Reading London's Suburbs

From Charles Dickens to Zadie Smith

G. Pope

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137342454
• eBook ISBN: 9781137342461
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Architecture General
• Index: Literature

A study of London suburban-set writing, exploring the links between place and fiction. This book charts a picture of evolving themes and concerns around the legibility and meaning of habitat and home for the individual, and the serious challenges that suburbia sets for literature.

1

‘Houseless – Homeless – Hopeless!’: Suburbs, Slums and Ghosts: 1830–1870

Suburbs have been a feature of London for centuries, yet London’s first recognisably modern suburbs, in the sense of living permanently near the city but not part of it began to appear in the latter decades of the eighteenth century with the establishment of single-family large detached houses, set in landscaped parks, at Clapham and Regent’s Park West. ‘By the second half of the eighteenth century’ Robert Fishman argues, ‘all the elements were in place for the creation of modern suburbia’ (Fishman, 1987: 26). These were grandly aristocratic suburbs pioneered by affluent Evangelists, including the Wilberforce and Macaulay families. This was the first attempt to carve out a dedicated domestic zone close to, and dependent on, the urban centre.

By the middle decades of the nineteenth century the outline of a standardised middle-class suburb first started to appear, in small developments, in locations around four miles from London’s centre, at Walworth, South Lambeth and Battersea in the south, out to Homerton, Clapton and Highbury in the north, and, to the west, Holland Park, West Kensington and Chelsea.

This chapter concerns fictional representations of this piecemeal suburban development, which formed part of the larger widespread restructuring of the capital. My contention here is that suburban fiction articulates a key trait: the anxiety that the space of the suburb cannot be readily seen and known. Suburban fiction dramatises the semiotic problem that suburbia cannot easily be read, cannot be fully known as objects of investigation or even constituted as meaningful ‘homely’ spaces. The suburb is predicated on offering a clear sense of order and homeliness, neatly distanced from the often messy and contingent inmixing of the city. In much fiction this drive toward suburban distinction and clarity is seen to fail, as we witness unwanted ‘urban’ elements return and invade pure suburban locations and homes.

One of the major changes in the segregating metropolis was, of course, the prosperous urban middle-classes’ drive to live somewhere else. Yet, this middle-class removal to the peripheral suburb, has two first paradoxical effects: both city and the suburb become difficult to see and sometimes to keep distinct. So, while removing them from unwonted proximity and sight of the mingling, indiscriminate urban masses, at the same time, the urgent need to see and account for the urban masses, this time for a suburban readership, increases. It is precisely at this point when the suburb begins to remove itself from the urban centre, that the city must then be re-imagined. It must be mapped, must be made to make sense. The urban itself becomes dense, crowded, inchoate, mysterious. Dickens characterises this urgent drive to see into the city as an uncovering, as the desperate urge, recorded in Dombey and Son (1848), to ‘take the housetops off . . . and show a Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes’ (Dickens 1991: 738). This unroofing metaphor, as we shall also see in Chapter 2 below, re-emerges in the metropolitan researches of that supreme investigator, Sherlock Holmes. The nineteenth century in fact produces a wealth of writing and commentary, sketches, guides, investigations and reports, that strive to penetrate the hidden spaces of the city.

At the same time precisely because the suburb offers withdrawal and privacy from the city, nobody is quite sure what is happening there either. The suburb offers secluded privacy, but also itself threatens to be worryingly unknowable. Fiction in the period under view, then, foregrounds these anxieties around the struggle to gain a view, to penetrate and read the occluded surfaces of the city and the private zones of the suburb, and to keep them well apart.

This anxiety of reading the suburbs thus presents a semiotic crisis, with reading the signs of the human-made environment. In his useful essay ‘The Semiotic Self’ Thomas Sebeok argues that it is precisely such a form of semiotic failure, of being unable to decode a dense network of environmental signs, which produces states of extreme individual anxiety. ‘Some aspects of anxiety’, Sebeok continues ‘can best be posed in the context of a problem involving information flow’ (Sebeok, 1989: 264). Interestingly for our purposes, Sebeok argues that this anxiety over environmental illegibility is linked to proximity, that is, to the relative boundaries of self and other. Anxiety is itself a signal, information flow to the self (‘a supplementary form of semiosis’), and a kind of second-order immune response, that an external intruder may be threatening the very constitutive boundaries of that self (Sebeok, 1989: 264). Any organism’s coherence is dependent on the ability to ‘segregate themselves from the rest of the soup of surrounding organic material, in order to keep their Self distinct from the Other’ (Sebeok, 1989: 266). This anxiety is of course central to my main theme: how the suburban individual can know and engage with external reality, with the modern space of the mass suburb.

Suburban space, then, premised on the maintenance of distinction and distance, the mapping of cultural and social distinction onto physical distance, is constantly undermined by such boundary anxieties. Suburban prosperity, everyday life itself, is based on observing boundaries; cultural, social, economic and even temporal (as the suburb here has no past, no intimate ancient connection to land or place at all). One key boundary that is constantly compromised is the demarcation between slum and the suburb, one which invokes the uneasy demarcation between past and the future. The suburb/slum boundary is regularly revealed to be permeable, as a horrible slum past of indiscriminate co-mingling threatens to return to the desired suburban present. Boundary fuzziness is characterised here as a contamination. While ‘the undrained clay beneath the slums oozed with cess-pits and sweated with fever’, David Reeder notes ‘the gravely heights of the suburbs were dotted with springs and blossomed with health’ (in Dyos and Wolff, 1973: 126). The worst that can happen to a new suburb is that it can sink down back to old slumdom (not difficult if we remind ourselves of the precarious physical and economic shape of early ‘speculative’ suburbs). This indeed is what happened at Agar Town, just north of what is now St Pancras station. Built by William Agar from 1810 on open fields, a few years later commentator W. M. Thomas called it ‘A Suburban Connemara’, noting how there exists ‘within a short walk of the city . . . a perfect reproduction of the worst towns in Ireland’ (Thomas, in Porter, 263). The inner suburbs were threatened with other ‘urban’ elements: light industry, brewing, manufacture of household goods, brick-making. As Nick Barratt reminds us, newish prosperous suburbs at Shoreditch, Hackney, Lambeth and Bermondsey, had, by mid-century, ‘degenerated into grim slums’ (Barratt, 238). The disavowed slum (from where many suburbanites would have migrated in the first place) threatens to remind the suburb of its dodgy foundation in shaky economic speculation. The oozing slum with its indiscriminate crush also horribly threatens to undo the principle of distinction itself.

The shape of the suburb

Etymologically ‘beyond the city’, by the sixteenth century the early suburb ‘contained precisely that which had been banished from the town’ (Ackroyd, 2000: 727). The originary, bounded, walled medieval city identifies, separates and expels unwanted and inassimilable elements of itself. Southwark, is the ‘South Work’, the germ of subsequent South London suburbia, originating as distanced (south, over the river) subordinate site for deviancy and unorthodoxy, for criminality, unassimilated immigrants, commercialised or deviant sexuality, even for irregular economic activity, such as non-guild craftsmen and unassimilated foreign workers. The suburb, notes Peter Ackroyd, ‘was in every sense a dumping ground’ (692).

In addition to these proto-suburban sites, deviant and unregistered outlands adjacent to the urban core, a simultaneous, yet very different tradition also existed, from the eleventh to the eighteenth century, of wealthy city-based merchants electing to build villas outside the city. Again, although clearly not what we would recognise as a mass suburb, as the numbers were neither large nor concentrated, these early villas are instrumental in gradually shifting from the widespread notion of the primacy of central urban habitation. Standard extra-urban development was physically contiguous to the urban core, either adjacent to city walls, as noted above in the ‘dumping ground’ type areas, or as haphazard ribbon developments scattered along major transport links.¹ As David C. Thorns notes; ‘many of the substantial traders and professional men in the sixteenth century combined a career in a city company with their mansions and suburban gardens’ (Thorns, 1973: 36). This other, aristocratic, form of detached suburban development, physically removed from the city while retaining economic and social links, is an important factor in the subsequent development of purpose-built extra-urban habitation.

Over time then, and starting in the late eighteenth century, the function of the suburbs switches polarity. It changes from being a negative, debased space containing deviant elements unhappily expelled from a broadly assimilative core, to starting to provide potential welcome space for expansive elements actively escaping a threatening core urban milieu. It is the late eighteenth century which marks a key moment of reversal of the notion of suburban space as malignant superfluity. Wealthy merchants and the aspirant ‘middling classes’ chose to remove themselves from the urban core in increasing numbers. F. M. L. Thompson notes ‘already from the middle of the eighteenth century the great suburban sea change had started in London’, which made ‘places distanced from the city centre desirable residential areas, rather than mere dumping grounds’ (Thompson, 1982: 2). In addition, Ackroyd marks the 1750s and 1760s as witnessing the ‘emergence of the villa as the standard suburban dwelling’ which ‘anticipated the atmosphere and texture of later suburban life’ (Ackroyd, 2000: 729). This period is the beginning of the reversal of the notion of suburban space as malignant superfluity. In 1758 Samuel Johnson’s Ned Drugget, in The Idler, No. 16, a thriving trader, lives above his shop until he ‘thought himself grown rich enough to have a lodging in the country’. In need of ‘the pleasures of the country’ he retires to Islington.

Where eighteenth-century London is presented, by Addison and Steele, John Gay, Johnson and other commentators as a vibrant clattering maelstrom, driven by commercial energy, a haphazard miscellany of buildings, social and economic activity, a motley of individuals from all classes and trades mixing closely, this was starting to give way to new forms of enforced spatial sub-divisioning. Even by the late 1700s, with the development of ‘suburban’ West End squares and private estates, in Mayfair and Marylebone, London was starting a process of social segregation, where ‘the hierarchy of ranks was stamped upon the topography of town’ (Porter, 95). By the middle of the nineteenth century London started to become a mechanism for sorting and storing its inhabitants, seeking to establish physical rather than symbolic forms of distancing and distinction in the diversifying city. Donald Olsen outlines a lengthy trajectory toward just such a geographic urban social differentiation in London, reaching an advanced stage in the Victorian period, which saw ‘the systemic sorting-out of London into single-purpose, homogenous, specialised neighbourhoods’ (Olsen, 18). Miles Ogborn terms this drive to order the ‘social production of distance’, a vital component of modernising power which imposes classification and order, an ‘urgency and ferocity of boundary-drawing and boundary-defining’ (Ogborn, 18). A combination of the expansion and specialisation of nineteenth-century trade, industry and commerce, the development of London-wide transport systems (omnibus, tram, underground, rail, road building), public and private environmental ‘improvements’ all contributed to this shift to single-purpose, single-class homes and districts. The creation of the suburb is part of this reordering.

One key example of the segmenting of metropolitan space is the classifying of gender roles theorised as ‘separation of spheres’, by Davidoff and Hall in their influential Family Fortunes (Davidoff and Hall, 1979). This profound development sees the splitting of the industrialising cities into, on the one hand, newly dedicated and patrolled public spaces, those activities taking place outside the home (politics, work, commerce and business), and also, on the other, into private spaces (domestic, familial). This ‘material separation of work and home’ argues Janet Wolff ‘was the result of both the Industrial Revolution and the growth of the suburbs’ (Wolff, 1998: 118). Suburban development was, then, a major component of this reorganisation and compartmentalising of spatial function. Men are allied to public roles and the spaces of work, and women are devolved to a domestic ideology, becoming exclusively identified with the home as wives and mothers.

These boundaries marked between social and gender groups, the zones of public and private, inside and outside, illumination and darkness, are, in the period under review anxiously negotiated. This chapter is concerned with the semiotic anxieties generated by modes of seeing and then making legible the shape and boundaries of these new, and often newly impenetrable, metropolitan zones.

By the 1840s this early piecemeal suburban development had consolidated into something more visible. The metropolis was growing rapidly. The population of England and Wales doubled in the first fifty years of the nineteenth century. In forty years, from 1801 to 1841, the population of London also doubled, from 959,000 to 1,873,000. Importantly, much of this unprecedented population growth was, for the first time, located in the periphery rather than the centre. This growth went hand in hand with the first serious suburban building boom. Susie Barson argues that ‘the suburban building boom began in earnest in the 1840s’ (Saint, 1999: 61). Donald Olsen describes a two-part process: the 1830s to the 1860s were a time, he suggests, when lines of new buildings were being built, pushing out from the centre of London; the 1860s to the 1880s were the decades when this linear extension halted, and a process of massive ‘in-filling’ began (Olsen, 1979).

Mid-nineteenth-century London suburbia, then, marks the beginning of suburban building mania, the point at which the mass suburb starts to emerge from the exclusive wealthy one. Now, with the development of railways and tram services, the suburb became more attractive to the middle classes. Where an early nineteenth-century suburb, in Clapham, or Regent’s Park West, would have enormous Italianate or Gothic villas set in landscaped parks, by mid-century suburbs would be far more modest. These latter were characterised by substantial detached and semi-detached villas, built from existing design manuals (often in gothic-revival style) by main stream speculative builders, in locations along main thoroughfares, such as Walworth Road and Brixton Road in the South, Hornsey Road and Seven Sister’s Road in the north and Shepherd’s Bush Road in the west. This kind of suburban development marks the start of a new type of metropolitan social formation. The small in number, tightly bounded social enclaves of the urban rich (albeit also containing vast populations of live-in servants and domestics), based on face-to-face contact, visual recognition, family connections and exclusive social networks, become increasingly surrounded by suburban developments. This inward surge of new mass lower-middle-class residents, uprooted, unknown to each other, of doubtful class or social origins, often temporary, but also domestic and private and so invisible, living in mass-produced houses and sites, provokes a profound anxiety about what can be known for sure about the suburbs.

Julian Wolfreys argues that writers from ‘Shakespeare and Jonson to Johnson, Fielding and Richardson’ had presented a London which could be ‘depicted, given a common image to be shared by writer, reader and audience alike’ (Wolfreys, 1998: 61). This city is certainly chaotic, carnivalesque, even monstrous, yet there is a sense that at least this can all be made sense of, be revealed. This is the central premise of much eighteenth-century writing: Addison’s Mr Spectator, John Gay’s street-walker, Johnson’s Idler, all walk the city’s curious bye-ways, note the sights and engage the crowds, for us. In mid-nineteenth-century London this is increasingly no longer true.

However, by the end of the eighteenth century, as cities expand and change by ‘bursting open their walls and spilling into the countryside’ as Christine Boyer argues, ‘the unifying view holding in place the city centre was an image torn beyond repair’ (Boyer, 1996: 251). This concern with seeing and knowing the city as a uniform totality occurs, Julian Wolfreys argues, at around the time that a single vision of the metropolis is no longer possible. Wolfreys firmly places this ‘epistemic shift’, this new doubt over what can be known of the expanding metropolis, in ‘the hands of the Romantics’, in the 1820s (particularly with Anna Barbauld, with Shelley and Byron), and in ‘the novelists who follow’ (Wolfreys, 1998: 67).

Writers, from the 1830s, can now only offer isolated snapshots of London; they cannot easily illumine the fragmented social spaces of the city. They cannot, argues Wolfreys, ‘pretend to create an image of the cityscape in its entirety’ (Wolfreys, 1998: 65).

Suburban views

Anxiety over what can be seen and known in the changing landscape of the mid-century metropolis is neatly revealed in an episode recounted in John Ruskin’s autobiographical Praeterita (1885). Ruskin’s view over the city is ruined by suburbanisation. Ruskin spent most of his early life in Herne Hill, South London, and he vividly recalls an edenic childhood on this pre-suburban London periphery. In 1822 this ‘little domain’, he recalls, ‘answered every purpose of paradise to me’ (Ruskin, 32). Importantly, Ruskin repeatedly returns to detailed descriptions of the uninterrupted panorama seen from the hills. This ‘view from the ridge on both sides’, was, he remembers, ‘before railways came, entirely lovely; westward at least, almost sublime’ (Ruskin, 32). Crucially, the city is still legible. It can be seen in its entirety at a conveniently removed distance. This vision, of the country and the city, proves dangerously irresistible to the young Ruskin. At one point his rapt ‘contemplation of the sweeping crescent’ gets out of hand. ‘One day’, he recalls, ‘I frightened my mother out of her wits by saying “the eyes were coming out of my head!” She thought it was an attack of coup-de-soleil’ [sun-blindness] (Ruskin, 32). This obsessive viewing is eventually ruined by the growing suburb, more exactly by the re-siting in 1852, of the Crystal Palace, the vast glass and iron building from the 1851 Great Exhibition. For Ruskin the Palace is meanly suburban; ‘We suppose ourselves to have invented a new style of architecture, when we have magnified a conservatory!’ The worst element of being swamped by suburban growth is, however, the destruction of his beloved view. ‘Then came the Crystal Palace’ he recalls, ‘forever spoiling the view through all its compass’ (Ruskin, 34).² The suburb itself is one of the ways by which the city can no longer be seen.

Ruskin’s rapturous descriptions of the city laid out for observation is a common theme in much mid-century London writing. Harriet Martineau records, in 1838, that her first urge, on encountering a new city, was to find the highest point, from which she could see a ‘living map’ below (quoted in Briggs,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Suburban Realities
• Chapter: 1 ‘Houseless – Homeless – Hopeless!’: Suburbs, Slums and Ghosts 1830–1870
• Chapter: 2 ‘A World of Mud and Fog’: The High Victorian and Edwardian Suburb, 1880–1914
• Chapter: 3 ‘The Third England’: Suburban Fiction and Modernity, 1918–1939
• Chapter: 4 ‘Your Environment Makes as Little Sense as your Life’: Post-War Suburbia 1945–1980
• Chapter: 5 ‘I Tried to Work Out Where I Was’: Contemporary Suburbia
• Conclusion: ‘All Stories are Spatial Stories’
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index