It’s that sugary time of year when I emerge from the station into a mown-grass pink-skied evening; the time when suburbs really come into their own. Long days, wide streets – I am faintly euphoric until I remember my existential crisis.
If you know me in real, you will have heard me boring on about this. I will have held your wrist as I described my return to the postcode where I grew up and bored on about the loss of my dreams. It was never meant to be this way, I will have said, enjoying the drama of the sentence. What I mean was: I never thought I’d return so fast to a life, though lovely, that I’d gratefully left behind.
“Lovely” was not a priority for my adulthood, placing firmly behind “fun” (which meant having all my friends living in the same block of flats as me, a sort of Barbary Lane but with human faeces by the gate), and also behind “unconventional”, which I quietly gave up on in around 2006. But I live here now – I keep having to say it, so my ears hear it and tell my head it’s real – back on the edge of suburbia. Except now suburbia is a different place.
In crisis, I’ve gone deep. I read an analysis of American suburbia in literature, from fiction (Richard Yates’s gin-soaked Revolutionary Road) to a 1957 polemic describing postwar suburbs as “fresh-air slums” where people die. For many in mid-century America, the suburbs were seen as a dangerous social experiment – too many people, all of them the same. In a bestselling 1961 study, the authors rename it “Disturbia”. While suburban men were getting ill from the stress of travelling too much, suburban women (according to these books, with names like The Crack in the Picture Window) were getting ill because they were trapped.
I am drawn to these stories – I’m looking, I think, for darkness and romance in these places that trouble me. But I have to look a long way – it’s only in the US that David Lynch shows the suburbs to be places of oddness and perversion. It’s only in the US that the Stepford Wives patrol picket fences with glassy glee. Because here in the UK, suburbia has always been the stuff of comedy. Of status anxiety and Hyacinth Bucket, of late 70s-tinged TV where dogs have racist names, but that’s not the joke.
Perhaps it’s hard to show a depth to the suburbs today because they are changing beneath our feet. If once they were an escape from the city, today it’s as if the city has caught up and mugged them for their wallets. Down the road from me, hoardings surrounding a building site advertise penthouse apartments. They sprout in grey glass; they’d disturb the view if there was one. Et in Arcadia... big shiny-dick buildings or something. Even “urban living” itself, and by that I mean the fantasies mocked up for those hoardings – a vision of coffee machines and women laughing over Chablis – can’t afford to live in town.
Instead it followed the families out to the sticks, where it orders a Big Shop on Ocado and spends its weekends car-booting for chairs. It is inevitable, I suppose. Suburbia was originally conceived as an alternative – a place of exclusivity away from the violence and vice of a city. But, as with Ryanair priority boarding, if everybody chooses it, the concept becomes redundant. Suburbs are no longer alternatives – while they’re the choice of a few, they’re the only option for the rest of us, squeezed out of the centre, reluctant, like ingrown hairs.
I wouldn’t have thought I’d ever mourn the suburbs of my youth, where the pavement between park and Poundland is trod wafer thin. But as I push the buggy sulkily past the new arts centre topped with bachelor pads, in part I’m feeling sorry for my younger self who thought the 7-Eleven that used to sit here was the height of class because it was American and stayed open late. When the suburbs finally disappear, what will we lose? Will more living experiments begin, in the suburbs of suburbs? Will their loss enable us the distance from which we can see their good side, their dark side, their depth?
Before it disappears completely – its greenery, its quiet – under a comfortable heap of culture and cash, I want British suburbia to be recognised as more than just a mossy joke. Then maybe I’ll come to terms with it properly. Maybe then I won’t be embarrassed to call it home.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
