One of the joys of walking round Romsey is looking at people’s front gardens.

These range from immaculate flower beds or lawns, via more-or-less looked after plots to the neglected. Other owners have paved over their land to provide parking, sometimes with a water-permeable surface but mostly solid so rain adds water to the storm drainage network.

I have identified at least one plot which has artificial grass, albeit surrounded with flower beds.

By contrast, within the old town few houses have front gardens.

Where there are terraces with front gardens, many of these are too shallow to be converted into parking lots and changing fashions of previous eras are apparent. Before the First World War it was common for front gardens to be finished with a small brick wall topped off with a low decorative iron railing and entered through a matching gate, with a tiled pathway leading to the front door. Examples can be seen in Richmond Terrace, Winchester Road, opposite the garage. There are further examples in Station Road and the lower end of Botley Road although most owners have replaced the tiles.

The railings were cut off in the Second World War to add to the country’s stock of metal for war production. Their stumps remain in many a wall and although some have been replaced, many have not, and they can be seen in old photographs.

Between the wars, instead of walls it became common for gardens to be hedged and privet was the plant of choice for this purpose, being more or less evergreen. Who can forget the sweet smell of flowers on an untrimmed privet hedge?

I have never seen any discussion on the provision of the thousands of privet plants that were needed to provide hedges across Britain, but some of them made their way to newly built houses in Alma Road and to nearby Duttons Road and Princes Road.

Privet continued to be used after 1945, but gradually front gardens became more open, with some builders putting restrictions on purchasers that the front gardens were not to be fenced. Most of the Whitenap and Halterworth areas largely contain unfenced front gardens.

The Abbotswood estate was designed so that tiny pieces of land set the houses back from the pavements and owners have dealt with them in various ways, from a hard surface, via plants in pots to plants in the ground. In theory the estate is provided with off-street parking, but I am not sure how this works out in practice.It will be interesting to see how developers and planners set out front gardens, if any, in the future.