Model villages aren’t just for kids

When you leave Bekonscot, the world looks different. The semis and grass verges of suburban Beaconsfield seem slightly wrong: too large, too assertive. It takes a minute or two to adjust your perspective — to size yourself up, or bring the surrounding houses down. In that moment, you experience the sensation described by Will Self in Scale, his morphine-addled hymn to Britain’s most celebrated model village: ‘Some people lose their sense of proportion; I’ve lost my sense of scale.’

Well, supply your own lockdown metaphor. As we emerge, muzzy-headed, from extended voyages around our own living rooms, the government’s recent announcement that we are now free to visit ‘amusement arcades, outdoor skating rinks, social clubs and model villages’ sounded like a bizarre bureaucratic afterthought. In fact, Bekonscot’s one-way system of paths was in place long before any notion of social distancing. The whole scaled-down landscape of towns, industries, harbours and hills was designed to be enjoyed from outdoors.