“Try to own a suburban home,” said an advertisement by the British Freehold Land Company in the 1920s, “it will make you a better citizen and help your family. The suburbs have fresh air, sunlight, roomy houses, green lawns and social advantages.” It perfectly summarises the ideal behind suburbia, which is where most people in Britain live today.
The huge suburban expansion of British cities between the wars accommodated population growth and enabled people to buy homes at low prices. London doubled in area over those two decades and increased its population by 1.2 million people. Speculators built semi-detached houses for sale at between £400 and £500 which were close, as another advertisement put it, to “tiny hills and hollows … pools of water, brambly wildernesses, where in spring nightingales sing and the air is sweet with the smell of violets, primroses and hawthorn”.
It is an ideal that has survived snobbery, condescension and hostility. “Just a prison with the cells all in a row,” wrote George Orwell of a suburban street. “A line of semi-detached torture-chambers …” Cyril Connolly agreed, calling them “incubators of apathy and delirium”. HG Wells called an early example “a dull useless boiling-up of human activities, an immense clustering of futilities”.
Now, according to Towards a Suburban Renaissance, a report released last week by independent thinktank the Smith Institute, suburbs are facing a new kind of threat. Their ideal “has rapidly started to fade”, says the report’s author, Paul Hunter. “As inner cities have undergone a renaissance, suburbs have frequently been left behind.”
Focusing on Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and Greater London, the report identifies stagnating levels of job growth and a significant shift outwards from the centres of cities in indicators of poverty.
Once sociologists and planners used to worry about “doughnut cities”, where prosperous residents would move out to the suburbs and leave the centre – to use another dated term – to suffer “inner-city decay”. Now the process has reversed.
Ben Page, chief executive of Ipsos Mori, has a similar view to Hunter’s: “All the evidence is that over the last 30 years outer areas have become more miserable than inner. It’s one of the most marked things I’ve seen.”
Suburbia generated its literature and filmography, sometimes affectionate, sometimes satirical: The Good Life, The Diary of a Nobody, Abigail’s Party, Terry and June, The Stepford Wives. It provoked sniggers and stereotypes, such as the bored housewife or the “over-eager half-sir”, as a Kensington-based writer said in 1939, who “mows a ridiculous lawn on Saturday afternoons”.
Individual suburbs became comedic locations: Private Eye’s Neasden, Peep Show’s Croydon, Peter Sellers’s Balham, Tony Hancock’s East Cheam. Champions of suburbia, such as the writer and broadcaster Paul Barker, have fought back: “I cherish suburbia’s vigour and unexpectedness,” Barker wrote in 2009. He called it “a land of pleasantness, friendship and hope”.
But Page says: “All these ideas we have about leafy suburbs have changed. They are losing their distinctiveness and reasons to be. Family homes have been denatured. They have been made into mini apartment blocks and their gardens are torn up and turned into car parks for all their residents. The high streets are declining. They are turning into dormitories – and not very nice dormitories at that.”
Reasons for the changes, according to Turner, include the success of government policies to revive inner cities and the effects of “agglomeration” – the idea that investment should support places that already have concentrations of business and population. Page agrees: “Inner London has become happier, safer and cleaner.”
In the inner-London borough of Hackney, an astonishing 89% of residents declared themselves satisfied with their area in 2013, compared with 51% in 2002. In outer areas such as Havering and Harrow, satisfaction went in the opposite direction.
Among other factors, government support for central areas has pushed up property prices, which has forced poorer residents farther out.
Migration plays a part: people arriving from poorer countries tend to find homes in the outer districts; those from richer countries settle in the centre. The decline in the provision of social housing in central areas has a similar effect. These factors will increase with recent government policies that will drive local authorities and housing associations to sell socially-rented homes in high-value areas.
Other pressures include the building of retail parks and shopping malls on former industrial sites – which tends to affect suburban high streets more than those in the centre – and the easing of restrictions on converting offices to homes. Major business districts such as the City of London have won exceptions that allow them to protect their work spaces. In suburbs, low-value but useful places of employment are likely to disappear.
The Smith Institute has been making some of these arguments for a while: for example, in a 2014 report called Poverty In Suburbia. Now it is also proposing action. It wants a Suburban Task Force along the lines of the Urban Task Force of the late 1990s: led by Lord Rogers, this helped promote the revival of inner cities. It wants planning policies and investment that specifically address suburbs.
It is remarkable that official documents such as the National Planning Policy Framework, while talking about urban and rural areas, don’t even mention suburbia. The title of the institute’s new report, indeed, refers to the Urban Task Force’s 1999 report Towards an Urban Renaissance. Hunter proposes various ways to encourage the sort of economic activity that might flourish in suburbs, such as small businesses and home working. He wonders if the outer areas of large cities might attract the clusters of technology businesses that currently thrive in places such as Cambridge and the Thames Valley. He wants simple but effective ways to improve public transport, such as better buses and cycle routes.
He also favours the ideas put forward by the architectural practice HTA for “Supurbia”, whereby existing suburbs are intensified, especially around railway stations and other transport connections – for example, by increasing building sizes from two storeys to four. This might seem problematic, as it could diminish the openness for which people value suburbs. But it addresses some of the reasons for which suburbia is criticised: that it uses land wastefully and is overdependent on cars. As Page points out, its diffuse layouts mean more infrastructure per person – more roads, drains and pavements; longer bus routes – which therefore requires proportionally more public spending.
Despite all this talk of decline, suburbs also offer opportunities. They have space, which is becoming more precious as the housing pressures on successful cities grow. They could offer the things that are getting harder to find in inner cities, such as cheap space in which to start a business, and indeed relatively affordable homes. Their ethnic and social diversity is increasing. Today on BBC radio, Hugh Muir talks of the growing movement of “visible minorities” into what he calls “the heartlands of Englishness”.
The biggest question is how the opportunities of suburbs might be realised without losing the qualities that prompted John Betjeman to celebrate Metroland in his 1973 TV programme or the National Trust to offer tours of Croydon, as it announced last week. How to increase density without losing tranquillity, or raise desirability without losing affordability? How to create homes and work for new populations while also making suburbs better for people who are already there?
There are problems that are not the business of suburbs alone. Current government policy is tending to destroy the economic and social diversity of central areas, especially in London, with the risk of creating exclusive inner and excluded outer rings. In fretting about poverty in suburbs there is also the danger that new policies will simply push the poor somewhere else – making them less visible rather than better off. There is a long history of such confusion, from slum clearances in the 19th century to recent urban regeneration.
The answers are not obvious. The Smith Institute’s report does not claim to have them all, but it does at least air them. It raises the powerful and appealing prospect of the renewal and reinvention of the suburban dream.
“I was to find,” said a satisfied housebuyer in the 1920s, “that residing in a suburb adds a thrill and a zest to life. It is an experience in having no traditions to live up to.”
Not a bad basis for developing the neighbourhoods of the future.
SUBURBS IN CULTURE
Sitcom stars
Reginald Perrin David Nobbs’s wayward exec, played by Leonard Rossiter in BBC’s The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin
Margot Leadbetter Penelope Keith’s aspirational housewife in The Good Life
Hyacinth Bouquet Patricia Routledge’s snob in Keeping Up Appearances
Social commentary
George Orwell wrote in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941)that our sense of England “is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes.”
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (1958) “The suburban separation of ‘work’ and ‘life’ … has been the most common response to the difficulties of industrialism.”
Edward Platt, Leadville (2000) “One afternoon in January 1995, as I drove along Western Avenue, I did what I had never done before: I parked the car in a side street and walked on to the road.”
Poetry
John Betjeman “Where a few surviving hedges/Keep alive our lost Elysium - rural Middlesex again.” (Middlesex)
T S Eliot “Trams and dusty trees. Highbury bore me/ Richmond and Kew/Undid me.” (The Waste Land)
Philip Larkin “On Saturdays squire ex-schoolgirls to the pub, by private car./ Such uncorrected visions end in church, or registrar:/ A mortgaged semi- with a silver birch” (Breadfruit)
Vanessa Thorpe
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