English Voices

by Ferdinand Mount

  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 The 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. The Bengali peasant hut, the banggolo, triumphs over the officially approved ziggurat. Anthony D. King, in his social history of the ultimate low-rise residence, declares that ‘in the first half of the twentieth century, the bungalow was the most revolutionary building type established in Britain’. It was the people’s choice, not designed, directed or even approved by the artistic establishment. Nor will it do to sneer at the suburbs as smug enclaves for the middle classes. There are working-class suburbs at Dagenham and Barking, as there are at the scruffier edges of most conurbations. There are plutocratic suburbs at St George’s Hill and Wentworth and Winchmore Hill. Every morning a fleet of white vans swarms into the capital from the suburbs of Kent and Essex and Herts to minister to the plumbing, plastering and electrical needs of the bankers of Notting Hill and Chelsea. The suburbs themselves become workplaces, as back offices migrate to cheaper premises on the M25, and Croydon becomes Edge City. Beyond the Green Belt, towns like Newbury become ‘exurbs’, the most desired places of all to live in, just as Lakeside and Bluewater are the most popular places to shop in. These malls are not to be put down as tawdry American imports, since they derive ultimately from the glassed-in galeries and gallerie of Continental Europe – Thomas Jefferson was so impressed by the Palais-Royal that he wanted to copy it back home in Virginia.

  Barker begins his book by watching a tower block in Hackney being blown up. He ends it by reflecting that scarcely any semis have ever been demolished, except when they stood in the way of road-building schemes. The sourest critics eventually succumb. John Betjeman, after all, began as a modernist, but by 1940 had repented to become the laureate of the suburbs. Even Slough forgave him in the end. But the orthodoxy was strong. Stationed in the Middle East during the war, J. M. Richards wrote a homage to the suburbs, The Castles on the Ground, but on his return to the Architectural Review he toed the Modernist line.

  The planning laws in their present rigid state give rise to the only serious corruption in British politics: they enable landowners to capture enormous unearned profits; even in a time of prosperity, they cause crippling housing shortages. Above all, in an age when thousands of acres are no longer needed for agriculture, they prevent ordinary people from living where they would most like to live (and from fostering biodiversity in their back gardens). As the Treasury report on land supply pointed out in 2003, current policy is bringing about ‘an ever widening economic and social divide’.

  Paul Barker does not press these lines of argument too far. He stresses that he is not proposing to ‘concrete over’ the English countryside; he is as keen as anyone to protect the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales. He argues only that ‘“positive” planning is best done with the lightest of hands’. He urges too a gentle bias towards preserving the streets as they are, for they are a city’s memory bank. But none of these things should be achieved at the cost of preventing people living the life they wish to live. Planning either slows change down to a glacial pace, or it is swift and destructive, as we can see from the post-war history of Liverpool, Birmingham, Bradford and Hull, to name but a few great provincial cities that have had their hearts ripped out. Better to yield to the mild incursions of the suburbs, and to the preferences of the people.

  Barker declares that ‘we ought by now to know that the worst mistakes
in planning come from trying to force other people to live in the way they wouldn’t choose to and often the way we wouldn’t want to live ourselves’. Why not go one step further and contemplate the possibility that the solutions to the rural problems ventilated by the Countryside March may sometimes lie in allowing people to do things they presently aren’t allowed to do? That indispensable anarchist Colin Ward, for example, advocates reviving the Plotlands. From the 1870s until 1939, speculators, unable to sell land into a depressed market, even at throwaway prices, hit upon the idea of dividing the worst land into small plots and selling them to city dwellers to do whatever they fancied with them – start a smallholding or chicken farm, build a holiday home or a retirement bungalow. All along the North and South Downs and the Kent and Essex marshes, and along many northern coasts and estuaries, these untidy pockets of chalets, allotments and prefabs appeared, until the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act killed off the practice. But if you designated a couple of fields outside every village to be sold off to locals as the new Plotlands, the rural housing shortage would soon dwindle.

  As would the problem of rural employment, if every village set aside a few acres of poor land to be leased out for workshops. The upper-class English may flee to Tuscany, but the working-class Italians flee to the Veneto where the ramshackle back lanes allow them to set up workshops without fuss and at knockdown prices – ‘the Third Italy’, as described in Paul Hirst’s essay on informal rural development. All over the Continent, you find these industrial districts, centred on some smallish town, where a host of little firms collaborate on particular products like furniture or knitwear. That, after all, is the way British manufacturing first developed two or three centuries ago, not least in the valleys round Stroud, where Laurie Lee drank cirder with Rosie. Such districts win no prizes for tidiness. The well-bred mind recoils from the sight of a Palladio villa surrounded by noisy small factories.

  Yet without some considered and selective relaxation of planning controls, any hopes of bringing work back to the countryside must remain wind and waffle. I saw no banner on the Countryside March demanding any such relaxation. Nimby and Nimrod still hunt together. In taking over a house, Roger Scruton rightly points out, the National Trust finally extinguishes the life that was lived in it. The house’s restoration is an act of taxidermy – no doubt a necessary act, as Robert Grant argues in his essay ‘History, Tradition and Modernity’, yet one which betokens in Grant’s words, ‘the loss, not so much of a past, but of a confident, unselfconscious, tradition-saturated present’. But the 1947 Planning Act does much the same to a pretty village or an urban conservation area. Deprived of all possibility of change in themselves and set in an equally frozen landscape, they too are embalmed.

  And here, sadly, we come to the final dichotomy laid bare by this excellent volume of essays. For Town and Country are not at odds. Far from it, they are joined together in an embalmers’ league against the ambitions of Suburbia. Just as incomers quickly develop nostrils sensitive to the slightest pong from the local pig farm, so I developed quite abnormal sensitivity while reading Town and Country to the faintest condescension to the suburbs. Sometimes, the sniff was barely audible, as in references to ‘new’ people who don’t quite understand country ways. At other times, as in Roger Scruton’s otherwise cogent closing essay, hatred of ‘those suburbs dropped from nowhere’ bursts out with full ammoniac pungency: ‘The commuter suburbs violate the landscape partly because they violate the sense of rural time. Even if they remain there for ever, people feel, it will be with a stagnant impermanence . . . they will be dilapidated without ever becoming weathered.’ But just when did this violation begin? When Hampstead became a suburb two centuries ago, or Streatham, or Croydon? At what point did the weathering stop?

  Walking through suburbs like East Molesey or Enfield, I am struck by an utterly contrary feeling: that these are places of deep settlement, not liable to be eviscerated at intervals like most English cities or knocked about by agricultural depression or technological change as the English village has been at intervals since the Middle Ages. Suburbs generate clubs and societies and cricket teams, just as Scruton’s local village of Crudwell does. True, their populations do not stay put over the generations, but then historians now realize that the population in English villages was much more mobile than we used to think.

  In detective stories, villages are always sleepy, just as suburbs are always leafy. The English village is lodged in our minds as the great good place where nothing changes, a refuge from the rat race and a retirement dream. But Clive Aslet, in his brisk, evocative, occasionally waspish prose, sets out to show us in 500 page-long snapshots how fragile, accidental and often tragic has been the history of the villages he has chosen. What happens to them is so often not the result of natural growth or decline but of some economic bonanza or hammer blow or some landlord’s benevolence or greed. Even those features of the rural scene which we think of as natural and time-honoured may well be the result of human activity, and often activity of the sort we now think undesirable, like the peat-digging which created the Norfolk Broads or the hedges which were grown to enclose land that had formerly been held in common.

  So many villages have disappeared, two or three thousand of them since the Norman Conquest (Aslet is uncertain of the figure). Some, like Hallsands in Devon or Covehithe in Suffolk, have been washed away by the sea. Others have been taken over for military ranges, such as Tyneham, Dorset, and Imber, Wiltshire. But far the largest number have been simply swept away and sometimes burnt to the ground by landowners who preferred sheep to villagers – or would rather look out on a romantic vista designed by Capability Brown than on a huddle of smoky hovels. The Clearances in the Highlands at the beginning of the nineteenth century are the most notorious, but the same terrible fate could strike any village deemed unprofitable by its owner at any time from the Dissolution of the Monasteries or even earlier. The inhabitants of Wharram Percy in North Yorkshire had been evicted by 1403. Only a few humps and hollows in the grass remain.

  Many villages which look so picturesque today began as untidy and squalid mining camps, like Burwash in the Sussex Weald, which was a centre of the Elizabethan iron-making industry three centuries before Rudyard Kipling came to live there and celebrate its magic in Puck of Pook’s Hill. All over Britain, settlements mushroomed to house workers digging out every kind of mineral – tin, lead, copper, manganese, even gold – as well as the coal and iron on which the Industrial Revolution was based. Strontium was discovered at Strontian, on the shores of Loch Sunart; titanium, first called Manaccanite, at Manaccan, by the Helford River in Cornwall.

  But when the seam was worked out, these boom villages lost their reason for existing. Tin and copper had been mined at Cornwall’s largest mine, the ‘Great Work’ at Godolphin, since long before the Romans came and the Godolphin family waxed plutocratic on the proceeds, but when the mine closed in the mid-nineteenth century, so did the village.

  Some mine-owners were more philanthropists than profiteers and built handsome model villages using the best architects of their day. So did other industrialists: the Quaker chocolate kings, Cadbury, at Bournville, Rowntree at New Earswick just outside York; Lord Leverhulme at Port Sunlight and Thornton Hough in Cheshire; the store tycoon William Whiteley at his Whiteley Village in Surrey (his benevolence did not protect him from being shot dead by the deranged son of one of his shopgirls who believed he was Whiteley’s illegitimate son). These model villages mostly survive, now shorn of their founders’ bans on alcohol and fun, and are much prized by their new tenants for their quaint and cosy atmosphere.

  Life in the old villages was never a honeysuckle idyll. As the poet George Herbert, rector of the parish of Bemerton, near Salisbury, remarked, ‘Country people live hardly.’ The truest accounts of rural life in the old days, such as Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford, John Stewart Collis’s The Worm Forgives the Plough, and Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield, all remind us mercilessly of the backbreaking
toil that had to be endured in all weathers as well as the perpetual insecurity of being dependent on the harvest and the squire’s goodwill.

  Although Aslet covers the whole of Great Britain, he half-admits that it is the English village which provides the heart of his subject: ‘North of the Border, rural settlements are not always villages, as they would be understood in southern England. Much of the country did not acquire villages before the eighteenth century, when they were built by landowners wanting to improve their estates or to promote fishing.’ In Wales, too, the countryside was dotted with scattered farmsteads; only in the bits of Wales first settled by the Normans – South Pembrokeshire, the Vale of Glamorgan – do you find the English-type clustered village with its church and manor and farmhouses around a village green.

  Over the past fifty years, though externally it may look just as lovely and unspoilt, the English village itself has changed dramatically. Chitterne, the remote village on Salisbury Plain where I was brought up, had declined from 800 souls in the mid-nineteenth century to 250 in my childhood. Yet it still possessed a primary school, a horse-racing stable, two firms of builders, a blacksmith, a garage, two shops, a Baptist chapel and no fewer than six dairy farms. All gone now. Only the parish church and one of two pubs survive. Like many other such places, Chitterne is now a dormitory for commuters and retired couples, no longer a more or less self-sufficient workplace. Under its lovely skin of brick and flint it is a new kind of suburb.

  And what exactly are the suburbs being derided for? For being too quiet, too leafy, too orderly – but these are the virtues which we attribute to old-fashioned village life and which we greatly admire. And what is to be done with the awful truth that, as Paul Barker points out, ‘suburbia gives most of the people what they want from a house, most of the time’? That also goes for the institutions associated with suburbia. Those dark satanic malls are the people’s choice. And the true people’s architecture is the semi-detached, the Voysey inheritance. As for the supposed moral inferiority of the suburbs, here I stand with Sherlock Holmes in the belief that ‘the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside’. Fred West was a country boy come to town. It is hard to imagine him settling in Esher. Deep down, what both urbanists and ruralists dislike about suburbia is its self-chosenness, its refusal to accept an imposed pattern of community. This self-chosenness is often reviled as ‘anomic’ or smug or selfish. Yet it would be hard to demonstrate that suburbanites respond less generously to serious moral challenges. They too have their war memorials. What sticks in the ideologue’s throat is really their refusal to be planned by someone else, whether by Le Corbusier or Lord Loamshire. Tim Mars, laureate and former resident of Milton Keynes, describes beautifully how the original scheme for the New Town, known as ‘Pooleyville’ after Fred Pooley, Buckinghamshire’s county architect, was to be a gleaming Modernist array of cluster blocks complete with monorail. In came the American sociologist Melvin Webber, who wanted to build an unapologetically suburban Little-Los-Angeles-in-Bucks. And despite the fact that the eventual chief architect of Milton Keynes also saw the project in urban terms, his fellow urbanists regarded the end result as a failure as a city. But when the actual residents were quizzed, they didn’t regard Milton Keynes as a failure at all. In fact, they liked it precisely because it was a series of villages.