We should allow people to build a new suburbia

Places where people feel part of a community, where families are treasured and supported, with basic facilities round the corner. We need to get over our obsession with density and the big city

In 1826 a private act of parliament was passed allowing the property of the late John Cator of Stumps Hill to come under the control of his great nephew John Barwell Cator. This unusual arrangement avoided a complicated trust in the interests of the direct descendants of Cator’s original inheritor, George Sparkes. John Barwell Cator was an ambitious man and saw the opportunity that his late great uncle’s estates brought. The estates included a stretch of land between Sydenham, Southend (what we’d today call Catford) and Bromley all within the Manor of Beckenham, as well as a smaller estate at Blackheath. The railways had arrived, stretching out southwards and eastwards from central London and Cator saw the chance to build houses, lots of houses. As one modern estate agent describes:

“In 1857 the Cators, who also had sizable land holdings at Blackheath, realised that their estates were ripe for residential development and soon suburban villas were spreading out from the new station. Built in the style of an Indian colonial town, with wide tree lined avenues and large detached houses in generous gardens, they were designed to appeal to the wealthy, looking for a home out of London but convenient for the city. As this market became saturated, the financially astute Cators turned to building smaller properties.”

Today we tend to think of suburbia as being about the car but these suburbs were created by the railways, allowing the middle classes of London to have a fine house with good gardens while commuting into the city for work. What these developments, not just the Cator estates but many others too, signalled was the beginnings of England’s suburbia. I’ve picked the Cator development because it was one of the biggest and I was brought up in Beckenham surrounded by the names granted by the estate’s developers - Cator Park, Albemarle Road, Foxgrove Road, Copers Cope. Suburbia, where so many of us grew up, was built to give people openness and an escape from the unhealthy air and intrusive noisy bustle of the city. At the end of the 19th century Thomas Millar describes a walk from Dulwich to Beckenham:

“Having had a glass of ale and a crust of bread and cheese at the Woodman, we will strike down the hill and peep at Annerley station. We shall have woods on either side. There runs a rabbit! That was a pheasant, which sprung up before us! There’s woodbine for you, you might gather an armful. What a variety of beautiful flowers are spread at our feet! This is a place where the inhabitants of London come in hundreds on a Sunday to breathe the fresh air, for once in Croydon railway carriages they are wafted here in a few minutes. Ten years ago it was wild woodland.”

As the city grew and the railways extended, the suburbs of London continued to spread but, while the people of the city were voting with their money and moving out from the city, we began to see an elite criticism of suburbia, especially as people who were less grand began to afford the comforts of a three-bedroomed home with a decent garden just ten minutes walk from a train station that would take them to the city in half an hour. Suburbs, said thiese urban elitists, were dull and lacked community or at least the sort of community a working man would enjoy. Sarah Bilston wrote about how the stereotyping of suburban life grew during the 19th century and this supposedly dull and, in Victorian terms, womanly world attracted the bile of urban writers.‘‘Your vile suburbs can offer nothing but the dullness of the grave” writes Edward Bulwer-Lytton in a typically high status comment about the new developments of the 1830s and 1840s. The high status criticism of suburbs as dull, lacking in the splendid glories of city life and enjoyed only by dull people isn’t new but goes right back to the earliest suburbs as the filled up with decent, hard-working middle class people.

By the 20th century suburbs were growing around all the world’s great cities and the invention of the motor car stretched further the spread of new developments especially in the United States. The idea of suburbia as boring and feminised was set by those urban elites and it was seen as a place without business, lacking the accidental engagement that people still believe drives the success of dense and crowded cities. In the 1930s that grandest of Eton-educated critics, Cyril Connolly could describe suburbia as “...incubators of apathy and delirium” and by the 1960s the sociologist and critic Lewis Mumford could sum up his 30 years of sneering at suburbia like this:

“In the mass movement into the suburban areas a new kind of community was produced, which caricatured both the historic city and the archetypal suburban refuge: a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mould, manufactured in the central metropolis. Thus, the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible.”

Today most people in America, Britain and France live in suburbia. Our culture is filled with images of suburban life and that life is the mainstay of comedy, drama and literature. Great British 1970s sit-coms like ‘The Good Life’ and ‘The Fall and Rise of Reggie Perrin’, and similar American staples like Rosanne and The Simpsons all use ordinary suburban life as the framework for humour. We live in a suburban culture and our daily lives are filled with activities made possible by our suburban lives. But still hardly a day passes without those suburbs being denigrated as ‘sprawl’, as ‘car-dependent’, or as trendy Australian architecture critic, Elizabeth Farrelly sneeringly put it: “...suburbs are about boredom, and obviously some people like being bored and plain and predictable…”

Today there is a sort of demonic bargain between the urbanist inheritors of Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Cyril Connolly, and another phenomenon with its roots in the 19th century’s urban elite, the NIMBY. I know we don’t think of Octavia Hill and Patrick Abercrombie as NIMBYs but both made their names by opposing suburban development. Hill used the fig leaf of giving the poor access to the countryside as the case for stopping suburban development in North London while Abercrombie, the man most responsible for the London green belt, helped create the Council for the Protection of Rural England on the basis that we couldn’t have all that urban economic activity outside the city:

“There is no time to be lost if the English countryside is not to be reduced to the same state of dreary productiveness to which the English town sank during the industrial revolution of last century. If we have allowed Adam Smith’s doctrine of the ‘invisible hand’, gradually creating order out of individual success, to dominate our industrial towns and coalfields, we cannot afford to wait for a similar emergence of economic beauty from a devastated countryside. It is poor economics to bring prosperity and improvement in one direction and at the same time induce deterioration.”

If that sounds like every press release from CPRE or a chunk from a Conservative MP’s speech on housing numbers we should not be surprised, except that Abercrombie wrote those words in 1927 and Octavia Hill was trying to stop development in the 1880s. Suburbia, however much the urban elite find it dull, represented an aspiration: firstly for the urban middle classes and latterly, with good council housing and better pay, for the working classes. The decisions of governments to limit urban growth were done as much to save workers from that suburban dullness as they were to meet the criticisms of sprawl and the dislike of (usually other people’s) cars. The effect of Abercrombie’s green belt was that, by limiting land supply for new homes, if London ever grew in size again, the result would be rapidly inflating house prices and rents serving to marginalise the urban middle class. This policy, in various guises, was enacted across the word from Bradford and Manchester to Portland, Auckland, Barcelona  and Melbourne. And everywhere the result of the policy is higher housing costs.

If we are to meet people’s aspirations we need suburbia. We need places that are a compromise between town and country, that are not places of work or high culture, but places that are designed around families, community and everyday living. People, given the opportunity, choose suburbia, opt for a home and garden with parking for the car because that is the life they want. The problem is that the planners, urbanists and experts don’t agree that this is where people should live. Suzannah Lezzard described the typical elite response to suburban life in an essay entitled “Why Do We Hate the Suburbs?”:

“Off they went, the two of them, both with their beautiful old houses and even more soulful gardens, on the emptiness of the suburban dream. All about what a crime the destruction of the countryside was, and not one word about what those houses, those small plots of land, might mean to those who owned them, let alone the fairness of distributing a little to many rather than sticking with a lot for a few.”

Suburbia is both democratising and liberating. In the 1930s and 1950s people who previously lived precarious lives in poor quality city rentals were able to move to their own space, their own house, their own nice garden. It is true that the motor car, another great liberator of the masses, played an increasingly important part in suburban life but for most people in most suburban places this wasn’t a bad thing but a boon. It may be that modern planners have added a distaste for ‘car-dependency’ to their general objection to ‘sprawl’, but for most people planning their lives, using a car to get to work, ferry the kids about and do the shopping is entirely normal and largely pleasant behaviour.

If planners want to limit the use of cars they need to do so by working with the grain of people’s behaviour and preferences, not by trying to force them into making different lifestyle choices because those planners have decided they don’t approve. The current planning obsession with urban density (something those trendy urbanists share with Henry Potter, the villain in ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’) results in more people living in environments they wouldn’t have chosen given the chance. Piling everyone into the city also returns us to those sexist mid-19th century views of suburban life as feminine and unbusinesslike, living a comfortable suburban life detracts from the imperative of work by highlighting home life, family and community.

The suburb wasn’t the invention of a planner or some grand thinker. For all that people like Ebenezer Howard tried to picture a sort of utopian suburban place, all they really did was polish what had already been done by builders and the families who bought the homes they built - men like John Cator. This laissez-faire development may explain why it is that planners, architects and the cultural elite dislike suburbia. As something that wasn’t designed by the great and good or funded by governments spending other folks’ money, suburbia represented the triumph of the middle-class, a place built in their image and containing the things that made their lives good.

There is an urgent need to do something about the housing crisis, but we shouldn’t do this at the expense of family life. Record low numbers of young children should be a wake-up call for those who argue for ever more crowded cities, for technocratic fixes like subsidised childcare, and who want to sustain the sociological disaster of a world directed entirely towards economic productivity. A world that gave us depressed adults, stressed children and now, a generation of people who have no real stake in the society that demands their productivity.

What we need to do is build a new suburbia, to provide places that aren’t focused on productivity and the momentary pleasure that makes this grind bearable but which are still well-connected to the city. We need places that work for children and which provide an environment that tells us work isn’t everything. We need to compromise again with the Taylorist world of the managerial class by saying that we don’t work to make money for the sake of money or, god forbid, to pay the taxes so we can get cheaper childcare and thereby earn more money to pay more taxes.

If we want to meet the aspirations of the next generation, this new suburbia must take the best of the old suburbs - living space, gardens, good links to public transport, community - and add responses to modern concerns about the environment, biodiversity, walkability and active travel. Our planners, instead of spending their hours on development control and management, need to spend their time doing actual planning in the knowledge that the government is committed to financing the infrastructure that makes a new suburbia possible. We can have walkable communities with social infrastructure within a safe short walk of where people live, we can build energy efficient homes, we can design places with woodland and use these designs to enhance biodiversity, and we can create places with children and families at the front of planners’ minds rather than, as seems the case with dense urban places, as an afterthought.

But first we must recognise that suburban life represents, for most families, an acceptable compromise between the business of the city and the muddy boots of the countryside. It may, to urban elites, seem dull when set alongside the high culture and commercial dynamic of the city, but it isn’t dull inside suburbia, it is a place that works for families, for communities and for children. Suburbia is that comfy pair of slippers, it is sitting in the garden with a mug of tea, and it is cooking Sunday dinner while the kids charge round the garden annoying grandpa. A good suburb has soft edges in contrast to the hard environment of the city, it provides for community and allows space for football, dog walks and throwing frisbees.

I started with the birth of my home town, so it makes sense to finish with where I am now - a different suburbia. We call it a village but it works like a suburb with people skittling off in all directions outwards for work and play. But we’ve also got that walkability and the social infrastructure you need for a good community. There’s a pre-school, a primary school and a secondary school, there’s a village hall, a doctors, a post office and a chemist. Plus two pubs, two clubs, a co-op, a butcher, several hairdressers and a recreation ground. We’ve got a football team and a cricket team, scouts and guides, a grand youth club and any number of activities for old and young. Without anyone forcing anyone else to do anything, we have most of the daily needs for most people within a few minutes walk of their front door. We still use our cars, of course, but if you don’t have one, you can still live a pretty grand life.

This is what I mean by a new suburbia. Lots of places like Cullingworth where people can feel part of a community, where families are treasured and supported, and where the basic facilities we all need are round the corner. Getting this means getting over our obsession with big cities and urban density, it means creating places at human scale with the needs of community and families put first. Above all we need to allow places like Cullingworth to grow a little bigger, to provide the homes and communities that tomorrow’s families deserve.