Hi Selma I can't apologise enough if I upset you over my observations of your gated community or not.
I will repeat that your premises are not a gated community as conventionally understood and what I have seen elsewhere. Minimally, a gated community lives within a clearly demarcated area that has a gate that keeps people out until permitted to enter by a resident or some kind of guard at the gate. Your premises had no gate in sight, nor a concierge to stop me getting in my car to your front door. A simple photograph would confirm my point. OK, there may have been cameras (assuming they were switched on) monitoring who gets in and out, but virtually every building in Greater London has surveillance by camera. Therefore, I want to suggest that if it was so easy for me to enter unchallenged, and also to leave your ungated area without a guard in sight, you may want to question the people who advertised the place to you as a gated community. I think you may have questions for them and on reflection may want to thank me for drawing your attention to this important point and not get taken in by the rhetoric of those renting/selling the place on false pretences. It is of course possible that, as people visit the site because flats are for sale, open entry becomes essential to the sellers of properties there, and an encouragement to people to drive into the site on the spur of the moment. Of course too, this further reduces any claim of it being a gated community at present! You refer to 100,000 people living in gated communities in the UK. This is in a population of 60,000,000 thus constituting only .0017 as a proportion of the population. A drop in the ocean surely and hardly worth emphasising as an illustration of the middle classes "huddling" together in gated communities--the main point of your piece. Further, .0017 of the residential population in gated communities could easily be missed even by satellite photography and would therefore readily be missed by me when driving around merely noting middle and working class areas. Wouldn't you agree? Let me finish by saying that the essence of what I said about the middle classes not living in gated communities in the UK definitely holds. It was the opposite of what you said and my statistical figure confirms this. Once again, I offer my unstinting apologies if I upset you. This was not the intention at all. I merely wanted to challenge your concept of a gated community on an open forum and in reply to your post on an open forum. Cornel PS The wrought iron decorative fence at the back of the premises was low enough and beautifully curvaceous and without spikes for any arthritic fellow like me to easily get over. It was no barrier consistent with the term a gated community! --- Carvalho <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > --- On Mon, 6/23/08, CORNEL DACOSTA > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Oh dearie, dearie me, > I have no idea what this outburst is all about. I'm > sorry you didn't think my residence to be a gated > community. I'll have to take it up with the lettings > agent that sold it to us as one. It could also just > be that you missed the wrought-iron gates around it...