Cul-de-sac, from the French, bottom of the bag, or bottom of the sack, a dead end street. If you care to look at a cul-de-sac on a map, it looks like a crude drawing of a cock, so the sack is an appropriate word for that bulbous, often circular space at the end of many British cul-de-sacs that exploded (and I use that word explicitly) after World War 2.
Cul-de-sacs and dead end streets are not unique to these weird isles, of course. But there is something distinct about their status.
Cul-de-sacs differ from dead end streets, the former occur in more affluent British housing estates. A dead end street has been abandoned, given up on, or overwhelmed by what shuts it off – maybe a railway line or a motorway, a supermarket car park. Drive your car up and dead end street and you probably have to reverse out. Whereas a cul-sac-sac is genteel, your car can be turned to face the opposite direction gracefully, if not in one smooth manoeuvre, then maybe only two or three. A cul-de-sac will not embarrass you.
Sit in your car, or just hang around at the end of a cul-de-sac for too long and you will be noticed and surreptitiously eyed with suspicion.
A dead end street is very different. It’s a cliché in TV crime. You will sense danger, and, if you are fleeing from a gang, a hit man, the police, there’s a wall at the end, or a rusty eight foot fence. You have to scramble over, the enemy at your heels, only to find, on the other side, a canal or an allotment, and your fall will take through a greenhouse roof.
The British cul-de-sac is a haven, an enclave of lawns, hydrangeas, roses, Sunday dinners and blokes washing their cars, whistling, or listening to Radio Two.
President George W Bush did not say ‘the French have no word for entrepreneur’, but he did say ‘I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully’ and ‘Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?’ but he looks like man of calm rationality compared to that tangerine fact-mangler.
But the English do have no word for ‘cul-de-sac’ and it’s this: ‘close’, the ‘close’ being a road that offers no route through. To live in a close on a relatively modern estate in the UK is know that you don’t live on a rat run, a short cut, a route for the scary and screaming acceleration of, usually, young men in Fiestas, Civics or Clios.
The word clos, the same word without the e, means, in French, a walled garden, usually a vineyard. And the etymology of the word Paradise is a from the Persian for walled garden. A close is a paradise. A cul de sac is the Garden of Eden.
Roman Polanski’s 1966 film Cul-de-Sac was shot on the island of Lindisfarne, Northumberland, off the the north east coast of England. The cul-de-sac here is the rising tide. Lindisfarne hs a causeway allowing access at low tide, but leave it too long and you can be cut off, stranded.
And at this point I am stranded, I have reached the end of the cul-de-sac and cannot spin the story around or reverse. I have no option but to wind the window down, listen to the song of the suburbs, the happy lives of those cut off from the modern world, living in a paradise of bungalows, birdfeeders and budgerigars.
(The above is a transcript from my podcast ‘These Weird Isles’ – available via Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Soundcloud etc).