Government has abandoned suburbia. Perhaps it should pay a visit?

Maybe some of those clever people who make plans for places might like to leave their big city offices, get in a car and drive out into the suburban communities where most of us live, work and play

A nice house big enough for everyone. A decent little garden. Somewhere to park the car. Good local schools. Safe streets and a low crime rate. Amenities like the doctor, the post office, the chemist and the pub within a short distance. Some local shops, at least enough to pop to for the things you forget on the supermarket trip. A bus service. Somewhere for children to play like a recreation ground or little park. Maybe a chippy, Indian or Chinese takeaway. The supermarket isn’t too far away, perhaps even a choice of supermarkets. For some a church, mosque , chapel or synagogue.

Clean streets and roads free of potholes. Some hanging baskets and flower beds. A war memorial that’s cared for and treasured. Football pitches. Maybe a cricket club. A swimming pool and gym close by and affordable. The village hall. A working man’s club or a conservative club. Bowls. A walk by the canal, river or through a wood. Fences that aren’t broken and paddocks that aren’t fly-tipped. Waymarked footpaths and bridleways that aren’t blocked. 

Bins that get emptied each week. A local tip for us to take garden waste, old broken chairs and inoperable electrical goods. Plus a service that takes away old washing machines, sofas and lawnmowers when we replace them. A regular route keeping gullies and storm drains clear. And men who spray weeds and moss to keep the place smart. Litter bins outside the shops and near the park. Regularly emptied of course. And someone to keep an eye on the parks and gardens making sure people don’t befoul them with dog pooh, damage the plants or forget to take home the debris from an impromptu picnic.

There’ll be a pilates class, keep fit for the elderly and yoga or zumba. A gardening club and a local history group. Some men who meet to organise walks and to help manage the paths. In the village hall or the little cafe by the park there’s a knitting circle and a craft fair. The school kids help plant the gardens. And some people run a youth club, others scouts, guides and brownies, and yet others junior football and cricket. Every year the local amateur dramatics group put on a pantomime.

The community organises a fireworks party on plot night. There’s a Gala on the recreation ground each summer. And some Christmas lights, to be turned on to the sound of the school band or ladies choir by the primary school’s Gala Queen. The pub has a karaoke night and the club puts on live music. There are quiz nights, evenings with psychics, bingo, snooker and a games night. There’s a fair raising money for the PTA and a fashion show to support the pre-school. Maybe a scarecrow festival, duck race or treasure hunt. Or some invented tradition involving men, beer and bales of straw.

Somewhere reasonably near there’s a library. Might even be a mobile library. And a minibus takes old ladies and gentlemen out for trips or to a lunch club in the church hall. For those who can’t get out there’s a meals-on-wheels service. A bunch of older men and women drive the more infirm to the hospital, dentists or GP. And another bunch help out with people’s gardens.

We lead boring lives most of the time. At least from the outside looking in. All these petty activities and expectations are ninety per cent of most folk’s life. For sure we also go to the theatre, eat out at nice restaurants, visit art galleries and enjoy the little of the grand city life we can afford. But most of our lives revolve around the community and network in which we actually live. I call this world ‘suburbia’ and, when it isn’t being sneered at by those grand folk in big cities, it is the world most of us inhabit. Yet when it comes to government those parks departments, bin men, librarians and youth workers, all the swimming pools, household waste centres, hanging baskets, flower beds and litter pickers are the things that go first. We stopped fixing up the roads quite as often, we reduced waste collections, we shut down the local tip and we sacked all the youth workers. The meals-on-wheels service ended and the day centre shut down. The funding for the minibus was taken away and the old men offering to drive neighbours to the hospital were told there were safeguarding rules making it impossible to promote the service.

Now there’s great strategies for “fifteen minute neighbourhoods” and “low traffic zones” making out that there’s some sort of effort to bring back that old fashioned local government. Except it’s organised from an office miles away by tone deaf people who appear not to have the first idea how people in suburbia live their lives. This new strategy involves a lot of rules often with cameras to enforce them. What it doesn’t involve is a return to the world where, for all its faults, the council got on with the basics of making the place look nice and feel cared for. How these new plans look seems to be the last thing on the minds of their designers. There is more money spent on signs than on making the new car-free or low traffic place look good. The people in their city centre offices miles away don’t ask about how people really consume local amenities preferring instead to mither on about ‘walkability’ and ‘active travel’ without asking what people might walk or actively travel to.

The list of actions, activities, amenities and functions I’ve listed is not a sort of rosy memory of a mythic past. All of those things are happening somewhere in England right now. All I have done is to describe a commonplace suburban community and observe the gradual elimination of old-fashioned local government in preference for great regional affairs. The events, projects and programmes put together by communities for their own pleasure face a constant barrage of new rules and regulations. Every little local activity comes with a set of requirements dictated by government. From impenetrably written safeguarding rules through the daft strictures of planners to the micromanagement of innocent activity by licensing authorities and the police, everything communities do only happens in the teeth of well-intentioned but deadening bureaucratic barriers. Where once the council was, like the police officer and the headteacher, part of the local community, today it behaves like the worst sort of colonial district commissioner ordering people around, banning and stopping things happening and generally getting in the way of what people want to do.

And then the council sets on some people to do community development saying that local groups and activities are dying out. What is needed, we’re told, is something called capacity building because then local communities will spring to life again. Perhaps, what we really need is for councils to do the basics of looking after what a place looks like - cleaning, planting, mending, tidying - and get out of people’s way so all those great things that once happened can happen again. Maybe some of those clever people who make plans for places might also like to leave their big city offices, get in a car and drive out into the suburban communities where most of us live, work and play. Stop off and wander around, talk to people about what government and the council can do to help. The result might be a surprise.