ABSTRACT
Polymorphous, like the cities of which they are a part, suburbs have offered almost everyone something to praise or, more usually, condemn. Suburbia-a term which, like many suburbs, has not aged well-has attracted attention from a very wide range of people. It has been treated as fair game by urban geographers and historians, by sociologists and political scientists, by makers of documentaries as well as writers of fiction. The result has been a minor academic and popular industry, to the extent that one writer began a review with ‘Not another book on suburbs’ (Gaskell, 1995)!
