"Suburban" is regularly used as a dismissive rather than a descriptive term, especially by architects and planners. And yet, judging by the sheer number of people who move there, suburbia must be doing something right. It is best to understand, Paul Barker writes, before rushing to condemn. Suburbs are an essential part of every city; quite often, the most vigorous and innovative part. Here, Barker leads an entertaining journey through Britain's 'burbs: a white witch living in a Croydon semi-detached; a high-rise block being razed; the hidden charms of the modern planned community of Milton Keynes; seaside bungalows and strip malls on the edge of town. With a keen eye for detail, Barker paints a humane yet provocative portrait of 21st-century living.…
"What Paul Barker is doing, which is so important, is to reinstate and point out that while there were great examples of modernist architecture in the thirties, the real 1930s architecture was suburbia. And there was a great deal of snobbishness about it. There were more than four million houses built between the wars. Three million of them were built by private developers and most of those were suburban. They were either on new estates or on arterial roads, the so-called ribbon developments, until they were stopped. The semi, with the pitched roof and the mullion windows and the faux Tudor beams and the little neat garden, was very much mocked at the time by the “smart”. People didn’t like them because they encroached on the countryside. Yes, and the architect Clough Williams-Ellis, too. They liked a strong division between country and town and hated the idea that people could appropriate the countryside. There was a big debate in the thirties about what the countryside was for because it was no longer really very productive. What was going to happen to it? Was it just going to be paved over? Williams-Ellis talked about the octopus – the tentacles of the city stretching out into the countryside. What Paul Barker shows so well is that suburbs often exemplified people’s dreams. The sort of people that could afford a suburban semi at this time were not really working class unless they were very lucky. Normally they were lower-middle-class people who had often lived in inner-city areas that were very insalubrious and overcrowded and this was a dream for them. For the first time funds became widely available for mortgages, so people who wouldn’t have been able to get a mortgage before were able to. Most people until the 1920s lived in private rented accommodation, often with unscrupulous landlords or landlords with very little money to make improvements. So being an owner-occupier was a huge social and emotional step. That’s why a lot of the criticisms of suburbia can be seen to be mean-spirited. These were often palaces to the people who bought them. Paul Barker picks up on all this so well. Like the desire for privacy. If you had been living in a tenement and sharing an outside lavatory with 10 other families you can understand why having your own front gate, your own front door and your own porch became hugely important. The people who scoffed at it were the aesthetes, people like John Betjeman and Osbert Lancaster, posh people. But these houses thrilled the people who lived in them."
