hazard lights flashing, and each time you open the passenger door it is in danger of being severed by passing traffic. A family of four, including small children, necessi- tates 14 to 16 items of baggage, mostly consisting of carrier bags bulging with stray pairs of shoes, gumboots, 'booster' seats, talking books and snacks for the journey. If you have babies, then the back seat of the car will be entirely taken up by enor- mous car seats, wider than first-class seats on a 747, which further restrict the space for luggage.

The car cannot at any time be left unlocked, nor can the boot be left open. To do so is to invite theft, followed by a dressing-down by the local police for facili- tating petty crime. Nor, of course, can the

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front door of your house be left unlocked. Consequently, as you make your dozen or so journeys with overnight bags, carrycots and bundles of linen, you have to lock and unlock the doors every time — probably a total of 30 separate wrist actions. Unless all members of the loading party have a full set of keys, then these will need to be passed to and fro on the kerb, a routine guaranteed to raise the tension level. Arriving at the cottage at 11 o'clock, you repeat the exercise, heaving the suitcases upstairs to the correct bedrooms and reassembling travel cots, only to dismantle them again on Sunday and repack the boot, before unloading the whole lot from another double-parked car.

Unless you are lucky enough to have a permanent housekeeper to cope with the weekend shopping, or a well-organised wife who doesn't work, the chances are you will wake up on Saturday morning without provisions. This presents you with two options. The first is to stock up in the village shop, the existence of which you first read about in the bus-shelter where a poster is displayed as part of the campaign to save it. When we rented a cottage in Gloucestershire, there was exactly such a shop in the next village. In our ignorance, we imagined our fellow villagers shopped there, and that this would be an effective way of acclimatising. For four consecutive weekends our menus were entirely built around village shop produce: scotch eggs, cup-cakes, white sliced loaves, Matesson's processed ham, hairy courgettes as big as fireworks, withered carrots and potatoes with giant cactus-shaped green shoots. The prices made Cullen's seem like CostCo. After that, we switched to the edge-of- town hypermarket like everyone else, where with the ease of a 40-minute drive (each way) we could find all the good stuff arranged along aisles identical to London.

There are two kinds of weekend cottages to be rented in modern Britain. The first are via agents and are priced like perma- nent homes. Four hundred pounds a week around Oxford isn't considered excessive for a three-bedroom, one-bath getaway with ten square feet of lawn. The second sort are cottages on landowners' estates rented to weekenders not liable to become sitting tenants. This second kind generally costs about a sixth as much as the first sort, and has more primitive plumbing, night storage heaters and immersion tanks over the baths capable of filling up a small wash- ing-up bowl with hot water.

For six years we rented just such a cot- tage, with honeysuckle around the door, in one of the prettiest privately owned vil- lages in the Midlands. Our landlord charged much less than the going rent, and hardly complained when our front garden full of squitch grass sabotaged prospects for the best-kept village award summer after summer. Winter weekends were bitterly cold. Until we had children this barely mattered, since we spent Febru- ary afternoons siesta-ing in bed. But the longer we had the cottage the more we noticed a very odd thing: bit by bit, it began to resemble our London house. This pro- cess began slowly. First we painted the sit- ting-room walls an identical Chinese yellow to our London drawing-room. Then we added almost identical lamps. The sofa covers were next. Then we swapped round a lot of furniture and books and some paintings, and found ourselves arranging and hanging them in Gloucestershire in the same configuration as before. By the time we left the cottage we could hardly tell which place we were in. Our weekends felt like we'd stayed at home, just taken two epic drives in the car.

Unless you are an MP and an address in your constituency is mandatory, or unless you own a helicopter, it is hard to see the advantages of weekending. Quite apart from the deteriorating traffic, the country is between three and four degrees colder than London, the regional television sta- tions never show the interesting pro- grammes (a fact you don't realise until too late: Central and Midland are listed in tiny type at the foot of the telly pages), and you can't even travel there by rail any more because it costs so much to take your whole family by train, and then you need one, if not two, taxis from the station. Only from May to July do we really miss the cottage, when London parks are hazy with traffic fumes, and we become nostalgic for proper lawns and herbaceous borders. Then we long to be invited away to stay by family and friends. As the children get bigger, we may come to miss it even more. For the time being, the money we are saving annu- ally in petrol alone almost pays for an Ital- ian villa for three weeks in August.

The weekend cottage is part of the dream of 'having it all', but the infrastructure can no longer cope. Elsewhere in the world it is different. From Manhattan you can reach Long Island or some gated community in Connecticut in little more than a hour and a half, and be confident that every village has a Fortnum's-standard deli selling lobster mousse and bitter orange cheesecake. From Hong Kong you can reach a weekend house in Saikung in 50 minutes. From Rome it's quicker still. From Central London, after 50 minutes, you are stationary in Chiswick or Barnes. Which suggests a possible solution. In the 18th century, Chiswick, Barnes and Kew were the popular weekend destina- tions. Shouldn't they become so again, if the existing residents can be induced to make way? The idea of leaving the motorway at exit one rather than exit 17 is appealing. Or, better still, stay put in London Proper (as the Indians call it), where the hot water tank bubbles like a geyser and weekends still comprise both a Friday and a Sunday evening.

Nicholas Coleridge is managing director of the Conde Nast Publications.