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Is suburbia the real land of the free?
Kentish Town author Paul Barker is championing the pastoral world of pebble-dash and privet hedges, writes Gerald Isaaman
The Freedoms of Suburbia by Paul Barker.
Frances Lincoln, £25
PAUL Barker has been having fun.
The former editor of New Society – oh how we miss that once influential magazine – has been roaming suburbia and coming to the ultimate conclusion that it is indeed arcadia.
With the help of a grant, he has left his home in Kentish Town – he chipped the enamelled name, Bowerhayes, off the front-door glass panel when he moved in – to see what is going on around the country he labels a “land of liberty”.
Indeed, Barker rejects the disparaging sneers that have for so long accompanied dreams of suburbia where, amazingly, some 84 per cent of us now live, and relishes the diversity of the social and enticing architectural detail that surrounds simple homes.
He contends that what passes for urban planning is sheer bossiness and snobbery, demands less planning, not more, declaring suburbia to be “the great triumph of non-planning”. He intriguingly insists that in the suburbs, for all their cosy corners, privet hedges, flower baskets, mock Tudor and pebble-dash frontages, there hides a powerful people filled with vision, individuality and ambition.
So he quotes Hermann Muthesius: “The Englishman sees the whole of life embodied in his house”, hence our obsession with possession, whatever the cost, MPs included.
It is a provocative argument. And it sticks, the more so since Barker himself evolved from black-masked Hebden Bridge, in Yorkshire, which has now cast off its defensive coats of industrial grime to become an enlightened centre for the arts.
So he goes on a sentimental journey through suburbia – the word is derived from the Latin suburbium, lower-class people in Rome being forced to live at the foot of its seven hills – taking us from Betjeman’s Metroland to Milton Keynes, really a new town, from Letchworth to the giant Lakeside shopping mall in Essex, to see exactly how we live now.
“I cherish suburbia’s vigour and unexpectedness, a white witch in south London, artificial black swans on a mall’s artificial lake, the multiple uses of crazy paving,” Barker explains. “Suburbia isn’t static; it’s endlessly adaptable.”
So are some of Barker’s facts.
He claims Cruikshank’s celebrated 1829 March of Bricks cartoon denounced new homes being built in Islington and Camden Town, not the threats of the Lord of the Manor to cover Hampstead Heath with houses.
He takes quotes from novels to enhance his erudition, pointing out that there is now an Ann Summers sex shop opposite the plaque in Bromley that marks the birthplace of HG Wells. Yet he fails to recognise that Wells, living later in Camden Town, was an ardent campaigner for better suburban housing for the poor.
Hampstead Garden Suburb is dismissed for failing to provide “artisan” housing without revealing the unfortunate reason – the rents of co-partnership homes worked out at 7s.6d, a week when 4s.6d. was the vital rate. Such is the difference between Dame Henrietta Barnett’s model estate for rich and poor and doomville.
He quotes historian FML Thompson’s description of suburbia as “a state of mind” when it was E. Arnot Robertson, who insisted Hampstead was “not so much a place, more a state of mind”.
But these are minor points in a highly entertaining treatise that recognises the worth of humane architects and the wickedness of red tape, especially at the moment when today’s incumbents of Hampstead dig down into their cellars to create luxury swimming pools and tap into geothermal heating — for free.
Thus he waves the flag for an Englishman’s home being his and hers total suburban schloss.
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