For the first time in my life, I’m a trendsetter. Young people, no longer tied to offices, nightclubs or adult ball pits, are moving out to the suburbs, where rents on sensible maisonettes are rising at the same rate that flats in town are falling. I am proud to say I was early to this; I was the first to officially give up. Give up on the city. Give up on £4 coffees drunk meaningfully on pavements, give up on night buses that stop on your doorstep, give up on nighttimes altogether. Give up on knowing the exact shape of your neighbour’s orgasms, and the sweetness of losing yourself in a crowd.
After five years back in the bosom of the suburb I worked so hard to escape, I’m pleased to share my hard-earned knowledge with the newcomers.
1. You are leaving the city to find somewhere with “outside space”. You have dreams, perhaps, of growing a pot of basil in order to mark the move from jarred pesto to fresh. You are experimenting with different pronunciations of “patio”. Friend, you have no idea. Up here we have outside space coming out of every orifice. A garden, tick, a field over there, tick, literal countryside, albeit golf coursed, over the hill. After a month of outdoor space, tending seedlings with a care previously only utilised for the abstraction of your pores, you will go one of two ways. Either you will become a passionate gardener and official “outdoorsy person”, tapping out lengthy replies to strangers recommending waterproof trousers by tog rating, and sharing photos of such foreignness as “leaves”. Talking with a psychedelic glow about your “relationship with nature”, as if you met it in a pub at closing time then spent the next 48 hours having sex with it and discussing your childhoods. Either you will become them, or you will become me, a person on polite nodding terms with the garden. I like to know the outside is there, available, like Frasier, on demand, but I do miss simply walking, rather than “going on a walk”, and I do miss the mild peril of concrete. Come for the outside space, stay for the view of it from your bed.
2. Little did I know, when I moved to the suburbs, that I would grow to greet every local dog by name. Pets are royalty here. Occasionally, I still see people walk past a cat without saying hello, and I raise my eyebrows and perform my inner curse. Posters for lost animals are given grave attention, not least because those of us with skin (pets) in the game (bed) are still looking over our shoulders for the infamous cat killer who stalked suburbs across the country looking for animals to dismember. Police blamed foxes. We, in our sash-windowed semis lit up like stages, know better. Perhaps because some people move to the suburbs to escape crime, fear and menace are pressed into these streets, drawn on the tarmac like bike lanes. In a vacuum, where nothing is happening, we search for trouble. Then take to nextdoor.com to dutifully report it.
3. The light though, the light. The light here swims from lemonade to butter, then silver like foil, then apricot. Waiting for a bus, one can enjoy a very slow firework show reflected quietly on a hand.
4a. There is a chance that you, like me, might view your move out of the city as a kind of failure. That you, like me, might have associated the suburbs with such painful ideas as “settling down” and “big shops” and “her indoors” and those fleece jackets you pull on over your head. You would have been right. And yet, here we are, you and I, pulled into its sleepy embrace, half-strangled, sure, but cosy, too. Moving away from a city makes a person question who they are, and how much of that is tied to the possibilities of the places that surround them. The bars they might find love in, the art galleries, the bridges, the proximity to cash. And makes us realise, too, that however metropolitan or busy a city life might look, often those of us living in it have, without even noticing, created routines and friendships that are so small and specific they require no more of the city than decent wifi. Suburbia in a towerblock.
4b. Of course, there’s the possibility that I’m making allowances, that I feel guilty for being basic, embarrassed at my too-predictable journey to a sensible house with decent freezer-space, but I will lay the theory here for you anyway, to use at your leisure.
5. It may take a minute, once you’ve unpacked your pans and walked around your streets marvelling at the hush, and accepted a pass-agg lasagne from your neighbour, it may take a month. But slowly you will realise… the city is still there. Even when you are here, contemplating the erection of a “reading nook”, the city is there. And even if you’re not marching through it daily, it will hopefully still have restaurants to welcome you when eventually you return for an evening, a museum, a feat of modernist architecture, an M&Ms World. We may have left it, but the city never leaves us.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
