Please send letters for the website, clearly marked FORUM, to Julia Dawson at: julia.dawson@emap.com or The Architectural Review, Greater London House, Hampstead Road, London NW1 7EJ, England. . SEASIDE SHUFFLE SIR: First allow me to say ‘Welcome’ before bringing your readers’ attention to the ongoing degradation of an environment close to home – ours. I’d been hearing ‘Seaside’ and ‘design coding’ mentioned together quite frequently of late so I thought I’d pay a visit. I went to the Seaside website to book a B&B but what I didn’t expect to find was over half the town’s housing stock available to stay in on daily rates. I browsed reservation calendars, saw how many were vacant over Thanksgiving and Christmas and concluded that Seaside is not a place people come home to. Not in any real sense. Like Portmeirion its photogenic predecessor, Seaside is a place for meetings, photo-shoots and short breaks. The already fine line between fantasy and reality vanishes when it presents itself as a venue for weddings, family reunions and any occasion you might have thought of going home for. Seaside is there for you as the hometown you never had, and with its design-coded hyper-reality, home needn’t have been a project, trailer park, or prefab to compare unfavourably. So hello Greenside, Meadowside and Leaside! Our love affair (and our government’s love affair) with the property ladder means that, like Seaside, our housing stock doesn’t function as housing either, and that exploiting its users is a source of personal (and national) wealth. Bottom-feeding people onto the property ladder with cheaper houses merely enables more people to afford to exploit those who can’t. Real communities can’t exist under such conditions so maintaining the illusion of them becomes paramount. A community is a dream for living in, a new type of hell where the smell of bread baking is outside as well. Post-Modernism showed us the intrinsic shallowness of four hundred years of Palladian imagery selling us the artistic, philosophical, enlightened and democratic society we never had but wanted to believe we did. Georgian terraces were successful product because they combined the extremely buildable Tudor plan with those hugely popular facades embodying the new aspirations. The conditions are almost in place for it to happen again. Mass production methods are still out there, like free radicals, waiting for the right ‘need’ to combine with and replicate the product we crave. And our deputy prime minister is the Inigo Jones – no, the Lord Burlington – of our times, bringing us new pattern books illustrating the welcoming, supportive and functioning communities we’re never going to have, but will want to pretend we do. New Urbanism? ‘I’m lovin’ it!’ Yours etc GRAHAM MCKAY London SW11, UK