Couldn't it just?
But that may be exactly where the problem lies. I can already hear the critics sighing about the soullessness and artifice of it all, the Pleasantville two-dimensionality. And the deeper you look, the more substantive this argument becomes. Even the Evening Standard article – which is laudatory - coyly adds: "Covenants are in place preventing residents from painting the exterior of their homes a different color." (At least I think it’s laudatory; I might be misreading British irony and the author actually considers the project an abomination.)
Perhaps my favorite part is that the Surrey Hamptons aren’t just about bringing a Long Island feel to the Isles, but that the settlement conveys a synthesized New England experience. "Providence Place, where life is complete," the homepage boasts - a more-likely-than-not allusion to Providence, Rhode Island. It reminded me of the surprisingly postmodern Babe 2: Pig in the City where "the city" is an amalgam of famous landmarks from various metropolises (image taken from from here):
Or the scene in The West Wing in which White House Communications Director Toby Ziegler rants against the Jamestown Mayflower Daughters of the American Revolution Preservation Society – "Jamestown was the sixteenth century. The Mayflower landed at Plymouth in the seventeenth century. The fathers of the Daughters of the American Revolution fought in? The eighteenth century!" (The exact quote is from Television Without Pity, which I strongly urge you to steer away from unless you possess a very high degree of self-discipline).
As for the prep dimension: prepsterdom, as argued before, harks back to an idealized New England (discounting Southern Prep for the moment, which is a phenomenon unto itself). And, of course, the name in itself speaks volumes. To state the obvious: the Puritans had a habit of naming their cities upon hills after English precedents - including Southampton, Hampshire, after which the Long Island Hamptons take their name. And now, The Hamptons have been re-imported to the UK, as an airbrushed caricature of the New England lifestyle (i.e., prepsterdom). A lifestyle which in itself owes so many things to rebelling against but at the same time emulating the original, not unlike the way children rebel against their parents but still end up resembling them. And there's more than a hint of artifice about the development - "like a theme park," as Mr. Spittles argues.
The greater meaning of The Hamptons, Surrey? Though showrooms have barely opened, the properties are selling like hot cakes - "Young couples and growing families are driving demand […] the Worcester Park address is seen as a good value, child-friendly location." So for now, I’ll leave it at "Certain British people like the thought of living in a community which looks like a perfected cliché of New England, pure and clean without the potential complexities of 'real' communities. Which is ironic because New England was founded by British settlers who either had to leave or wanted to escape England and what they perceived as decadence and spiritual corruption, 'a country that's nothing more than the dried husk America came out of.'" (Just quoting.)
Check out The Hamptons, Surrey here before for your own slice of the American dream. But beware: "Close inspection of the earlier phase of houses shows that supposedly wooden façades are in fact clad in manmade grainy boards that will never mature into the faded elegance of authentic New England architecture."
And fun fact of the day: according to my good friend Wikipedia, "the name 'Hampton' may come from the Anglo-Saxon words 'Hamm,' meaning an enclosure in the bend of a river, and 'Ton,' meaning farmstead or settlement."
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