Training | 2009.12.04
The outskirts of happiness | Lynsey Hanley
Suburbs can be places of growth as well as retreat, but only with planning, thought and humanity
It\'s hard to grasp quite what it is, but something powerful is expressed in the title of Catherine O\'Flynn\'s Costa prize-winning 2007 novel, What Was Lost . The book is set in a suburb of Birmingham, which has its own shopping centre but not its own heart. The people who live and work in it have forgotten something, but they can\'t remember what it is they\'ve forgotten.
That phrase, "what was lost", comes back to me a lot when sitting on trains which thread through the outskirts – some scruffy, many neat – of towns and cities. There\'s so much evidence of gain that it\'s hard to see where the loss may have occurred. But the London Transport Museum\'s new exhibition, Suburbia , has given me a few clues. It\'s sponsored by American Express, for one thing, whose support is granted with the statement that "we feel we have played an important part in the evolution of the suburban lifestyle in Britain".
By which we can guess they\'re not referring to the sensation of being a hamster on a wheel, or a cog in the corporate machine, or a slave to the man. But that\'s a cheap shot to be getting on with. The exhibition is hope-filled, beautiful and propagandistic in a way that makes you marvel rather than despair. Those late Victorians knew how to get their bread buttered on both sides. The Metropolitan Railway company built the houses as well as the tracks and stations to get to them, giving the aspiring suburbanite (or city-country dweller) access to a new life, neatly packaged.
But are suburbs places that give people what they want and take away what they didn\'t know they had? The writer Paul Barker, in his cheerfully provocative new book, The Freedoms of Suburbia , argues that suburbs are nothing more or less than a conspiracy to make people happy, their popularity proven by the fact that successive generations have voted with their feet, and moved out of cities or estates as soon as circumstances allowed.
The Suburbia exhibition, in support of Barker, highlights the symbiotic link between good housing, good amenities and good prospects. Golders Green, Southgate, and the Metroland of distant Bucks and Herts, are broadly prosperous places that, a hundred or so years after their development, feel integral, peaceful and well-resourced. Morden and Sutton, though, aren\'t quiet any more; they\'re not immune to the process of change, which makes the people who\'ve striven and saved to live in them angry.
People wanted cars, despite the tube, and so they got them, and the roads to drive them on, and in so doing sowed the seeds of their own assault by noise. Cars mean drive-through as much as drive-to, while buses and trains have their destinations, literally, written all over them. Yet the suburbs can also mean long train rides, and the freedom to stare out of the window. It depends on your perspective.
Barker\'s point is that planning – hell, let\'s call it socialism – works for some things and not for others. It\'s easy to forget how fast we booted out Attlee and Bevan for not being able to deliver the New Jerusalem quickly enough. Macmillan replaced them, first as minister for housing, then as prime minister, ushering in "13 wasted years" of Tory rule which nevertheless reinforced an image of the British people as essentially individualistic, if not as materialistic as we appear to be now.
New housing development, driven as it is by the need to catch up (though I suspect it never will, given that matching housing demand with supply will make house prices go down), is bound, at least in theory, by the pressure to fill in previously used urban space rather than bust the green belt. This can only be a good thing if that means that the critical mass of people in a place is pushed up to the extent that services follow to meet the increased need.
I recently moved back into a densely populated area after a couple of years living at the kind of density more associated with suburbs, and have realised how much better the services are in a place with the critical mass to support them. I hate to say this for fear of planting a foot on Daily Mail island, but fortnightly bin collections are, indeed, not much fun, especially in summer. (Three-quarters of households are suburban, which means a lot of stinky bins.)
Most importantly it\'s good public transport that pumps fresh blood in and out of places and keeps them moving rather than static and isolated. The thing about place is that it forms you as you grow: you need rich yolks to get thriving chicks. There\'s no such thing as growth in a vacuum, which is why it\'s folly to believe all that people need to thrive is a house and a car. They need other things, not least the chance to live with and learn from other people. Suburbs can be places of growth as well as retreat, but only with a degree of planning, of thought, and of that oft-forgotten quality, humanity.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]urbs-planning-transport-vacuum
