Andrew Beharrell, Senior Advisor, Pollard Thomas Edwards
This is the latest in a series of short essays about where Londoners live. I’m interested in the ordinary places – the most common types of home and neighbourhood, which have driven the capital’s historic expansion – not the architectural award-winners. What makes these places enduringly popular, and what can we learn from them when considering how to revive existing neighbourhoods and create new ones today? I draw on personal memories of the homes I have lived in or visited often, and I encourage readers to share their own experiences and insights.
In 1993 I moved with my young family to a semi-detached house in Hampstead Garden Suburb. We stayed for 16 years and moved only because of an opportunity to build our own place nearby. Like many of our neighbours, we were only the third generation of owners of our 1935 house: we know couples who moved in when they first had children and plan stay until they are carried out. The houses are large enough, but not too large, and they are endlessly adaptable. One family we know has remodelled three times: to accommodate three young children, two careers and a nanny; to provide semi-privacy for teenagers; and now to suit semi-retirement for music-loving bibliophile empty-nesters.
When we moved in, our house was impeccably clean and relentlessly beige. Little had changed since the 1930s, and we gently lifted it into the modern age, keeping the sensible room layout, lovingly restoring the draughty Crittall windows and the cream and black bathroom tiles, stocking the teak veneered wardrobes, with their original trouser press, cufflink drawer and tie rack. Far away in Northumberland on a freezing New Year’s Eve, soon after completing our restoration, we received a call from our neighbours to say that our house had suffered a catastrophic plumbing leak. The fire brigade had to break in to shut off the water, which had been cascading under pressure from a broken pipe in the roof and had seeped through the party wall. Teapots inside kitchen cupboards were full to the brim, such was the downpour. The point of this story is that the construction was so robust that the house dried out with relatively little damage, helped by the suspended ground floor and raised threshold, not permitted today: the water just poured through and out into the street.
HGS is clearly a rather privileged suburb, rigorously conserved in its original state by a Trust, which does not hesitate to serve enforcement notices on illicit installers of plastic windows, or to name and shame householders who erect satellite dishes. One of its greatest achievements, in sad contrast to most London suburbs, is the preservation of front gardens from being concreted over for parking.
Devon Rise inspired me to write a homage to the suburban front garden called Privet Lives, celebrating the many positive impacts of the humble hedge: on the environment and ecology; on air quality and privacy; on jobs for gardeners and exercise for householders [1]. Above all, front gardens and front gardening provide opportunities for casual social interaction ‚ and during the pandemic they have come into their own for socially distanced doorstep encounters. Book-clubbing, hedge-trimming, car-washing and produce-swapping ‚ these cliches of the suburban good life are precious everyday activities which create a context for a sociable society.
Reflecting on this period in my life made me wonder why this excellent housing type has been so long neglected (if not derided) by architects and planners, and to reflect on the future of London’s suburbs under threat from active densification and casual neglect.
Origins and Perception
London’s biggest building boom took place in the 1920s and ’30s with massive expansion of the suburbs around new commuter rail and underground links. The great architectural legacy of Metroland is the semi-detached house. There are around 541,000 semis in the Outer London Boroughs. The inter-war semi is probably the most under-appreciated of London’s major housing typologies. Although often derided by the professions and the press, it is enduringly popular among residents of London’s suburbs, and accounts for over 10% of our housing stock. The semi is endlessly adaptable to changing demands and circumstances.
The suburban semi-detached house was pioneered by distinguished architects and planners of the Arts and Crafts and Garden City movements, and it was popularised by the developers of what Osbert Lancaster famously dubbed ‘Bypass Variegated’ [2]. They all extoll the merits of a house with its own front door, and gardens front and rear. Pairing offers the appearance and status of a ‘villa’ and the practical benefits of a garden-passage and side-windows ‚ at a lower development cost and higher site density than a detached house.
‘Metroland’ is now used, with growing affection displacing scorn, to describe the inter-war outer London suburbs. It was originally coined (as Metro-Land) by the marketing people for the Metropolitan Railway as it pushed out into North-West London and beyond.
The semi-detached house is by no means the only typology found in the suburbs, but it is the predominant one, and, for most of us, it captures the character and image of Metroland, in both innocent times, and times of neglect and degradation. Nor is the inter-war semi the first application of this typology – its origins lie in Victorian paired villas, model cottages for agricultural workers and the artful pairings of Richard Norman Shaw at Bedford Park and Parker and Unwin at Letchworth, and their many collaborators ‚ but the builders of London’s inter-war suburbs rolled it out as popular housing for aspiring people on modest incomes.
While the suburbs provided an accessible arcadia for their residents, they became a lightning conductor for the snobbery of higher-minded people ‚ some of whom came from the places they so despised. In The Intellectuals and the Masses, John Carey devotes a whole chapter to ‘The Suburbs and the Clerks’ [3]. Many pre- and post-war writers describe the soul-destroying conformity and ugliness of the suburbs. Here is George Orwell in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) on ”the futility, the bloodiness, the deathliness of modern life” and in Coming Up for Air (1939) on ”semi-detached torture chambers where the poor little five-to-ten pound a-weekers quake and shiver”[4]. Osbert Lancaster wrote: ”It is sad to reflect that so much ingenuity should have been wasted on streets and estates which will inevitably become the slums of the future. That is, if a fearful and more sudden fate does not obliterate them prematurely: an eventuality that does much to reconcile one to the prospect of aerial bombardment.” [2]
Illustration by Osbert Lancaster
Notes
[1] Privet Lives by Andrew Beharrell for Future of London https://www.pollardthomasedwards.co.uk/journal/privet-lives-placemaking-in-suburbia/
[2] Pillar to Post ‚ English Architecture without Tears by Osbert Lancaster (1938) ‚ republished by Pimpernel Press Limited 2015
[3] Quoted in The Intellectuals and the Masses, Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880 ‚ 1939 (Faber and Faber 1992) John Carey devotes a whole chapter to The Suburbs and the Clerks.
[4] Quoted in Ged Pope’s All the Tiny Moments Blazing ‚ A Literary Guide to Suburban London (Reaktion Books) – recently presented to the London Society ‚ which contains many excerpts from pre- and post-war writers describing the soul-destroying conformity and ugliness of the suburbs.
