VANISHING GLORIES OF SUBURBIA
Front gardens – once many Britons’ pride and joy – are being paved over at a terrifying rate with dire consequences
THE biggest vandal in Britain over the past century has been the car. For proof, just look at these heartbreaking photographs assembled by the Old Streets picture project. They come from the Francis Frith Archive, a fine collection of historical photographs of Britain. The new pictures are taken from Google Street View.
The changes are huge and horrifying. The trim front gardens, trees and garden walls of Como Street in Romford, on the eastern fringes of London, in 1908 have been ripped away, replaced by hard standing for cars which are parked right up against the houses’ handsome bay windows.
In Elmscott Gardens, Enfield, the neat walled and hedged front plots of 1955 are ow car pull-ins covered with harsh paving or gravel.
Throughout the suburbs of London, front gardens have been torn out at an unprecedented rate.
Since 2005, more than three million front gardens have been paved over, claims the Royal Horticultural Society.
Of the 19.1 million front gardens across the country, five million — more than a quarter — have no plants, while at least seven million are mostly paved. These are shocking statistics for a supposed nation of gardeners.
This decline reflects the relentless rise in the number of cars on the road: from 21 million in 1995 to 31 million in 2015, according to the RAC Foundation.
But a host of other factors — from the introduction of wheelie bins to council parking restrictions and even the boom in buy-to-let properties, whose tenants often have no interest in gardening — have only exacerbated matters.
The result is rows of soulless, barren streets, devoid of the greenery that used to be such a feature of suburban life.
BUT this is not just an aesthetic disaster. It is an environmental one as well. There is widespread evidence that paving over front gardens has contributed greatly to flooding disasters in this country because lawns and flowerbeds, which used to absorb water, have been replaced by impermeable paving, concrete and Tarmac.
In London, a 2015 report warned that 17 per cent of permeable ground surface had been lost in the past 40 years, mainly due to homeowners paving gardens, and that if this continued, ‘ relatively light rainfall may overcome the drains and sewers’.
Wildlife has also suffered. Bees and other pollinating insects benefit from nectar-producing flowers in front gardens, while trees, shrubs and hedges provide nesting sites for birds.
Hedges of hardy evergreens such as privet, yew and laurel also provide sound insulation and privacy and absorb street pollutants, while thorned varieties can deter burglars.
Today, 84 per cent of us live in suburbia. When we started migrating there in our millions, from the late 19th century onwards, the dream was to escape the urban soot and gloom of industrial Britain for our own little Eden with airy accommodation and greenery — and, in particular, for a house with a front and back garden.
‘That universal sense of a garden for everyman — for people regardless of occupation or status — is peculiarly British,’ says Sir Roy Strong, the historian and gardening writer, who was brought up in a Twenties suburb in North London.
‘It was an invention of the Victorian age when the population trebled in a century. Everyman was given a precious plot of earth in which to plant flowers and cultivate produce, a place to sit in the shade or in the sun, resting from his labours, escaping from the grim side of urban life to look at the petals unfolding or the fruit ripening.
‘ The suburbs are about privacy, about the Englishman’s belief that his home is his castle,’ he adds — literally so, where mock Tudor beams, crenellations and turrets are part of the design.
Sir Roy remembers the pride and almost competitive keepup-with-the-Joneses spirit that almost all these new homeowners displayed over their suburban abodes.
‘I recall my father clipping the green privet hedge in front of the house,’ he recalls. ‘ From the porch, hanging baskets would be suspended. Every evening there was the ritual watering.
‘The border round the front lawn was planted with antirrhinums and edged with white and blue alyssum and lobelias.’
Alas, those watering, pruning and planting rituals are vanishingly rare today in Britain’s front gardens.
The pride has disappeared. The beauty, silence and privacy that front gardens afforded have been ripped away with the torn- up lawn and grubbed-up hedge.
And, as these pictures show, a refuge that was once so green, peaceful and thoroughly British has been killed stone dead.