The Private Garden of Suburban Delights
Throughout the last two centuries, suburbs in England have been a target of criticism from metropolitan elites. Suburbia is famed for being the inefficient midpoint between the productivity of cities and the pastoral arcadia of the countryside. Its has often been ridiculed for its repetitiveness, low-quality housing, and masterplans that are determined by requirements of highway engineers opposed to the underlying physical and cultural landscape. [1] Despite this, in England at least, most of us live here— but why? The key is the spatial characteristic that differentiates suburbia from metropolitan life: the private garden.
Although the suburban house-and-garden typology may be successful in terms of its social benefit to the individual occupant, yet suburbia as a wider landscape is a tangled story of failures and success.
History of the cultural desire for private gardens
The Englishness of gardens
The personal ownership of a house and garden is a quintessentially English cultural idyll. The first lines of Rudyard Kipling’s poem, The Glory of the Garden, begins:
“Our England is a garden, that is full of stately views
Of borders, beds, shrubberies and lawns and avenues” [2]
The English have a long history of garden cultivation, dating back to the medieval period.[3] According to Jonathan Kellet, the ‘provision of dwellings with private gardens’ in England and Wales is ‘extremely high’, compared to other European nations.[4] In terms of the amount of this aspiration for garden ownership, in 1970, the Housing Research Foundation published that 93% of prospective residential buyers desired a garden.[5]
Land Ownership
According to Richard Gill, the English, in particular, the upper classes, have a ‘profound attachment to the land itself’.[6] Land ownership as a means of social and political power is well-ingrained into English culture. From the introduction of the feudal system in the Norman period, until the rise of the middle-class in the eighteenth century, the landed gentry have been the most influential members of English society.
Middle-class gardens
The social climb of the middle-classes in the eighteenth century, led to the aspiration of the capitalist ‘national society’,[7] to personally own an estate and country house. The metropolitan ‘national-society’, moved away from the bourgeoise Georgian townhouses of London, with shared private gardens, and their aspiration manifested in the owner-occupied house-and-garden typology, with both a personal front and back garden. This was an opportunity for citizens to have their own piece of the English countryside. In 1972, Oscar Newman described the socio-economics of garden ownership, as the ‘traditional symbol of arrival’.[8]
Bedford Park, in London, was the late 19th-century pioneer of the ‘garden suburb’.[9] An 1880 newspaper said that ‘The charm of the scene has been greatly enhanced by the loving tenderness with which every possible tree has been preserved… [it has] neither mansion or mews but comfortable dwellings’.[10] However, these ‘Queen Anne’ detached ‘comfortable dwellings’ by Norman Shaw,[11] were only economically available to the middle-classes.
Working Class Slums to Bylaw Estates
As London reached its industrial maturity in the 19th-century, the population increased fivefold,[12] and the metropolitan city was at its maximum capacity. The dominant household of the working-classes were ‘warren’ houses, which merely included a small yard with a shared outside lavatory. Warren streets were winding and difficult for the authorities to maintain and often accumulated waste and smoke.[13]
To improve the health of the working classes, the 1875 Public Health Act, introduced ‘bylaw streets’, which were long straight roads, lined with terraced or semi-detached houses with gardens, and were orthogonally arranged, which were easier to patrol and maintain.[14] The bylaw street is the typical working-class suburban street as we now know it.
Gardens for the individual
The suburban private garden is a residential greenspace typology, which is intended for the use and social representation, of the individual family unit. For the working-class occupant, the suburban house and garden was an undoubted improvement of welfare, compared to the East End warren terraces.
Additional functional space
The suburban garden provided the working classes with additional functional space, which would not have been available in the dense warren slums of the city. They were for growing vegetables, drying washing, general maintenance, hobbies, and a safe space for children to play.[15]
In 1897, George Cadbury completed the Bournville industrial village, just outside of the then metropolitan Birmingham. Adjacent to the factory were houses with large gardens for the workers, as John Claudius Loudon had planned in 1829.[16] Cadbury found, that the profit that the working residents would gain from growing vegetables, would offset the costs of rent, thus the addition of large gardens were economically feasible. [17]
Class divide and improvement
The Hampstead Garden Suburb, founded by Dame Henrietta Barnett, and planned by Sir Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, was an arts and crafts residential utopia, that blended the social boundaries of class. In a 1903 letter, entitled ‘A Garden Suburb for the Working Class’, Barnett said that all classes were welcome in the suburb; the middle-classes could live in the ‘promised land’, by philanthropically subsidising the ‘industrial classes’.[18] The suburb’s success is attributed to its diversity of style and scale, which to a certain extent, liberated individuals from the collectivist construct of class. Quality of life in the suburb, was an indisputable improvement from the living conditions, of the urban slums, but also satisfied a middle-class romance for the countryside.
The level of privacy in the suburban house-and-garden was a far cry from the communal living conditions of the working-class London terrace. By dwelling in an isolated private space, one can escape the reach of the city. A 1948 report by the Ministry of Health, found that residents wished gardens to ‘provide the greatest possible measure of privacy’,[19] with high hedges in the back garden and a low hedge framing the front of the house.[20] Kellet said that residents would be willing to accept a smaller back garden if they were free from overlooking.[21] Landscape historian, Tom Turner, says that the rear garden is a spatial extension of the house and that the ratio, of the boundaries, length, and width are just as important as those of an internal room.[22]
Self-Expression
Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of the suburban garden, is that they are rarely created by professionals, and are reliant on the resident for design and maintenance. The Hampstead Garden Suburb had design intentions with large gardens planned, yet when it was constructed, the garden was merely ‘the part of plot not occupied by buildings’.[23] The empty plots were simply the non-space, in which the house was not.
However, I pose that this lack of design empowers self-expression. Furthermore, creativity in the garden counterpoints the monotony of repetitive suburban housing and emphasises the diversity of the suburban neighbourhood. The garden is simpler to manipulate compared to the house, so is feasible for the typical resident.
The Becontree Estate, in Essex, began construction in 1919, but by 1939 was the largest local housing scheme in the world.[24] It was a socialist project, built and maintained by the London County Council. However, it was undeniably homogeneous, both architecturally and socially. The estate was composed of 27,000 homes yet had a mere 91 housing designs.[25]
Lack of ownership in the 20th-century suburb meant that gardening was more than a freedom but compulsory; this was to enforce neighbourliness and the upkeep of the street. In Becontree, there were 16 accounts of eviction served, for the ‘non-cultivation of garden’.[26]
The most successful individualist garden is the owner-occupied garden. By the 1980s, following the contentious ‘right to buy’ scheme, the working-class garden became a target of criticism. Urban elites lost the monopoly on what was considered tasteful.[27] The freedom of ownership empowered suburbanites to do as they wished in the garden, leading to a variety of questionable designs.
Reported in the Telegraph, Becontree resident, Terry Mannix, has placed in his front garden, an ‘original blacksmith’s anvil, a 10ft-tall, cast-iron lamp post, and a half-sized red pillar box’, and a ‘fox hiding from a top-hatted Victorian gentleman.’[28]
Although this garden design may be excessive, it illustrates that ownership enables the autonomy of the resident, and provides the individual with freedom and responsibility, rather than restrictions imposed by a collective.
A landscape of individual gardens
Suburbia is an individualist landscape, that is composed of a variety of isolated dwellings that are each intended for the private use of individuals. The nature of arranging private space into collective estates is a dichotomy, that creates a variety of socio-political problems.
Political sprawling landscape
Politically, the key cause of suburban expansion in England, was the context, of a growing population, and a rising lower-class, combined with a cultural desire for a house-and-garden.
The most significant political problem was the scale of demand for new homes in the early 20th-century. During the inter-war years alone, the working-class estates created four million gardens.[29] The issue of scale is that the nature of garden ownership, requires land in which to own, thus when applied to the scale of an entire class, an entire tract of land is required to change.
In 1964, in the BBC programme, A City Crowned with Green, Reyner Banham argues against mass suburban ownership in London, he said:
“The thin patchy expansion, of the thin patchy metropolis, can still be traced, but in the end, it was to be London’s undoing. The idea of giving every citizen his own house on his own piece of ground with greenery became dynamite, as soon as every citizen came to mean every Tom, Dick or nobody with a vote”.[30]
However, with a mass demand for land in a small democratic nation, without altering the mainstream culture or politics, suburban expansion was arguably inevitable.
Capitalist gardens
The other key political issue in suburbia is the capitalist nature of both the physical development and the demographic that resides within it.
The 1923 Radical Housing Act, provided private developers and builders, with large subsidies to build new suburban homes.[31] The product was an inherently capitalist landscape, constructed for economic profit, which due to the lack of designers, manifested as low-quality housing, that is repeated in geometrical patterns.[32] Due to the prevailing singular usage, the lack of focal points, and the public inaccessibility of the house and private garden, the suburban public realm is futile to non-residents. However, this is an issue that can be solved with design, although due to the current ‘housing crisis’ this type of expansion is still occurring today in the exurbs.
The isolated layout of the suburban landscape produces a social deficit of animation and neighbourliness, compared to the city. The key flaw of suburbia is the paradox between its individualist nature and the aspiration to create community collectives.
The suburban landscape of London appeared in three forms, each with distinct social characteristics. Firstly, the “patchy”[33] expansions, which were extensions of existing communities that surrounded the capital; places like the Hampstead Garden Suburb, which retained the village ‘nucleus’ and were relatively successful. Secondly, the suburban development between the expansions, which sprawled across greenfield sites and tended to appear around transport interchanges due to the lack of community focal points, places like Becontree.[34] Thirdly, Patrick Abercrombie’s 1944 green belt plan, began to protect the countryside around London, so instead, new satellite towns developed just outside of the greenbelt; this includes, the ‘Garden Cities’ of Letchworth and Welwyn, and the less successful post-war ‘New towns’, like Harlow. Although, due to the absence of history, these new developments required a period of time before a successful community was established.
Empowered by advances in transport technology, and the 1883 Cheap Trains Act,[35] suburban residents seldom live where they work, thus are more economically and socially tied to the city.[36] Displacement from the city created a social void, and the physical isolated layout of suburbia dictated a new social landscape.
Social advancement in individualist suburb
The escape from the city, was an opportunity for personal social advancement, particularly for the middle-classes. Since the early 20th century, the suburban front garden has been a place of social display, thus grander front gardens can publicly contribute to higher social status. ‘Mrs Bouquet’ or rather ‘Bucket’ from the television programme ‘Keeping up appearances’ was a media caricature of a middle-class suburban mindset, whose appearance to the neighbourhood, was more important than reality. An unfortunate product of an individualist society is social competition, which often manifests itself in edited versions of reality.
Lack of community — garden as a solution
Although community is rarely designed for in the suburbs, collective authority can enforce neighbourliness. In the Hampstead garden suburb, with the intention that one could bond with one’s neighbour in the private garden, the authority would measure resident’s hedges with a stick and would issue fines if the height was not up to standard.[37]
According to Martin Hoyles’s 1994 paper, gardening is England’s most popular outdoor leisure activity.[38] Gardening can be a social activity, it ‘was the common interest around which new social life could be built on new estates’.[39] Authorities, including the London County Council, used this public interest to create community. The authority held gardening competitions that the entire neighbourhood participated in. Banham argued that the suburban social landscape was an “illusion”,[40] and although this may be true now, social gardening events irrefutably did enhance suburban wellbeing at the time.
London literary elites were ‘threatened’ by this new social phenomenon, and went as far as to say that suburbia was ‘bad for you’.[41] In a 1930s edition of the medical journal ‘The Lancet’, Dr Stephen Taylor publicised a new term called ‘suburban neurosis’.[42] It is ‘A set of psychological, or psychological and physical symptoms, said to occur particularly amongst suburban housewives, associated with feelings of boredom, anxiety, loneliness, and lack of personal fulfilment.’[43] However, according to Professor David Gilbert, it was not a scientific study but merely a ‘thought piece’ that fits with the story of social displacement.[44]
Looking forward
The suburban community spirit has diminished with time. Due to the expansion of complex social networks, through the increase in personal technology, there is less need to socialise with the direct neighbourhood, furthering the decline in physical community. The declining desire to impress the neighbours has reduced the quality and originality of gardens, which is a testament to the privately arranged individualist nature of the suburban landscape.
The private suburban garden fulfils the romantic English cultural idyll, of personally owning a piece of countryside. However, this desire at a mainstream scale is problematic, which in the context of this democratic country inevitably led to suburban sprawl. Moreover, the deficit of urban focus, prevailing repetition of single usage, and contradictory collection of individual isolated gardens don't lend towards a successful social landscape. However, the private garden as an individual typology is socially successful; it provides its residents with freedom, functional space, and a place to express themselves, and to a certain extent the garden facilitated the liberation from the boundaries of class.
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This piece has been adapted from a talk called ‘The Individualist Suburban Landscape’ that I gave as part of my research at the Cambridge Department of Architecture in 2018. https://issuu.com/benjaminnourse/docs/individualist_suburban_landscape
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[1] Ministry of Health, Central Housing Advisory Committee, Report of the Sub-committee on the means of improving the appearance of local authority housing estates. The Appearance of Housing Estates (HMSO, 1948), 3. Cited in Tom Turner, Landscape Planning (London: UCL Press, 1996),151.
[2] A School History of England (1911) by C. R. L. Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling, cited in Jonathan E. Kellett, “The Private Garden In England And Wales”, Landscape Planning 9, no. 2 (1982): 105–123, doi:10.1016/0304–3924(82)90002–8, 105.
[3] Jonathan E. Kellett, “The Private Garden In England And Wales”, Landscape Planning 9, no. 2 (1982): 105–123, doi:10.1016/0304–3924(82)90002–8, 106.
[4] “The Private Garden In England And Wales”, Kellet, 1982, 105.
[5] New Housing in South East England: Purchasers’ Like and Dislikes (The Housing Research Foundation, April 1970) cited in, Turner, Landscape Planning, 1996, 157.
[6] Richard Gill, Happy Rural Seat (UMI Research Press, 1994), 3.
[7] Wahrman, Dror. “National Society, Communal Culture: An Argument About The Recent Historiography Of Eighteenth‐Century Britain∗”. Social History 17, no. 1 (1992): 43. doi:10.1080/03071029208567822.
[8] Oscar Newman, 1972, Defensible Space. Faber and Faber, London, 189. cited in “The Private Garden In England And Wales”, Kellet, 1982, 122.
[9] Mervyn Miller, Hampstead Garden Suburb (Chichester: Phillimore, 2006), 9.
[10] Daily news, 5 May 1880, cited in Hampstead Garden Suburb.
[11] Miller, Hampstead Garden Suburb, 2006, 10.
[12] Miller, Hampstead Garden Suburb, 2006, 1.
[13] Engles, F. Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (London, 1892), 49. Cited in Turner, Landscape Planning, 1996, 145.
[14] Reyner Banham, [Review:] Muthesius, Stefan: The English Terraced House, (New Haven, 1982), 72.
[15] Turner, Landscape Planning, 1996, 157.
[16] Turner, Landscape Planning, 1996, 149.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Miller, Hampstead Garden Suburb, 2006, 22,23.
[19] Ministry of Health, Central Housing Advisory Committee, Report of the Sub-committee on the means of improving the appearance of local authority housing estates. Our Gardens (HMSO, 1948). Cited in Turner, Landscape Planning, 1996, 151.
[20] Turner, Landscape Planning, 1996, 151.
[21] “The Private Garden In England And Wales”, Kellet, 1982, 121.
[22] Turner, Landscape Planning, 1996, 161.
[23] Cook, J.A. ‘Gardens on housing estates’ Towns, Buildings, Construction (Oxford University Press, New York, 1977), 267. Cited in Landscape Planning, Turner, 161.
[24] Turner, Landscape Planning, 1996, 151.
[25] The Becontree Estate: ‘built in England where the most revolutionary social changes can take place, and people in general do not realise that they have occurred’, Municipal Dreams in Housing, London, January 2013
[26] Working Class Housing in England Between the Wars: The Becontree Estate, Andrzej Olechnowicz, 1997, 210.
[27] “Everyday Eden: A Potted History Of The Suburban Garden”, TV programme (BBC, 2017).
[28] “A Cultural Feast in Corned Beef City”, Christopher Middleton, Telegraph, 2002.
[29] E. D. Simon, Rebuilding Britain (1945), 72.
[30] Reyner Banham. “A City Crowned With Green,”, TV programme (BBC, 1964).
[31] Turner, Landscape Planning, 1996.
[32] Ministry of Health, Central Housing Advisory Committee, Report of the Sub-committee on the means of improving the appearance of local authority housing estates. The Appearance of Housing Estates (HMSO, 1948), 3. cited in Turner, Landscape Planning, 1996.151.
[33] Reyner Banham. “A City Crowned With Green,”, TV programme (BBC, 1964).
[34] Reyner Banham. “A City Crowned With Green,”, TV programme (BBC, 1964).
[35] Miller, Hampstead Garden Suburb, 2006, 6.
[36] Robert Bruegmann, Sprawl (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 2.
[37] “Everyday Eden: A Potted History Of The Suburban Garden”, TV programme (BBC, 2017).
[38] Martin Hoyles. “Working Paper No 6: Lost Connections & New Directions: the private gardens and the public park”. 1994, 1
[39] Frank Milligan, “The Use Of Leisure II”, Liverpool Quarterly, 1937, 86.
[40] Reyner Banham. “A City Crowned With Green,”, TV programme (BBC, 1964).
[41] “Everyday Eden: A Potted History Of The Suburban Garden”, TV programme (BBC, 2017).
[42] Taylor, Stephen. “THE SUBURBAN NEUROSIS”. The Lancet 231, no. 5978 (1938): 759–762. doi:10.1016/s0140–6736(00)93869–8.
[43] “Suburban Neurosis | Definition Of Suburban Neurosis In English By Oxford Dictionaries”, Oxford English Dictionary, 2018, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/suburban_neurosis.
[44] David Gilbert. quoted in “Everyday Eden: A Potted History Of The Suburban Garden”, TV programme (BBC, 2017).
