ABSTRACT
In an article on the aesthetics of squatter settlements, Dr. Lisa Peattie noted that ‘owner improvisation in England has its partisans’, observing that ‘there is even a book praising the suburban, semidetached style, entitled Dun Roamin’ (Peattie, 1982). The fact that the title (and the author, the publisher and the date) was cited incorrectly, indicates that the book had not been so much as looked at. But that ‘even’ in the sentence is the give-away: the implication is that suburban houses do not merit attention. The remark is nothing exceptional; when Beyond the Gates of Paris by Francis Maspero, with photographs by Anailk Frantz, was published, a critic for La Quinzaine Litteraire wrote that it ‘leads us into a land more exotic than the desert of the Tartars or Kafka’s castle, a land which lies on our doorstep and which we’ve never seen’ (Maspero, 1992). ‘We’ being, of course, the reviewer and presumably his readers too, on whom the juxtaposition of Kafka, Tartar and suburb would not have been lost. But such observations are merely recent examples of the persistent snobbery that has discoloured references to the suburbs in Europe, and particularly Britain, for more than a century. Contempt for the suburbs was expressed in the writings of Victorian and Edwardian authors like George Moore or T.W.H. Crossland – who regarded the ‘suburbans’ as ‘low, inferior species’. But it was the later growth of the suburbs which inspired the bitterest invective. Between the world wars, half the housing stock of Great Britain was newly built, providing ‘homes fit for heroes’ (war veterans) and substantially replacing the Victorian slums. Remarkable though this housing revolution was, it had no supporters among intellectuals. To Cyril Connolly, the slums were ‘the breeding-houses of crime, but the middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium’ (Davis, 1982).
