Please note that this programme transcript is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS THE GNOME ZONE TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Richard Weight Producer: Simon Coates Editor: Nicola Meyrick BBC Room 1210 White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS (020) 8752 7279 Broadcast date: 24.08.06 2030-2100 Repeat date: 27.08.06 2130-2200 CD number: PLN634/06VT1034 Duration: 27.41 Taking part in order of appearance: Michele Hanson Columnist, The Guardian & author of Living with Mother until the Very End (forthcoming) Ekow Eshun Creative Director, Institute of Contemporary Arts & author of Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in England and Africa Andrew Saint Editor, The Survey of London Martin Daunton, F.B.A., F.R.Hist. S. Professor of Economic History, University of Cambridge & Master, Trinity Hall Lord Best, O.B.E. Director, Joseph Rowntree Foundation Michael Bracewell Cultural critic & author of England Is Mine: Pop Life in Albion from Wilde to Goldie Bevis Hillier Author of the authorized three-volume biography of Sir John Betjeman Adam Lively Novelist, documentary maker & author of Masks: Blackness, Race and the Imagination Iain Sinclair Novelist, cultural geographer & author of Lights Out for the Territory: Nine Excursions in the Secret History of London; Liquid City; London Orbital and Suicide Bridge: a mythology of the south and east WEIGHT: Suburbs are found throughout Britain. But it’s the English who are obsessed with them—perhaps because attitudes to suburbia are prisms of class culture and hybridity. The garden gnome, for example, is a German import. Simultaneously a source of discontent and fantasy, is suburbia the natural habitat of the English? After all, most people live there. As a girl, writer Michele Hanson moved from the centre of London to the suburb of Ruislip. She remembers what drew her parents to the margins. HANSON: My mother liked it because she’d come from quite a poor background. My father lived in Camden Town, which then was rather slummy, and my mother came from Barrow-in- Furness. And so, when they went out to the suburbs, it was a wonderful, clean, open, spacious, luxurious place to go. They were coming out of the city and into more pleasant surroundings. And, of course, she played bridge, she had her friends, she had the local Jewish community, she had the chicken farmer visit, they had the coalman delivering and they had a great big garden with an orchard and stuff like that. But for a teenager, that’s no fun. WEIGHT: Ekow Eshun is the Creative Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts and author of Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in England and Africa. After a few years in Ghana, he spent much of his childhood in the smart London suburb of Queensbury. On the face of it, as mundane a place as suburbia can fashion. ESHUN: I thought the place most fascinating, strange, extraordinary place possible because—certainly if you come there from having lived for a few years in Africa—the order of the place, the sequence and the normality of it just feels fantastic. Equally, I guess the predictability of it felt quite exotic to me because it was so fantastically serried. WEIGHT: So the exoticism was its normality, its anonymity even? ESHUN: Yeah, I have in my head the image of these streets I’d walk down: semi-detached houses; porches in front; crazy paving; people washing their cars on Sunday mornings; properly, a policeman walking down the street saying hello to the children as he walked past. For me this was an image straight out of Ladybird books and it was so fantastically correct and proper, such an idea of what England could be, was supposed to be, should be that I was enraptured! WEIGHT: Over the last century, millions of people have left the city in search of the good life. But life’s got more complicated recently. Both Downing Street and English Heritage have expressed anxiety about the fabric and future of suburbia from dilapidation to petty crime. To address the malaise of the suburbs, we first need to understand them. What exactly were the original suburbanites escaping from? Andrew Saint works for English Heritage and edits the official history of London’s buildings. SAINT: It begins in the nineteenth century when people really did think the city was evil and frightening and dangerous and polluted and wicked. And the suburb could represent something which was other than that. It was a place which could be virtuous, where you could be safe and where you could walk and enjoy yourself in your garden, dig and make flowers, not go to the pub—all those kinds of things. WEIGHT: People weren’t just escaping the grime, overcrowding and degradation of the city. Many were also in search of a new identity—upwardly mobile and socially liberated. Martin Daunton is Professor of Economic History at Cambridge University and Master of Trinity Hall. DAUNTON: A sign of middle class status was to have a non-working wife. The question then arises: what did the women do when they stayed at home? Well, they might have been twitching the net curtain and watching their neighbours, but they might also develop a very active social life within the suburbs. And it might well be that it was the men who felt a threat to their identity because the men would go off to work, return in the evening and might well feel that they were under the control of the woman who had been looking after the home. And sometimes the men would feel that they needed then to find their own separate masculine space within the suburb. They might go to their own clubs if they were well-to-do. If they were not well-to-do, they might go fishing, they might go to the football or the rugby, which were male zones. WEIGHT: Suburbs then as now were variegated places, embracing a wealth of different people, some of whom weren’t well off. In fact, deprivation lurks behind the fixed, ceramic smiles of many garden gnomes. Richard Best is director of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a charity that’s involved in managing suburbs in York. BEST: Suburbs come in all shapes and sizes and in some suburban areas—not the kind of Hampstead Garden Suburb at, I don’t know, getting on for a million pounds a house!, but on the peripheries of some big cities—we have neglected areas where the little row of shops is now closed because nobody used it—they all went to the supermarkets; where we’ve got some derelict land; where the people who live there may have been there many years and be rather an elderly population. There are areas in need of attention that we are tending to neglect when we concentrate on regenerating the inner city or even worrying about people who need affordable homes in rural areas. The bit in the middle is very big, that suburban part of the UK, and some of it is now ready for an overhaul. CD 1: Pet Shop Boys: Please: Suburbia WEIGHT: The Pet Shop Boys observing bus- stop vandalism in suburbia. But what to do about it—repair or renewal? The British cult of do-it-yourself maintenance was born in the suburbs—a product of home ownership, an expression of individual pride in one’s home and a way of saving money. But DIY won’t be enough to maintain the suburbs. Let’s start by seeing how modern they are. How does Andrew Saint of English Heritage view them? SAINT: There was a very specific and constructed aesthetic of the suburb which took about a hundred years to put into place, and it represented a real achievement—the rather sophisticated nature of the street lay-out, the internal lay-out of the house, the relationship of the garden to the street, the house to the street, etcetera, etcetera. WEIGHT: Are we also talking about a very English modernity? SAINT: Yes, it’s a very good way to put it. It’s reducing to a very simplified form the basic English vernacular elements of the cottage for the twentieth century and giving them to the ordinary working class person. And, of course, in the early twentieth century people were still not frightened of talking in a top-down way about what would be good for the working classes. WEIGHT: Making the English cottage available to all? That doesn’t seem like a very modern idea. Yet suburban homes were bought and sold as a planned way of life that incorporated the best of country and city living. And the most significant wave of development took place during the 1920s and ’30s in the new age of mass democracy, when the familiar mock-Tudor semi made its appearance. For the first time, people were consciously buying a life-style. Michael Bracewell, author of England is Mine, is a cultural critic. BRACEWELL: One of the things that was on sale was definitely a social and moral idea as well. If you look at the advertising for the London suburbs of the 1920s, you are being presented with a whole package: you’re not just buying a house; you’re buying respectability, you’re buying a kind of moral cleanliness, you’re buying a life-style. And I suppose it’s easy, from a contemporary perspective, to find that a rather staid or even snobbish construct. But, if you think about it, it’s not that much different to the way that warehouse loft apartments are marketed today as a life-style choice. It’s just that today’s choice would be urban, edgy and in the 1920s it was an idea of the happy family unit. WEIGHT: What sort of life-style are we talking about? Suburbs are seen as atomized places where individuals only connect with others by peering over the garden fence to admire— or envy—their neighbours’ roses. Can the suburbs foster a civic culture, one that’s wired into a mass medium? Martin Daunton at Cambridge. DAUNTON: The suburbs are not simply atomistic. I pick up your point by looking both at what is happening within the home and within the suburb as a whole. In the home, people are clustering around the radio set and it would be one radio set. So one thing which is happening there is that people might indeed be sitting in their own living room being atomistic, but at the same time they’re part of a national culture. But they’re not only sitting within their own home, within their own living room because the suburbs were also intensely social places. WEIGHT: Now in north London, Michele Hanson remembers the rooted community of Ruislip, at the centre of which was her extended family. HANSON: I think my mother felt rooted out there. She was there for about twenty-five years and she was very happy there. And also a lot of my father’s family lived there. My auntie lived round the corner, another auntie lived in Ickenham, another auntie lived near the woods. WEIGHT: What’s the relationship, do you think, between the urban and the suburban? Where does the city stop and the suburbs start? HANSON: This is very mixed, sort of very close to Hampstead Heath, so it’s a little bit suburby. It is a wonderful place to be because you’ve got all that outdoors. I wonder if that’s a sort of hangover I’ve got from living in Ruislip. WEIGHT: Maybe we’re all a bit hungover when we think of suburbia. Where do we get our stereotype of it from? The late poet laureate, Sir John Betjeman, is credited with—and blamed for—the idea of suburbs as cosy places. His documentary, Metro-land, celebrated the London suburbs that grew up around the Metropolitan railway. DVD: Metro-land (Sir John Betjeman reading own commentary) Over the points by electrical traction Out of the chimney-pots into the openness ’Til we come to the suburb that’s thought to be commonplace Home of the gnome and the average citizen. WEIGHT: He initially sneered at the “home of the gnome and the average citizen”. But, radiated by patriotism during the Second World War, he viewed the suburbs more sympathetically. His official biographer, Bevis Hillier, explains. HILLIER: Betjeman said in a radio broadcast—and this really was a volte face—“I like suburbs. Nothing is ugly. Bicycling in the suburbs of a great city, I see a strange beauty in those quiet, deserted evenings—laburnums and lilac weeping over the front gate, father rolling the lawn and mother knitting at the open window.” WEIGHT: So was there a moral aspect of life in the suburbs that appealed to Betjeman? HILLIER: Yes, I think these were people who were content with their lot. He rather envied them because he wasn’t content with his lot. Why? Because his father was “in trade”. Betjeman always had aspirations above this. He wanted to be with the toffs. WEIGHT: So Betjeman was troubled by the same anxieties about status as many inhabitants of suburbs allegedly are. Sadly, his picture of them has become a caricature. The suburbs have replaced the countryside as an idealized way of imagining England—settled places of compromise and security. Novelist and documentary maker, Adam Lively, grew up in the country but moved to the suburb of Dollis Hill, near to the heart of Metro-land. LIVELY: There is a sense that has come down through the culture, the idea that suburbia is unimportant and stultifying. WEIGHT: So is it because we don’t have a British dream and we define class much more in terms of culture than income; whereas in America the suburbs are the location of the middle class to which everyone aspires to belong? LIVELY: Perhaps in Britain we tend to define ourselves in terms of where we’ve come from as opposed to where we want to go to, and the suburbs, of course, traditionally are the place of aspiration. WEIGHT: The idea that suburbs are stultifying may, ironically, stem from the fact that they’re very rooted places. Strong communities and yet with enough space and anonymity to avoid being noticed. The recent arrests of suspected extremists have shocked people, not only because they’re English but also because they live in suburbs—just like IRA cells did before them. Should we be surprised to discover that suburbs may be harbouring extremists, perhaps even incubating them? Novelist and cultural geographer, Iain Sinclair. SINCLAIR: To me, it’s the obvious place they would be. You need to be somewhere where you can live almost invisibly. You need to be somewhere where you’ve got time and space to carry on your ways without the thousands of surveillance cameras and the logging procedures which attend life in the inner city. And, secondly, those sort of places are very convenient for airports. So if you’re going to carry on your threat through airports or you’re going to shoot planes out of the sky, that’s the place it’s going to happen. Those places are much more frightening than the centre of a city and the great estates because the kind of crime you get there is very low level—it’s sort of street gangs, drug wars and random killings, you know, all the picturesque stuff you’d expect—but the other thing is more sinister because we don’t know. It’s any of these suburban houses. WEIGHT: Someone who imagines such events in his work is the novelist, J.G. Ballard, himself a suburbanite. Iain Sinclair again. SINCLAIR: J.G. Ballard’s become the great sort of sage of the suburbs, living for years and years in Shepperton. And Ballard, sitting there and thinking about what the suburbs are, says that they are very interesting because whatever we’re taking on in terms of Ikea furniture, kind of Swedish design, modernism, the use of the Internet, making pornographic movies at home—whatever it is you do to kind of create some sort of shock to your imagination, get you out of boredom and inertia, will happen in the suburbs rather than in the centre. That’s his pitch. And to react against this inertia and boredom that is endemic to that place, you have to come up with solutions like acts of subversion. WEIGHT: People can be disturbed by the presence of deviance and subversion because they romanticize the suburbs as sites of stability and don’t see how radical they can be. But, says Andrew Saint at English Heritage, it’s also because others romanticize the city. SAINT: This is a very important point. When the whole kind of moral agenda of the suburb got worn out, which it was by the Second World War, there came a whole set of new urbanites who began to romanticize inner city living and they really still have the agenda. Richard Rogers is a very good example of such a character who somehow believes that civic virtue means having continuous street parties, sitting at metal tables outside cafés talking about the latest film or something; that this somehow is the only real form of modern life. WEIGHT: Do you think that the likes of Richard Rogers miss the fact that suburbs have always been very socially diverse, then? SAINT: Yes, I think many, many people do forget how diverse they are and how surprising they are when you read that terrorists are supposed to be living in our suburbs today. But it’s amusing, in a way, if you can say that about the question, that people should be surprised that terrorists should live in the suburbs. They expect them all to be living in the inner city. Well, lots of wild things are happening everywhere in the suburbs. WEIGHT: And does it prove how exciting and modern they are? SAINT: It certainly shows how modern they are. I think we could do without that form of excitement! WEIGHT: So if we live in such interesting times, why has a rather dull paradigm of suburbia got stuck in our culture like leaves in a well-painted drainpipe? Poets aren’t the only ones to blame. So many of our TV shows are set in suburbia, like The Kumars At No. 42 and The Good Life. VHS: The Good Life. Actuality taken from The Weaver’s Tale. WEIGHT: The Good Life is a satire of the Goods’ attempt to turn suburbia into a rural Arcadia it never was. Yet Margot Leadbetter, the show’s anti-heroine, has become synonymous with suburban woman—partly because Margaret Thatcher was made Tory leader around the time it first aired. Dr. Jonathan Miller spoke for a metropolitan élite when he derided Mrs. Thatcher’s “odious suburban gentility and sentimental… patriotism catering to the worst elements of commuter idiocy”. Not everyone agreed. Critic Michael Bracewell. BRACEWELL: It was partly, I think, a comedy of recognition—certainly in the case of, say, a Giles cartoon or a Carry On… film or, indeed, some of the early sitcoms—the classic Reginald Perrin, Good Life. There was a kind of open-handedness about the humour and about the satirizing of suburbia, which curiously ended up championing suburbia as much as it ridiculed it. WEIGHT: Why, despite the amount of snobbery there has been towards the suburbs, why have they remained so popular? BRACEWELL: One has to be very wary about subscribing to this idea of suburbia just being this huge, monotonous tract of boring houses and petty-minded people. I think it’s far more complicated than that and it’s the complication, in fact, which makes it so interesting. WEIGHT: They’re very ambiguous places, then? BRACEWELL: Yeah, I think they are. WEIGHT: Both those who demonize and those who romanticize the suburbs ignore what ethnically variegated places they are. The 2001 census found that a substantial number of African Britons as well as Asian Britons are moving to inner suburbs— though their reception has been mixed. Remembering his experience of bigotry, Ekow Eshun found that class and race were bluntly elided. ESHUN: People don’t really know where to put you. White, working class, quasi-racist kids who I was at school with were very perplexed, slightly angered because, you know, me and my brother and sister spoke quite well and, you know… WEIGHT: Better than they did? ESHUN: Yeah, we spoke better than they did! We did better at classes, and this angered them. For me, actually, it was a really good illustration of the fact that the suburbs aren’t particularly bland places. There’s actually quite a lot of tension, anger—to put it crudely, insipient violence, really—that’s right there because people don’t have a way necessarily to say, “I don’t like you. You don’t belong here.” It’s not like everyone’s crushed in together in terraced housing, it’s not like inner city living where people are in flats and apartment blocks. This is very different. Everyone’s got a home to go to. The real tensions are about, you know, “What’s your position within this ostensibly flat scenario?” “Where do you really stand?” “And, actually, if you’re doing better than me and I’m white and you’re black, what does that mean?” “Who are you?” “Why are you occupying this position and I’m not, frankly, because I thought that was where I was supposed to be?” WEIGHT: Suburbia’s diversity is a more privately-lived one, then. But what’s it contributed to our culture? For Michael Bracewell, it’s the “spiritual home of English pop”. BRACEWELL: One of the things which is interesting about suburbs culturally is that they’re edge places, and one of the things that happens on the edges of places is that people can feel alienated or slightly isolated. But, at the same time, they are within sight, if you want, of a cultural centre. And I think that one of the things that can happen with the suburb is that you create, if you want, a place that people want to rebel against—if you want, the frustration of being just in sight of the glamour of a city centre can really heighten people’s creativity. That’s been a constant pretty much since suburbia began and has given rise to some extremely interesting creative people: David Bowie in Beckenham or with Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid being at Croydon Art College… WEIGHT: Paul Weller in Woking. BRACEWELL: Paul Weller in Woking, Siouxsie and the Banshees from Bromley, Suede from Haywards Heath, etcetera, etcetera. And almost invariably what happens the moment these people become very famous and successful is they turn round and say how much they hated the suburb that they came from, when I think that there’s a very good case to say that it was the suburb that they came from that shaped them, in some ways, provided that kind of grit which sharpened their creativity. WEIGHT: If the suburbs generate so much of our culture it’s strange they’re not credited with doing so. They’re seen as places of settlement rather than innovation. Is that because latent snobbery still regards them, as in every sense, middling places? Ekow Eshun at the ICA. ESHUN: The suburbs are raising questions about who we are and how we live. WEIGHT: So we should look a bit less at the inner city and a bit more towards the suburbs? ESHUN: Well, I don’t think we really have a choice. In social terms anyway, I think the suburbs come to visit us. You’re dealing with all the urgent issues of, you know, social change, really—issues of class and of income—all of these things which to an extent you can ignore if you’ve got a certain income and you live in a nice place in the middle of town. You can ignore those for a while, but on a national level you actually can’t. WEIGHT: … because if those issues are ignored they’ll fester, even in the most comfortable cul-de-sac. CD 2: Roxy Music: For Your Pleasure: In Every Dream Home a Heartache WEIGHT ACTUALITY: I’m in Gladstone Park with Adam Lively on a beautiful, sunny, breezy afternoon. And, as well as the usual things you’d find in a park—kids’ playground, flowerbeds, to our left is the new Wembley football stadium, in the background there’s a duck pond with a rather erotic statue of a naked woman and there’s a black family playing cricket over there. People of all sorts of different ages and backgrounds, it seems. It seems to be a very vibrant and very civic atmosphere here. LIVELY ACTUALITY: It is. It’s actually one of the few public spaces in Dollis Hill, in this suburb, where people come together and it’s very, very popular. It’s a beautiful park. The view that we’re looking at now is described by the great American writer, Mark Twain, as being “paradise on earth”. Mark Twain lived here for about a year at the end of the nineteenth century and the park immediately in front of us would have been pretty much the same. Beyond that, there were rolling hills. Mark Twain actually said that they were more beautiful than the Tuscan hills. There would have been the railway here. The other thing that Mark Twain commented on was it combined the pleasures of the countryside with the fact that you could get into central London within half-an-hour, even in those days. WEIGHT: Suburbs are vacated spaces, generating much of our culture but without fully benefiting from it. Their most innovative inhabitants catch the train into town and don’t return on the 5.42. But suburbs have always been platforms from which people’s identities change. Should we therefore look at them as a new kind of city? Martin Daunton at Cambridge. DAUNTON: In a way what is happening is not the turning of the English town dweller into rural dwellers. What is happening in the 1930s is that the countryside in Britain becomes almost emptied of real economic significance. Food is imported from overseas. Very few people live in the countryside. The countryside is instead available as a screen upon which people can project their desires. Suburbia is part of that projection of desires. WEIGHT: So it’s not an Arcadian ruralism; it’s a new urbanism? DAUNTON: Precisely. It is exactly a new form of urbanism which Britain is pioneering within Europe. It is not an atavistic looking back to some lost rural past. It is actually the creation of a new urban future. SAINT: If you look all over the world, everybody’s living in places like this. Why? Because it’s not an English thing alone to want to have a house and a garden. It’s an absolutely universal thing. It happens in China, it happens in Italy, it happens in France, in cultures which are thought to be very traditionally urban. WEIGHT: As Andrew Saint said earlier, the suburbs are a very English form of modernity; he now reminds us that, paradoxically, suburbia is also a way that England connects with global life. There may be few mock-Tudor beams in Beijing but, as a way of living, suburbia is a nexus of international society. Not all of us want to live in suburbia. But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t influenced our world. Suburbs are no longer homes to monoculture, if they ever were. Growing diversity is difficult, but perhaps it’s in suburbia that we’ll feel most comfortable having a conversation with the neighbours. Modernity and progress can be found in the strangest of places. 8