Before and After: Nelson and Box Hill

Head out to the far reaches of Northwest Sydney and you'll find two kinds of suburbs: 

1. 1. Grass and horses
2. 2. Brand suburbia full of copy-and-paste houses with grey roofs. 

Here are two suburbs - one of each kind. 

Nelson

Head around 45km northwest of the city and you'll arrive at this suburb named after Bart Simpson's school bully.

It looks like this. 

As well as grass, Nelson also has giant houses on giant land. 

You may even spot a hobby farmer's pond or two.

There may not be much here, but you can't deny that it's fairly pretty. 

Unsurprisingly for a place like this, you can meet the horses of the equestrian centre.

They may be needing to pack their bags soon. 

Like the horses, it was time for me to head on to my next suburb for something a bit different. 

But not before getting eaten by rabid dogs. 

Nelson: 

Box Hill

Immediately next door to the open space and mansions of Nelson is Box Hill. 

It's still very new - in fact it's very much not finished. 

But yes, it's one of these suburbs. 

Here's a real estate pet peeve of mine - real estate marketers never use the word house. Home and land packages aren't a thing. Stop it. 

With that out of the way, did I see anything of interest in Box Hill?

Well, all of the streets are spacey, which is fun. 

But other than that, it's really the same cookie-cutter suburb which has been mass-produced all over Western Sydney. 

That being said, it's probably a bit better than average for one of these suburbs, due to the fact that some of the houses look different. For instance, one of these has a red roof, 

and these ones look funny too. 

The Blue Mountains in the horizon help reduce the eyesore. 

Otherwise, though, if you've seen one of these entirely car-dependant new suburbs, you've seen them all. 

Same houses, 

with the same park in the middle. 

Maybe the next suburb will be more interesting. 

Box Hill: As the name suggests, it's the kind of suburb you'd take out of a box.

Here, I usually embed a Google Map, but the suburban borders are out of date for this bit of Sydney, so instead here's an extract from Openstreetmaps. You can see the map itself through here: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/5573665 

© OpenStreetMap contributors