CITIES ARE A FAILED EXPERIMENT:

In praise of suburbia: Life on the edge of things: a review of Paul Barker's THE FREEDOMS OF SUBURBIA (Ferdinand Mount, 12/22/09, The Times Literary Supplement)

Even today when four out of five of us live in the suburbs, they are little studied, let alone defended in print. The publisher’s blurb introduces The Freedoms of Suburbia, Paul Barker’s enchanting and persuasive pictorial essay, with a nervous defiance as if the book were proposing free heroin for toddlers. This is not a systematic history like F. M. L. Thompson’s Rise of Suburbia. Barker, a former Editor of New Society and a prolific writer on architecture and planning, proceeds ambulando. These are Suburban Rides, which in a gentler style echo Cobbett’s suspicion of people who take pleasure in bossing other people about. By this seemingly oblique method, Barker manages to convince the reader of several propositions which might have made little impact if presented in a more formal academic fashion.

The book is sumptuously illustrated, giving us on every page a marvellous range of semis, bungalows, villas, prefabs, shacks, chalets and mobile homes in every imaginable style – classical, Tudor, Queen Anne, Gothic, Arts and Crafts, even modernist. Nine out of ten of these dwellings sprang from a collaboration between the speculative builder and the client, without the sniff of an architect. From about 1830 on, after John Nash built the cottages ornés in Park Village East, the architectural profession largely withdrew from the suburbs to await orders from grander clients, such as the Grosvenor Estate and the London County Council. Thereafter architects built town halls and lunatic asylums and company headquarters. They did not accept and were rarely offered commissions for “Dunroamin” or “Mon Repos”, not least because most of them believed such abominations should have been strangled at birth. Build up, not out, they chorus. High-rise equals civilized, a theme recently reprised in Richard Rogers’s paper “Towards an Urban Renaissance”, which, as Barker points out, is a plea for London to become more like Lord Rogers’s native Florence.

Barker, by contrast, speaks up for Non-Plan against Plan, for Jane Jacobs against Lewis Mumford, for higgledy-piggledy plotlands against streets in the sky, for the human and the individual against the machine à vivre. But he does so temperately and with a generous eye. He reminds us that architects and planners can build desirable suburbs: Norman Shaw’s Bedford Park, Raymond Unwin’s Hampstead Garden Suburb and Letchworth Garden City. So can benevolent employers and landowners: the Cadburys at Bournville, Lord Leverhulme at Port Sunlight, the Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpes in Edgbaston.

Above all, there is Milton Keynes. Here in the flattish bit of Bucks, the planners have created a remarkable city which has now grown almost to the size of Nottingham and whose inhabitants still love it and call it MK, on the analogy of LA. One of MK’s charms is that it contains a variety of building styles: from Bovis’s reed-thatched black-and-white executive homes at the top end to cheap modernist bungalows designed by the Norman Foster partnership in its early days. The town’s enormous grid, studded with roundabouts, is also enlivened by the occasional ancient village centre which has long been swallowed up: Woolston and Wolverton, Woughton on the Green and Shenley Church End.

Those villages have been suburbanized, just as Thomas More’s Chelsea and Pope’s Twickenham and Keats’s Hampstead were turned from delectable villages into London suburbs, as highly prized in their new role as in their old. Suburban change is remorseless and unpredictable. Islington was once the home of London’s dairies, and the playing fields where Thomas Lord turned out as a bowler for White Conduit Cricket Club; then it was developed as a “walking suburb” for city clerks, then it slipped downhill into bedsitshire and has spent the past fifty years climbing back to gentility. When Eric Hobsbawm, a newly demobbed sergeant, moved into a flat in Gloucester Crescent, Camden Town, just after the war, he thought of it as “the western outpost of the vast zone of London’s bombed and yet ungentrified East End”. To think of this epitome of metro chic, the home of Mark Boxer’s Stringalongs, as part of the East End takes some stretching now, as much as regarding present-day fashionable Hoxton as an extension of the West End.

Far from being sunk in unenquiring apathy, the suburbs are in constant flux. Barker points out that H. G. Wells would scarcely have recognized a single building in the high street of his native Bromley. The old shopping parades of the 1930s have been eclipsed by the out-of-town hypermarkets. Colin Ward, the doyen of anarchist anti-planners, regards the unfinished, transitional nature of the suburbs as one of its great attractions for a child. There were secret places for solitude in the fields and copses that had ceased to be farmland and were not yet residential. This edge-of-things feeling is beautifully caught in Spies, Michael Frayn’s child’s-eye novel.

When asked to choose their preferred type of home, Britons always put the bungalow top, with the Manhattan-style loft and the tower block nowhere.