The village...

Matte Stephens

Now if you don’t know the village, you can be forgiven for thinking it’s a hot bed of crime, especially if you've read all the tales that go on such as 'the crims' happily nothing could be further from the truth, It just happens over time to have housed a few of the more successful villains in their retirement. Most of its residents are made up of lawyers, bankers, publishers, teachers and the media, but they all come a close second to medical consultants and for some bizarre reason mostly gynaecologists, to such a degree that you can throw a stone from your house and probably be guaranteed to hit one of them.
                                                                                                                

The fact that it has no underground station anywhere near and only allows one single decker bus under duress to pass through it, may have something to do with it’s lack of notoriety and its ability to keep its head below the parapet, and yet it’s far from cut off.

Film and television love the village, they’re usually filming something. An advert for washing powder in a kitchen, crime drama in a drawing room, murder in the park and on one occasion a lesbian orgy in a friends bedroom. The roads line with pantechnicons full of lights and food buses and the resident’s now quite blasé about it all take little notice. An evenings television suddenly becomes more interesting as you realise you’re watching the police interviewing someone in a friend’s house, or your son tells you a raunchy music video has just been shot in one of the teacher's common rooms of his 17c school. In fact quite a few films have used areas of the school, such as the graduation scene in 'Legally Blond'. The areas varied architecture, green spaces, easy parking and close proximity to its own media working environment attract them. But it wasn't until recently when I was looking at houses on one of the location web sites for film and magazine shoots that I realised just how many of the village houses were represented.