After years of having derision heaped on it, suddenly suburbia is all the rage.
Lots of people's writing is secretly biographical and my interest in suburbia, as seen on this site and elsewhere, is no exception. I reacted against growing up in the outer west London district of Ealing (or rather in Pitshanger, a suburb of it) with a conscious fix of inner city living in my 20s, where I could walk to work but also had a nasty mugging. In my third decade as an older and wiser parent I now both live and work in the west/south-west London 'burbs from which I sprang, while simultaneously propagating the argument that these much maligned outposts are actually great places. Now it seems after years of deriding the suburbs as boring and lacking in character, people are queuing up to praise suburbia as utopia in a big way.
Suburban criticism has been longstanding and voluminous over time. George Orwell's much quoted description of suburbs as "a prison with the cells all in a row ... semi-detached torture chambers" is from 1939. Only last month the Guardian's review of the reformed Spandau Ballet accused the New Romantic mainstays of being "stuck in an 80s suburban wine bar", hurling the ultimate insult their way. Sneery suburb-bashing by the commentariat is repetitive to the point of being predictable, but given recent developments it's starting to look a little old-fashioned.
A new book from Paul Barker entitled Freedoms of Suburbia counteracts the usual notion of suburbia as a place of cloying claustrophobia. A new London Transport Museum exhibition also revels in the home of mock-Tudor that's more usually just mocked. Forthcoming spin-off events include Friday night DJ-led dance events in the name of suburbia – surely the very reverse of the idea of the 'burbs as drab and boring.
Planners and architects have been among suburbia's biggest critics, accusing it of breeding ugly buildings and featureless uniformity, so it is significant that the Royal Academy of Arts recently hosted an event celebrating London suburbia as part of its architecture lecture series.
It seems that old prejudices are being displaced by the realisation that the suburban semi is the epitome of flexible living space with scope for knocking through walls, extending outwards and upwards – modifications rendered impossible in, say, the riverside penthouses of Manchester, Newcastle and Liverpool, where residents are unhappily trapped in negative equity to a higher degree than their suburban counterparts.
Suburban enthusiasts are not just confined to London town or blighty's shores. Last month I made my first ever trip to the US for a conference during which people from all over the world gathered to talk about the "new suburban paradigms". Its site, Hofstra University may technically be in New York, but its Long Island campus was where the Levittown model of rapidly constructed US postwar suburb was pioneered. An event called The Diverse Suburb taught me new vocabulary like "foreclosure" for "repossession". Presentation topics included data on Latinos choosing US suburbs as a point of entry rather than suburbanising outwards and even a contribution on the burgeoning popularity of churches in suburban California due to Christian heavy metal.
The recession has bitten the suburbs in the US as the UK but both are demonstrating resilience. There are also differences in form and function across the pond. In the US car culture has always ruled supreme, whereas in the UK suburbs have been defined more by public transport links, particularly in London as a talk on Tuesday at the Transport Museum will illustrate.
Importantly, the suburbs take many forms, from garden cities (modelled on Hampstead Garden Suburb) to stockbroker-belt pads (Betjamin's hated Metro-land) via corporation suburbia (Burnage, where Peggy Gallagher, Oasis matriarch, still lives) and plenty of other variants in between. All of the above were areas launched with much promise – homes for heroes, brave new worlds of post-slum clearance etc. But attitudes equating them with naffness and the constantly pillorying of suburbia as a whole by the commentariat are being eclipsed by a recognition of their strengths. Change may be slow but the penny seems to be dropping that the suburbs are a source of pride after all.