The invasion of the wheelie bins

Once I thought nothing could make residential Britain look uglier than pebble-dashing, PVC windows and satellite dishes. I was wrong. As if the country had not been brutally homogenised enough by the fact that every high street has the same shops, now every residential road is reduced to being an identical backdrop for a very persistent invader: the wheelie bin.

Lined up like Daleks, they are breeding in my North London neighbourhood, blocking front gardens and pavements. Outside houses split into flats, where each has its own set, there are actual crowds of these 4.5ft graceless plastic buckets, which come in multiple colours for different sorts of rubbish.

When wheelie bins first started infiltrating our streets just over a decade ago, we valiantly tried to fight back. English Heritage called them ‘an abomination that blighted our streets’, and there was a ‘Not in my front yard’ campaign.

So what happened? After a brief skirmish, total surrender. Today there are millions of wheelie bins spilling across roads the length and breadth of the nation.