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 The Freedoms of Suburbia. |
On a path to the liberating sounds of the suburbs
The Freedoms of Suburbia.
By Paul Barker.
Frances Lincoln £25
SUBURBIA is one of those dirty words, like crazy paving or pebble-dash, a term looked on with disdain by planners and architects.
But a new book by Kentish Town-based design writer Paul Barker challenges this assumption – and finds delight in the 20th-century boom years of urban sprawl.
And while we may sneer at such ideas of mock-Elizabethan homes strung out along anonymous A-roads, and regard multiplex cinemas, shopping malls and garden centres vile blots on our green and pleasant land, Barker offers an alternative view.
He grew up in that beautiful Yorkshire village Hebden Bridge – “I therefore had no knowledge of what suburbia may mean” – but considers his first home in London, Kentish Town, to be among the earliest suburbs.
“We also lived in Stepney, while perfectly good small terrace houses were demolished all around us in favour of monster blocks,” says Barker.
“All that was wrong with most of these houses was that they had too many people in them, and those people were too poor.
“It was nothing structural: architecture was neither the ailment nor the cure.”
It set him on a path of realising what he defines in The Freedoms of Suburbia as the “merits of suburbia”. Coinciding with its publication, the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden has a new exhibition charting the intrinsic link between the growth of the Tube network and the suburban boom.
From Gants Hill out east to Wembley in the west, Southgate in the north to Bromley in the south, our city bulged over the waistband of Zones 1 to 3 as the London County Council, and private developers sought to create new homes where everyone had their own patch to call a garden and an indoor toilet.
Called “From Homes to Gnomes: How Public Transport Shaped The Suburbs”, the exhibition considers how public transport contributed to the growth of the suburbs.
The exhibition also considers suburban lifestyle and its architecture and design.
The show includes some terrific posters, signs and maps – all there to sell the countryside in the city dream of early planners, and describe how the idea of living that bit further out, away from the grime of over tenements and the bustle of old London, was sold to generations from the end of the First World War to the modern era.
DAN CARRIER
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