old brick houses being spoiled

In response to John Lawrence's now-deleted comment.
Why photograph something ypu be;leve to be ugly?

To draw attention to the fact, and also a way of expressing my distress, instead of letting it simmer inside. The above houses are not particularly ugly, as they do at least have their original windows, but it's such a shame when the old brickwork is destroyed.

Just one house can spoil a whole street, as it sticks out like a sore thumb, and then others follow suit and the area becomes a hotchpotch of clashing colours, with the subtle shades of brick now lost forever.

I used to live in a big city, where it was like looking for a needle in a haystack to find a single private house that was still in its original state. And this change happened virtually overnight, in the late 80s or early 90s.

Fortunately, the situation is not so bad in Oxford, where they have several 'conservation areas' which forbid exterior wall painting and UPVC replacement windows. I am lucky to live in one such area, but it's like shutting the stable after the horse has bolted, because many houses had already been spoiled before the regulations came into force. However, the good news is that anyone replacing their plastic windows now has to revert back to wood!

example of a 'sore thumb'

It's a craze. They'll revert to their original state when it's over.

If this is a 'craze', it's been going on for more than three decades now.

Four decades ago, drives and front gardens were paved in the then-fashionable "crazy paving" - a matrix of odd-shaped chunks of broken pavement slabs with mortar filling the gaps, usually without proper excavation or foundation, and hence liable to break apart within a short time.