"Church Langley is a fine place to live," said the spokeswoman. "But it is not a rural idyll."Indeed not, says Stephen Barrie, a 28-year-old publican who moved into the Potters Arms with his wife Sharon seven months ago. "They try to portray it as having a community spirit, but this is still very much a place where people don't speak to each other. "I asked my solicitor to search because I liked the countryside around me, and there was nothing," one woman told a council meeting earlier this month.Now the council hopes to persuade developers to put more information into their show homes. People have dreams about what it means."A spokeswoman for Harlow council admitted there had been objections: "The plans for expansion did not always get mentioned by the developers when people came to buy, and they didn't show up on the searches."Some residents claim to have been misled about the amount of open space that would be left. By insisting on being seen as separate, the residents were behaving "like the sulky teenager in the supermarket who doesn't want anyone to think he's with his mum".CRIME figures for the last three months show that while some areas had more than 180 crimes, Church Langley was the lowest with 42.

But then the building work is only half completed.Mr Hampson said there was "a constant rumble" of complaints about the expansion, and the phrase "a new look at village life" was now being played down "The word village can be a bit prejudicial. Commuters form the dominant tribe in the village, using the motorway or Harlow railway station. But the outline permission also insisted that 23 per cent of the homes went to housing association tenants.That upsets some of the private home owners, who have complained to the council. Others want to have the name Harlow removed from their addresses. Doing this, I've learnt that the profit motive isn't automatically evil."MR HAMPSON became treasurer of the residents' association and applied the same principles in raising pounds 500,000 for the community centre.

There's even a meeting of the Socialist Workers' Party, which seems out of place in an area that once worshipped Mrs Thatcher and now cherishes Blair's caring capitalism.The one thing that most people there do have in common is that they have recently decided to buy a house. "We had money from Tesco, and from Nortel [an electronics firm based just outside the village], from the Foundation for Sports and the Arts."Now the community centre is full every night, with activities ranging from karate and aerobics to line dancing and short-mat bowls. Spend a few thousand on sticking a cabin here and it will treble your sales.' They know that if they plant shrubs along the side of the road they'll sell houses. "I said: 'You want people to move in? You need community life. The first went up in 1992, and the next year Mr Hampson was sent by the Church of England to serve the fledgling community from a temporary cabin paid for by the developers "I approached them on their own territory," said Mr Hampson. Outline planning consent was granted on condition that the developers incorporated community facilities.