Nea Meadows

Walking around Nea Meadows you'd think you were out in the countryside somewhere, and until the post war expansion in housing, you would have been. The area was an expanse of farm and heath land, a sparsely occupied buffer between Christchurch town and Highcliffe village, now one continuous conurbation, though Nea remains as a natural oasis in 'Bungalow Land', the post war urban sprawl, and a reminder of what was. Most of the developments took place before I lived around here, though in the last 40 years I've seen many of the remaining pockets of green swallowed up, until today very few remain. It's a lovely parcel of land too, grassland and woodland with a fair sized lake fed by two rivulets.  And, even though it's an island in a sea of housing, it's still and quiet, and it's not hard to imagine yourself far from the madding crowd.