The Life and Death of the Australian Backyard

Tony Hall

• Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780643098169
• eBook ISBN: 9780643102071
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

A substantial backyard has long been considered an iconic feature of the Australian suburb. Nevertheless, during the 1990s, a dramatic change occurred: substantial backyards largely disappeared from new suburban houses in Australia.

Whatever the size of lot, the dwelling now covers most of its developable area. Although the planning system does not actually promote this change, it does little to prevent it. It appears to be a physical expression of the way that Australian lifestyles are changing for the worse, in particular longer working hours. This in turn raises issues about health and wellbeing, especially for children.

Vegetation surrounding the dwelling plays an important role in microclimate, storm drainage and biodiversity, irrespective of whether the residents use their backyard. Its loss has serious ecological implications, a deficit rendered permanent by the changes to the housing stock.

The Life and Death of the Australian Backyard is based on a detailed quantitative study of this increasing, but previously unstudied, problem. It discusses the nature, uses and meaning of the traditional backyard, presents an understanding of the changes that have been happening and suggests possible remedies. All professionals working in the landscape and development industries, local government, consultancies and in universities should read this unique study of an issue of increasing significance to urban sustainability.

CHAPTER 1

The origins, form and function of
the backyard

Until comparatively recently, the backyard has been one of the dominant images ingrained in the psychological consciousness of the Australian suburbanite. Evolving from the negative space left over once a detached dwelling is imposed on a blank allotment, the yard symbolises a standard of domestic comfort to which the majority of Australians have traditionally aspired. The physical manifestation of the idealised large yard can be attributed to the way Australian cities have been surveyed and regulated, but the emotional and functional attachment to this space must be linked to a deeper underlying set of attitudes, which are substantially English in their origins.

The origins of the suburban backyard

Private gardens used for pleasure or for growing fruit and vegetables for a household go back to ancient times and can be found in nearly all sophisticated civilisations. However, up until the late 18th century, in most societies across the world, the decorative garden was normally the preserve of rich and powerful. Although the story of its evolution is an important and interesting one, the focus of the argument of this book is the private garden or yard possessed by the middle classes at least, if not the population at large. The story of the middle-class domestic garden is one that belongs to the history of suburban development during the 19th and 20th centuries.

The English back garden

Suburban development in general, and the garden suburb in particular, has its origins in the industrial cities of the mid 19th century, especially in Britain. The story has been told many times, but particularly accessible accounts have been provided by Helena Barrett and John Phillips in their book Suburban Style (Barrett and Phillips 1987) and Peter Hall’s many books, especially Cities of Tomorrow (Hall 2002). The invention of the steam-powered railway enabled the better-off to have houses built for them beyond the edge of the city and travel to and from it by train. The introduction of horse-drawn buses and trams, and later electric trams, enabled increasingly larger sections of the population to take advantage of this trend. Houses and gardens in suburban developments offered an escape from the pollution of the city. They also offered an approximation to the rural idyll: ‘a cottage in the country’. Such rural nostalgia was a 19th century urban phenomenon that is still with us today. In earlier centuries, agricultural dwellings in the countryside were regarded as, and usually were, primitive. It was the city that was urbane, civilised and cultured. In contrast, the 19th century industrial city was overcrowded and polluted and the idea of a house surrounded by trees and flowers became, in contrast, appealing. The low-density suburb was born.

However, as other European countries industrialised, this process did not necessarily occur to the same degree and with the same physical outcome as in England, because the growth of their major cities was still constrained by defensive earthworks. England had no such constraints. It was on an island and had seen its last land battle in the late 17th century. In consequence, the creation of a ‘house and garden’ form for large-scale suburban living became more extensive, and occurred at an earlier date, in England than in most of the rest of Europe. It was seen at the time as a remarkable innovation and was conveyed to German speaking readership by Muthesius in his influential book, Das Englische Haus (Muthesius 1908). Its effect on the form of London was well described by Rasmussen in his classic book, London: The Unique City (Rasmussen 1937).

The content and design of the 19th century English domestic garden provided much scope for invention and evolution, not to mention business opportunities for a growing body of entrepreneurs. Both Barrett and Phillips (1987) and Timms (2006) have drawn particular, and long overdue, attention to the work of John Loudon in the early part of the 19th century. He wrote books on domestic gardening, especially garden design, and founded and edited one of the first gardening magazines. He put out practical advice with great energy and also believed gardening:

‘… is a character-building activity that leads to morally upright citizens and healthy cohesive societies.’

Timms 2006

The mid-19th century garden was characterised by a profusion of formally arranged flowers with bright, sometimes gaudy, colours. Its evolution was aided by the import and discovery of new plant species from across the world. It was also aided by the invention and manufacture of conservatories, spraying devices, lawn mowers and rollers, and a host of other gadgets. The garden, as much as the interior of the house, bore witness not only to changes in fashion but also to the evolution of cultural taste. The English suburban garden of the early and mid 19th century, although colourful, was characterised by formality and artificiality. However, by the end of the century, the influence of the ‘aesthetic’ and ‘arts and crafts’ movements had begun to predominate. The neo-vernacular garden, with informal arrangements of ‘natural’ plants, became a new ideal associated with the names of William Robinson and, more famously, Gertrude Jekyll.

The garden city

Following on from the market-driven and technology-driven birth of the garden suburb was the idea that suburban form could be promoted as a worthy cause and could be designed and planned. It could, thereby, be made available to those on lower incomes, not just the middle and upper classes. The first attempts were those created by a number of English manufacturers for their employees. The estates most clearly intended as garden suburbs were Port Sunlight, adjacent to the Lever soap factory across the Mersey from Liverpool, and those created by the Quaker chocolate manufacturers Cadbury at Bournville and Rowntree at New Earswick, outside York. Bournville, situated in what are now the southern suburbs of Birmingham, was a particularly fine example. It was located adjacent both to the factory and railway station. The layout was landscape dominated and the architectural style was neo-vernacular, incorporating themes from traditional rural building.

The greatest step forward and, in effect, the genesis of town planning as we know it today, came at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries with the publication of Ebenezer Howard’s book containing his arguments for garden cities which, fortunately, has now been reprinted (Howard 2003). For an account of its origins, readers should turn to Creese’s The Search for Environment (Creese 1966) and for the implications and consequences of its arguments to Peter Hall and Colin Ward’s Sociable Cities (Hall and Ward 1998). Such cities were to be a combination of the best features of the industrial city and the countryside, while avoiding the disadvantages of both. The proposals went beyond the design of a single city and envisaged the creation of a complex of cities linked together by railways. What was particularly ingenious was the way the development would be financed. It would be undertaken by a trust in which the tenants would be shareholders. The increased value of the land, known as betterment, would thereby accrue both to the benefit of the residents and to the city as a whole. These ideas were realised with the construction of Letchworth and Welwyn Garden Cities in the early 20th century. Letchworth had a landscape-dominated form with buildings in a neo-vernacular style. Welwyn was built in a more neo-classical style, but with the same house-and-garden, landscape-dominated form. In both garden cities, not only were back gardens large enough to grow vegetables but additional allotment gardens were available to rent for this purpose. The arguments made in support bear an uncanny resemblance to contemporary ideas of environmental sustainability.

Unfortunately, only two gardens cites were built and subsequent mid 20th century new towns, in Britain and elsewhere in north-west Europe, were built by central government agencies in a modernist style. Nevertheless, the house-and-garden form was continued and, much more importantly, the greater part of all British public housing followed a template borrowed from garden city ideals, albeit much debased. The roads were lined with family houses with substantial gardens at both front and back.

A worldwide phenomenon

During the latter part of the 19th century and the early 20th century, the suburbs of the cities of North America, Australasia and parts of western Europe all took on a similar form to that which had arisen in Britain. Their cities, too, possessed suburbs of houses and gardens linked to city centres by rail, light rail and tram services. What did not occur, aside from some isolated examples in the United States, were new towns and large-scale public housing developments following garden city ideals.

During the 1930s, all these cities saw a massive unplanned expansion of privately built houses for the middle classes. Although the principal means of access, and the generator of development, remained the train and tram, all such suburban development began to take advantage of the advent of the motor car by both the providing of a garage within the curtilage and paved accesses and arterial roads designed for motor vehicles.

By the mid 20th century, a standard model of city form had emerged. The city centre housed business and shopping and a certain number of wealthier households. It was surrounded by an inner city of dense housing that accommodated the lower income groups. Beyond this were the middle class suburbs, with houses and gardens becoming lower in density the further they were from the city centre. The wealthy lived on the fringes, with very large houses and gardens – they could afford the longer journey to work and thereby take advantage of lower land values further from the city.

The second half of the 20th century saw a dramatic evolution in the design of suburban form towards one based almost exclusively on the use of the motor car. In Western Europe, the spatial effects of increasing car ownership were contained, to a large degree, by the restricted availability of land for development as a result the proximity of towns and cities to each other and by the planning polices adopted in most Western European countries. However, in North America, South Africa and Australasia, there was land in abundance. The building of new motorways at public expense could open up vast tracts of land for development. Cheap fuel enabled the motorist to live far out, and travel back and forth to the city centre or other centres of employment. Larger houses, large amounts space around the house and ample provisions for parking cars could all be provided in this very low-density form. As time passed, shopping and entertainment centres designed entirely around the car were built. They were later joined...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The origins, form and function of the backyard
• Chapter 2 The meaning of the backyard
• Chapter 3 The death of the backyard
• Chapter 4 Why is the backyard shrinking?
• Chapter 5 Why does the planning system not prevent the shrinkage?
• Chapter 6 What should be done to preserve the backyard?
• Conclusion
• References
• Index