More than once already in the preceding pages mention has been made of the obliteration of English villages. The process is notorious and inevitable. Expostulation is futile, lament tedious. This is part of the grand cyclorama of spoliation which surrounded all English experience in this century and any understanding of the immediate past ... must be incomplete unless this huge deprivation of the quiet pleasures of the eye is accepted as a dominant condition, sometimes making for impotent resentment, sometimes for mere sentimental apathy, sometimes poisoning a love of country and of neighbours. To have been born into a world of beauty, to die amid ugliness, is the common fate of all us exiles.

— Evelyn Waugh, A Little Learning