Daily Grind Of Still Water

At any rate, my soon-to-be ex- friend Gavin raised one sculpted eyebrow and said, in a Chelsea art-school drawl, “God, Charles – you’re so suburban.”

Smart? I’ll say it did. For one thing, I lived in Notting Hill, the epicentre of hipness and urban grit. Granted, the house had a garden with a herbaceous border and there was a parade of shops next door Oh, and foxes raided the wheely bins And my neighbours drove a Range Rover. But this was Britpackland; even the local supermarket was owned by Tom Conran, dammit.
He was right, though, Gavin – it is possible to live in Notting Hill and be suburban, for the good reason that Notting Hill is a suburb The idea may cause consternation in W11, but it is true So are Primrose Hill and Knightsbridge.

So is Clerkenwell, even the loft apartments in St John’s Street. As the contributors to a new book, London Suburbs, point out, London has been suburbanising itself since the time of Chaucer. By the 17th century, the city was already famous for it: the Spanish ambassador, describing London to the Queen of Spain in 1657, predicted that “there would be no City left shortly, for it will all have run out the gates to the suburbs.”Suburbs may conjure up images of Ruislip and Pinner but the first of them were Hoxton and Aldgate, just outside the walls of the City of London. Suburbia is a place, adjacent to a city, from which people commute to that city. The early burghers of Hoxton may have commuted on horseback, those of Pinner by the Metropolitan Line – but both were creatures of the suburbs.The trouble with suburbs is that they have a way of becoming urban, requiring the building of yet more of them in pursuit of the great British dream: what PG Wodehouse’s Psmith – a reluctant inhabitant of East Dulwich – referred to as “the parcelling out of the countryside as gardens” Psmith had things the wrong way round, of course. Suburbs are not formed by an incursion of the countryside into the city but by its opposite. Roughly speaking, country folk move to inner cities and city dwellers – country folk themselves a generation or two before – move to the suburbs.

You can’t have suburbs without urbs; to use the Latin, no rus in urbe without the urbe. The process is endlessly self-defeating, like a dog chasing its tail.John Nash built Park Village East – the prettiest of all suburbs – in the 1820s; 75 years later, half of it was torn down to make way for railway tracks needed to feed the newer, bigger suburbs beyond Regent’s Park. In 1954, the Elaine of John Betjeman’s poem, Middlesex, walked to the outskirts of Ruislip in search of the “few surviving hedges/[which] Keep alive our lost Elysium – rural Middlesex again”. Ten years later, Middlesex was abolished, its last hedges rooted up to provide semis for a million more Elaines.Given this melancholy trend, it is curious how quickly London’s suburbs became things of comedy.

You can count suburban tragedies on the fingers of one hand: Brief Encounter was set in a notional suburb, though Trevor Howard was escaping from it as fast as British Rail could carry him. By contrast, Chaucer kicked off the suburban sitcom as a genre around 1380 with his description of the aspirational Guildsmen and their wives, all fur coats, brass daggers and keepinge up with ye Joneses. Six hundred years later, they were to find their apogee in that Queen Regnant of Suburbia, The Good Life’s Margot Leadbetter.The amusing thing about Margot, as with all suburban comic figures since Chaucer, were her pretensions. One hero of London’s suburbs, a Regency architect called Richard Elsam, designed a stately home for Vauxhall Road that was actually a nest of jejune clerks’ semis disguised as a Palladian mansion Margot would have loved it. Tending her Surbiton garden, she wore an Hermes headscarf and green Hunter wellies; asked to pour brandy on a cut, she dithered between Hine VSOP and Remy Martin. Like suburbia itself, Margot was neither fish, flesh, fowl nor good red herring: an urban matron dressed as a countrywoman, a middle-middle-class housewife with pretensions to the gentry.