Why are writers so snooty about the suburbs?
First, literature laughed at suburbia, then it inspired a golden age in sitcoms. Now, its setting is coveted, says Ged Pope
The suburbs have long been treated as something of a joke. A 1937 guide, Wonderful London, sadly admits that “for some reason, residence in Tooting, like residence in Wigan, is a matter of Music Hall jesting”. Poor Tooting gets it elsewhere. Bromley-born HG Wells despised its “over-ripened gardens and no longer brilliant villas”. TV viewers of a certain age will recall Tooting’s own urban guerrilla, Wolfie Smith (Robert Lindsay), in beret and Afghan coat, fist pumping “Power to the People” outside Tooting Broadway Tube.
Is it the names themselves? “Tooting” seems childish, conjuring up Mr Toad’s toy-townish car horn.
Names such as Penge and Pinner, Totteridge and Tottenham, Chorley, Cheam and Chiswick, sound like minor ailments or solicitors’ firms from the Fifties.
In fiction, there is a long cultural tradition of the suburbs, especially the London suburbs, as comic. From Charles Dickens’ absurd Camberwellian Horatio Sparkins, the Grossmiths’ Holloway-dwelling buffoonish Charles Pooter, George Orwell’s Ealing-based, blustering George “Fatty” Bowling, Stevie Smith’s romantically deluded girls, Nigel Williams’s insignificant Wimbledon poisoner, English fiction is packed with suburban losers, halfwits and incompetents.
Being domestic and defensive, the suburbs are also somehow divorced f from reality. Outsiders know n nothing about what goes on there. T This means that, in the popular i imagination, they exist as both t the place where nothing ever happens and as a breeding ground for outlandish fantasy. It is not for nothing that Private Eye E uses Neasden as the go-to p place for the absurd or i improbable.
It is not so much broad c comedy as bathos, which is the crucial ingredient. Think of Hancock’s H Half Hour w with its disgruntled s suburban antihero l living at
2 23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam (sidelined, seedy, not even making m it to Cheam itself ) and dreaming of being a man of consequence. Indeed, suburban bathos is what marked the golden age of the British sitcom. Just to mention Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, The Good Life, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, Ever Decreasing Circles, is enough to trigger distressing memories of desperate snobbery, keen voyeurs and, above all profoundly incompetent, infantilised men.
So why do we always treat suburbia with disdainful humour? I think it’s linked to fears of what the suburbs actually are, of what really goes on there. This only happened in the later 19th century. Original suburbs (beyond the city) were just plain scary. The Canon’s Yeoman in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales from the “suburbes of a town”, admits to “Lurkynge in hernes and in lanes blynde” where “robbours and thieves Holden hir privee, fereful residence”. By the 16th century, the proto-suburb was the place for all that horrible stuff that the walled medieval city doesn’t want. Southwark, the “South-work”, was for prostitutes, lunatics, foreigners, stinking industries, bear fights… and theatre.
Things changed in the 1870s. Suddenly there was a jostling army of lower middle-class clerks filing to the City every morning, harbingers of an industrialised future of mass literacy and a growing restless consumer culture. This was terrifying for many commentators. These new suburbans were brash, loud, unapologetic, and getting horribly close. They just don’t know their place. Think of Jerome K Jerome’s blazered and sunburnt rowdy weekend sailors, in Three Men in a Boat, gatecrashing those sedate Thameside Inns near Richmond.
Edwardian commentators nervously dismissed the suburb. Nothing to worry about as this was merely the place where nothing ever really happened. TWH Crosland, in The Suburbans (1905), archly observed that the “whole of the humdrum, platitudinous things of life, all matters… are wholly and unmitigatedly suburban”.
Popular fiction writers joined in. Keble Howard, in The Smiths of Surbiton: A Comedy Without a Plot (1906); gives us, formally: “A Note of Warning: There are no people of title in this story; no epigrams; no deeds of heroism; no strangely beautiful women; no extraordinarily handsome men.” Shan Bullock’s titular Robert Thorne: Story of a London Clerk (1909) sadly admits, “this is my story, I am sure it is not great”.
A more extreme version of this “nothing to see” mode was that the suburbs didn’t really exist at all. In Psmith in the City, PG Wodehouse’s monocle-wearing Old Etonian has to go down to Clapham. First, he has to “ascertain that such a place as Clapham Common really exists”. Exasperated, Psmith explains: “One has heard of it, of course, but has its existence ever been proved? I think not.”
These anti-suburban anxieties – the suburb is a nothing and for nobodies and therefore funny – merge in the best-known suburban comedy, the Grossmith brothers’ The Diary of a Nobody (1890). Charles Pooter, just moved to a new villa, innocently asks: “Why should I not publish my diary? I fail to see – because I do not happen to be a ‘somebody’– why my diary should not be interesting.” Good question.
Sadly, Pooter is indeed a nobody. He fails to exist on so many levels. Socially invisible, humiliated by delivery boys, tradesmen and domestics and overlooked by just about everyone. Despite being a homebody, he notoriously fails to maintain any homely tasks, failing at fixing, painting, planting. Worse, his cosy physical world endlessly rebels: “April 11th: Today was a day of petty annoyances.” The house attacks him as if he were an invading parasite.
Yet, in the second half of the 20th century, the suburban landscape, in all its emerging variety, is finally reclaimed and enriched. For JG Ballard, the “everywhere of suburbia” is the future; not the decaying and museumified urban centre. The uncanny orderliness, the empty spaces of life on the margins, the endless hours of afternoon TV in darkened rooms, are modernity. For Hanif Kureishi, in The Buddha of Suburbia, Bromley’s endless dark avenues of boredom and alienation provide the impetus for the punk earthquake, for pop, for all attempts to dream and rethink and refashion the self. Zadie Smith’s north-west London estates and suburbs are both alienating and entrapping, frightening and reassuring, the energised and diverse places where global and personal identities are created. These are also comedies of a kind, that speak to our contemporary condition; of individuals struggling with alienation and uncertainty, identity and boredom.
What is funny is that lockdown seems to be accelerating a process that has been evident for a few decades – the suburbs as desirable, young, exciting, varied, full of life; the centre as dull, moribund, and now mostly empty and closed. The roles have been reversed.
The business mantra of Pret a Manger, never knowingly opening anywhere near a suburb, was “follow the skyscraper”. Now, apparently, it’s “follow the customer”. And we know where the customers are now to be found.
What is funny is lockdown seems to be accelerating a process that [sees] the suburbs as desirable
All the Tiny Moments Blazing: A Literary Guide to Suburban London by Ged Pope is published by Reaktion Books (£25)