Are there any niche towns or villages in usa that look extremely similar to british ones?

10 comments

1. >towns or villages with beatiful stone thatched roof cottages and red phone boxes.

   Such buildings are pretty rare in the US. Then again, they’re pretty rare in the UK too.

2. I would be more surprised if you find an actual phone booth. They are almost completely gone

3. None that I’m aware of, we built out houses differently. By the time English settlers arrived here I don’t believe even they were building those styles anymore. Much of our architecture is english-based, but it’s georgian, not Tudor/medieval. The closest you’ll find is Tudor revival houses built in the early 20th century. Those are generally interspersed throughout neighborhoods on the east coast. I’m not aware of any places where they’re the majority of buildings though.

   Here’s an article on them:
   https://www.oldhouseonline.com/house-tours/tudor-revival-style/

   Here’s kinda what I’m talking about, on this street there’s a couple randomly throughout. This one has had the exterior changed a bit but it has a fake thatched roof:
   https://maps.app.goo.gl/QpEsxRcV8kZv6UeY7

   Here’s another that obviously has a new roof but you can still see the styling with the roofline and half timbering:
   https://maps.app.goo.gl/2kQbdcuhwHK7nfv49

   The surrounding area is a mishmash of different building styles and dates. Not much in that main town section is older than the very late 19th century, there was a fire then that burned most of it.

4. Nope. Stone roofs seem like a bad idea here and phone booths are extremely outdated. Maybe residual ones (not red) but I’ll be genuinely surprised to find any that aren’t in a major city today (and even in many major cities tbh)

5. Red phone booths were never a US thing (phones weren’t invented until a couple hundred years after the British settlements in the US were founded), so you’d only find them in a place that had been designed to look British and from a very specific era. Thatch is also almost unheard of. It was common enough in the 1600s when those settlements you speak of began, but it’s a roofing material with extremely big drawbacks, and we had a ready supply of wood to replace it with shingles, which last much longer. For the same reason, we don’t have stone cottages. Wood is cheaper and easier, so the early colonists built in wood, not stone.

   So if you’re looking for that particlular British style, you’re probably out of luck. You could probably find a red phone booth placed by an enthusiast, and I bet there are a few thatched roofs made by history enthusiasts, but both at once seems unlikely.

6. I don’t know of any place in the US like that.

   Thatched roofs are virtually unheard of in the US, and phone booths haven’t been in common usage in the US for at least a quarter century.

   There was a bar a couple of towns over that used to have an old-time red British phone booth outside, but it was purely for decoration and it wasn’t connected to anything. . .but that bar closed and the place that went in after it didn’t keep the phone box.

7. Probably nothing like you describe, except maybe historic preservation villages like [Plimoth Pawtuxet Museum](https://images.app.goo.gl/UtG9TKuiZ57DY6Mm9), and nobody lives there. They’re filled with actors in period costumes which is kind of fun.

   We have some cities and towns that are clearly more British, like [Portsmouth, NH](https://images.app.goo.gl/tXfU9856XEamsqDo9), [Newburyport, MA](https://images.app.goo.gl/4d9SqoVYczQd3diCA) and of course much of [Boston, MA](https://images.app.goo.gl/hGSnW1goTatKvBhd9).

   Red phone booths are distinctly British and were obviously invented after American independence. Our own phone booths (and police call boxes) and never became a cultural symbol, so there was never a need to preserve them. There is a bar I love called [The Olde English](https://images.app.goo.gl/rVzYt8EpS6q13Ac49) in Albany, NY – which does have a red phone booth. The building itself is historic, from the 1730s. Super cozy in there.

8. You won’t find any ‘English countryside villages’ per se, but a lot of the historic quarters of older northeastern cities such as Boston and Philadelphia will have a ‘British’ look to them.

9. DC and I think Boston have these weird phone boxes to get in touch with emergency services. Many have been taken down but some are still standing as artifacts or re-decorated into some type of public art.

   Public phone booths are pretty rare, though you may still find them in major city government buildings, particularly if the local court system is there.

   Some private clubs still have the telephone booths for private conversations,but the phones no longer in them.

10. Thatched roofing was only used on the earliest English dwellings in New England. These were basically temporary fisherman’s cottages – the settlers used wood shingles on their permanent dwellings. Plimoth Patuxet has thatched roof cottages but these are recreations, the oldest verified still-standing home in Massachusetts was built in 1641 and uses wood shingles.