Everyday Eden: A Potted History of the Suburban Garden

This is Southwark in South East London.

I was born in this ancient borough,

and over the years I watched as so many fellow South Londoners

headed to the foothills of Surrey, Kent and Essex.

They were leaving these familiar streets that hold the bones

and ashes of their ancestors, forsaking window-boxes

and backyards for hedges and borders.

They were going in search of a garden.

They were heading for a place without a past - suburbia.

Britain's intelligentsia has always sneered at the suburbs.

I may be a writer and journalist, but my sympathies were always

with those that saddled up and headed for the Promised Land.

They called this a little piece of heaven.

The space of lawns was the big thing for me.

We'd never had that space before.

Wonderful times.

I can go snip-snip, I'm doing me garden, I'm here for the day.

I love that. I love that.

The distinction of the suburban garden is that it is democratic.

Acres apart from the garden's aristocratic past.

Yet the puzzling thing is

because it's not grand, the story of this garden hasn't been told.

The British city a century ago - industrial, polluted,

jam-packed with people.

Almost no-one had much of a garden.

# If you saw my little back yard

# What a pretty spot, you'd cry

# It's a picture on a sunny summer's day

# With the turnip tops and cabbages

# What peoples doesn't buy

# I makes it on a Sunday look all gay... #

But in London, where the railways ran out of the city,

a different story was emerging.

Houses were sprouting up around the stations.

Something entirely new was happening.

This development would later spread to every British city.

But the story starts here in London, birthplace of suburbia.

For the fortunate ones it was a chance to say goodbye to the

grim city and hello to their own individual Garden of Eden.

Among the first to leave were those who would become

part of a social experiment in a planned utopia.

Founded in 1906, Hampstead Garden Suburb provided rented accommodation

for the working and professional classes in leafy surroundings

beyond the stench and fog of the city.

Anne Lowe still lives in the home first occupied by her grandfather,

a Post Office worker from North London.

My mother was a little girl of two,

and that's a postcard of her in the back garden before all

the hedges had grown up, and they were just little whippy hedges.

Presumably when your grandad moved here he would have come from

-quite a poor...

-Very poor.

-..poor household.

-Very, very poor.

So his experience of moving here must have been incredible

to come from that background.

Yes. I think they thought it was wonderful.

The master plan for Hampstead Garden Suburb dictated that each garden

was planted with two fruit trees

and divided from its neighbour by hedges rather than walls or fences.

Hampstead Garden Suburb's founders, Henrietta and Samuel Barnett,

were as passionate about social reform

as they were about healthy living.

I think they were trying to create a total environment for people

to live in where you're surrounded by gardens,

you have vistas out from the houses across countryside.

You're surrounded by trees in the streets and so on.

-Was that a break with the past, in a way?

-Yeah, very much so.

In the Victorian period, well, they weren't really gardens for a start,

most of them were terraced houses which were built in their hundreds

-of thousands across London.

-Hmm.

-It tended to have a small, basically,

-a yard at the back of there.

-Backyard, yeah.

You know, and that's where you did your utility stuff.

The grimy yard was exchanged for an idyllic cottage

with gardens back and front.

The front gate, very much looking like a countryside gate.

Then you have this straight path going up to the front door,

usually lined with roses, roses around the door.

Then the architecture itself,

you have these incredible low eaves, the gable ends, that severe triangle,

and the roughcast white rendered surface to the walls.

All these things were part of the vocabulary of the arts and crafts...

-Yeah.

-..look, if you like,

and it's a language which I think certainly not just British people,

but people around the world understand.

It's an incredibly strong brand,

if you like, you know, which you call the English country garden.

But this planned arcadia came with very strict rules and regulations.

You only could put your washing out on a Monday.

The hedges had to be a certain height.

Someone used to come along with a measuring stick and, you know,

woe betide you if they were taller than that. You had to comply.

Why was that? Why did they need to keep the hedges so low?

Well, it was a boundary to your garden,

but you could still talk to your neighbour and that sort of thing.

And it didn't cut everyone off, it didn't isolate everyone,

-it made it more...

-More communal.

-..much more of a community, yes. And you weren't spying.

-No.

Everyone was interested.

If you had a glut of beans then you would share them

with someone else who didn't have a glut of beans.

Ultimately, Hampstead Garden Suburb didn't quite materialise

into the vision the Barnetts had in mind.

You can imagine that all these rules, hedge controls,

wash-day, coupled with high rents and, worst of all, no pub,

wouldn't have necessarily appealed to the inner-city working class.

But the Barnetts were definitely onto something with this

Garden Suburb concept.

The planned idyll of Hampstead Garden Suburb is, of course,

nothing like the suburban sprawl we've come to know.

That development really took off with the radical Housing Act

of 1923, when private builders were given subsidies to build new homes.

A staggering 3 million were built across Britain between the wars.

This was suburbia's big moment,

at least for the white collar middle classes.

They could now afford to buy into the dream.

This ad is a gloriously rose-tinted view of suburbia.

There's the big mock-Tudor house, the train is far into the distance.

The neat flowerbeds, the trees, fathers watering the sunflowers

and the mothers sitting knitting with the kid at her feet.

It presents a very Disney-like, magical view of the suburbs,

and a far cry from the dirty, chaotic city.

-# It's a beautiful morning

-It's a beautiful morning

-# It's a beautiful day

-It's a beautiful day

-# It's a beautiful morning

-It's a beautiful

# Dream home... #

Clarkson print workers were settling in to Tudorbethan villas

in areas such as Bromley in Kent.

And, thanks to the recent introduction of British Summer Time,

they even got to spend more time in their gardens.

There's an extra hour of daylight each day,

and working hours are reduced, so as well as the space, you have the time.

And in the winter months, lots of offices and banks,

in particular, had gardening societies and clubs,

the idea being that in the summer all your clerks would be rushing home

-to cut their hedge in the evening, which is rather nice.

-In suburbia?

Yeah.

For the new settlers, the commute became a way of life.

Former East Enders were now commuting from Essex.

And South East Londoners from places like here in Bromley.

Like many other people round here, he worked in the printing trade,

which was quite well paid at those days.

Pauline Figgin's father moved here in 1936.

Your father left Camberwell to come here.

My family were from Camberwell, well, the Elephant, and they stayed.

And I'm thinking how it would have been for him to have moved to

a house in the suburb in the '30s and suddenly had this.

Yes. It's quite obvious that he really wanted a garden.

He loved the garden and he loved his flowers.

He loved growing vegetables and seeing it produce things.

He used to commute to London to work.

And my mother looked after the house,

and they got to know the neighbours.

You see, everybody moved here about the same time.

All of them would have been heavily involved in the gardens as well,

-presumably.

-Yes, they all had to design their gardens.

They all followed a fairly standard format with the rose trellis

in the middle and then dividing the vegetable section

from the more leisure area, the lawn and the flowers.

And also the retreat corner.

Yes, they had this tiny area with a canvas cover when it was really hot.

And they would sit outside the French windows in deckchairs

and enjoy the sunshine.

Do you think of it as a happy place to be?

Hmm, yes, I think we were very contented.

You know, things weren't changing, you didn't have the big vast

changing world in those days, so you thought you'd achieved something.

You'd got a nice garden and you were there to enjoy it.

The suburbs proved a sanctuary for many, but they became a target

for criticism by an influential few - the London literary set.

HG Wells led the charge.

He wrote of suburbia in War of the Worlds.

He said "All these, the sort of people that lived in these houses,

"and those damn little clerks that used to live down that way,

"they'd be no good, they haven't any spirit,

"no proud dreams and no proud lusts".

A fear and loathing of suburbia gathered pace among the literati,

with writers such as Graham Greene, and even George Orwell weighing in.

The new settlers were cast as the petty bourgeoisie.

I think it's also been quite threatening for elites to see

new social groups suddenly appearing.

In the inner city there weren't these displays of apparent new wealth

or leisure time, and this was obviously worrisome,

at the very least.

They apparently laid themselves open to criticism from every side,

and we still have this.

The literary elite were scornful of the suburban phenomenon,

but others went even further.

They said it was actually bad for you.

Bizarrely, the medical profession, by way of its journal, the Lancet,

came up with this term "suburbia neurosis" to describe the alienation

the women felt when they moved to the suburbs.

One woman writes of her condition,

"I had pain in my back which runs up and down,

"my stomach swells up terribly,

"I can't sleep at night, I'm getting ever so thin."

I think it was Doctor Stephen Taylor in the 1930s,

a doctor in South London, South London suburbia,

and what he identified was what he called suburbia neurosis.

This was women who, you know,

were showing signs of depression,

maybe showing physical signs of backache

from, sort of, household labour and other kinds of things.

And it fits with a particular story.

It fits with a story about, you know,

once there were these kind of communities in the city

and now women, in particular, have moved out.

You know, it wasn't a scientific study,

it was a sort of thought piece.

And...you know, to some extent there's a truth in it,

to some extent this is about people who've moved.

You know, displacement always comes with, sort of, psychological burdens.

Suburban neurosis certainly wouldn't deter the next wave

to leave the city.

It was the turn of the working classes.

By 1937, nearly one in five urban working class families

across the nation had bought their own home.

It was their first big chance to leave the city and embrace suburbia.

They were moving to contemporary suburbs like Welling and Bexley,

where there were smaller semi-detached homes, very different

to the villas of Bromley or the cottages of Hampstead Garden Suburb.

Nigel Betts' father, a fishmonger, moved out here to Welling in 1938.

So your dad moved here because of business,

but most people probably would have moved because they'd suddenly got

the chance of a house and a garden.

Yeah, I think the thing is round here

you could buy a house for like 12/6 down, which is like 2½p,

and you paid 7/6 a week on the mortgage,

and suddenly you had a two-up/two-down,

front garden/back garden.

Which would have been a complete departure from what you'd left

if you'd come from London.

A place like Deptford, Bermondsey and that, this would be, you know,

like heaven, because you'd have a front garden,

a back garden, three bedrooms upstairs,

a living room, dining room. I mean, can you imagine the change?

By the late 1930s, nearly 300,000 homes were being built each year

by the private sector.

But modernists and conservationists were appalled by suburban sprawl.

They hated the fact that the house designs sprang from builders'

commercial instincts, rather than the elevated minds of architects

and social reformers.

Well, certainly all of the more expensive semis were advertised

as having their front gardens made up. Laing's and Wimpey did this.

Again, to make it feel established,

it didn't just look like a shanty town plonked on the side of a meadow,

which is obviously what a lot of them would've looked like.

-And if the back garden was visible from a station...

-Yes.

-..say, then they would do that too.

-Of course.

And Laing's and Wimpey and possibly Wates also ran competitions

while the houses were still being sold and occupied, basically,

to make sure that the cottagers, as they were supposed to be,

kept their gardens in order.

These gardens were promoted as something to be proud of,

something that needed care.

Rita Withers also lives in Welling

in the house her parents bought in the '30s.

Her family had moved from rooms in Tottenham to a thoroughly

modern home, which came with a barren garden that her father

set out to transform.

He had a friend, and he was a grave-digger at Tottenham Cemetery,

and he said, "Oh, don't worry, Bert," he said,

"I'll come and dig all that over and get you sorted out," which he did.

Mum wanted trellising, which was put up.

You can see that was one of the first things that was put up.

-And so they...

-The trellis, because she wanted roses on that.

It seems like the trellis had become the staple of the suburban garden,

along with a very prescribed set of flowers.

Always roses, but things like lupins were really, really popular.

You know, people would join clubs, the Sweet Pea Society,

or delphiniums and so on, and would really go for this big look.

What did they favour in terms of flowers?

Oh, all sorts of the old flowers that you don't see around

so much now, but everyone used to queue down at Woolworths

when some new plants came in,

cos the Woolworths down at Welwyn Corner always went in for

trees and everything, knowing that this estate was growing.

And they must have made a fortune, really,

because everyone went down there.

The heart of the new suburb was the High Street.

There was Boots, the gardener's chemist,

and this was the old Woolworth's that gave one sixth

of its floor space over to gardening paraphernalia.

Gardening was the big boom industry for the new suburbanite.

It allowed people to get into gardening in quite

a spontaneous way, because it had been quite class-bound in many ways,

particularly with the nursery world, where the tradition was

that you wrote off your list for bulbs or perennial plants and so on

to your nursery, you know, as if you had a, you know,

a tailor or something, you know,

and you gave them the order and it came back to you,

you had to be of a certain kind of social standing

and economic standing to be able to do that.

And I think there was a certain amount of democratisation

of gardening at this point.

An indication of just how popular it was as a subject,

gardening, is the fact that Wills and Co published a series

of 50 cigarette cards, which you can see here.

These were published throughout the '30s.

And you see here, this is a woman laying crazy paving.

Yeah, the crazing paving's fantastic.

It's just so odd to think you would open a packet of cigarettes...

-And see...

-..and see gardening hints.

Putting garden tips in a packet of fags reveals just how popular

this outdoor hobby had become among the suburban classes,

whose approach to how they lived had thoroughly changed.

When you live in the city the closeness of those densely populated

streets creates an enforced neighbourliness.

You tend to live more publicly.

But when you move to the suburbs you become more part

of the private family unit.

You retreat from the street and settle into the rear gardens.

Round the lawn, Dad managed to put some tins in,

and we had a nine hole little golf course

that I used to play with my friends and that for hours out there.

As a young child, you used to always have a little bit of garden.

I think that was quite normal for children to do in those days.

Because we didn't have television, we didn't have computers, you know.

I suppose doing things like a little bit of gardening

was quite the normal thing to do.

By the mid-1930s, Surrey boasted what would come to be seen

as the archetypal suburb,

but one certainly not for the working classes.

It had grander homes and grander gardens.

The upper middle classes were now also buying into the dream,

which became a reality here in Surbiton.

Now this is the Mayoral garden party,

and me in my Buckingham Palace dress that I had.

In 1936, the young Mildred Baird and her family took up residence

here at the Glade, with its three-acre garden.

Mildred's father worked in London.

He was working with Knight, Frank and Rutley in Hanover Square,

and when we had a telephone, in those days

the telephone in the hall, and I would listen to him, "Mayfair 3771."

I still remember that all those years ago.

My father had seen this property

knowing it was coming up on the, you know, estate agent's business,

and so he decided to move.

It was wonderful.

My brothers and I were very pleased, we loved it up there.

It looks an amazingly glamorous garden, that,

because the pond looks huge.

It was a beautiful garden, beautiful.

And when you say it had three lawns, you mean it was broken up,

something broke the lawns up in to three parts?

Yes. Yes. Because one big lawn was where they played cricket.

There was one big lawn where they had a sitting area for people,

and then the other lawn where they had entertainment.

-Is this your wedding?

-That's my wedding.

-Ah.

-We had to have the wedding May 17th,

-because the azaleas would be out.

-Is that why?

You see, all the azaleas were out. And they are out.

All the azaleas were out, and those are the big trees in the back there.

-It was red roses.

-Yeah, that's great. Really nice.

-Mother wanted me to have red roses.

-And that.

-Yes.

But it sounds to me like the garden, for your dad being the Mayor,

was quite a draw in the community, presumably, because...

It was. It became thus. It became thus.

And there are still people in our church will talk about the dos,

the fairs, the fetes that went on at the Glade.

Wonderful times.

Grab her! Grab her!

Oh, dear, do you think it's his Bible or his hymn book

that old grandpa there was waving?

Now this is one of the things that happened.

So the entertainment that was sitting,

they did things like funny races, and this is flowerpot race.

You had to walk only on your feet on the flowerpot.

That's the Glade Conservatory over there.

There we go again, races.

That was the Minister from New Malden.

I don't know why he was there.

He was a good runner, wasn't he?

That was my father.

You see how they'd had to usher the audience all round the edge

to give the ballet schoolgirls room to do their dancing?

I never remember rain coming when we had one of these garden fetes.

We were blessed with good weather.

And look at the shadows on the grass,

it must have been bright sunshine.

There certainly were shadows on the grass.

Everything in the suburban garden was rosy,

whether it was the lupins of the villas of Bromley,

the rose trellises of the semis, or the azaleas of the Glade.

But war was about to change all that.

Yet according to one critic,

suburbia was oblivious to the emerging threat.

By the close of the 1930s,

suburbia had ceased to be merely a done target for snob writers.

Its manicured lawns housed an apathetic herd,

according to the broadcaster and author, JB Priestley.

They were ill-prepared for the realities of war.

Priestley wrote, "We messed around in our back gardens,

"we drove about in our little cars, we listened to the comedians

"and the crooners as the shadows crept nearer."

But I'd argue they were far from being an apathetic herd,

as they battened down their windows and built their Anderson shelters.

This is the year war started.

Can you remember what your dad's reaction was when war was announced?

Dad had been in the Somme, and when war started, he went into shock.

And he sat in the dining room for three days

and didn't talk to anyone,

and then he got up and he went and he dug a trench

right across the garden, shored it all up.

And I can remember him taking me and mum out in the garden and saying,

"Well, you'll be safe here." And then he was all right.

Mum had had to get the doctor,

and the doctor said he's gone into shock, he'll come out of it.

But the thought of another war must have been terrible for him.

MUSIC: "In Every Dream Home A Heartache" by Roxy Music

My father had got his study shored up against bomb damage,

so we were asleep in bed there, and about half past one,

one bomb went off, and we all went up to see what was happening out there.

AIR RAID SIRENS WAIL

Went back to bed, and two hours exactly,

and the second one went off and it must have been a timed bomb,

and it knocked down part of the big oak tree up the garden.

So in one night you had two bombs in your garden?

We had two bombs in our garden.

And then we went back to sleep after that.

During wartime the gardens themselves became a great leveller.

Everyone was expected to pull together

as part of the national Dig For Victory campaign.

-NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER:

-'This Dig for Victory leaflet number one,

'issued by the Ministry of Agriculture,

'tells you how to plan your spring planting campaign so that you can

'have fresh vegetables in your garden

'next winter and all year round.'

Everyone grew as much as they could, they really did.

-So people in the suburb got very involved in that?

-Yes.

And when the houses along the road were bombed

everyone was asked to still use the gardens,

because the houses were derelict,

but the apple trees were still bearing fruit,

and you could still grow fruit and veg and everything to... Yeah.

The campaign was launched by a man who's since been described

as the first working class hero, after boxers and gangsters.

His name was Mr Middleton,

and he was the BBC's first horticultural instructor.

Mr Middleton lived in Surbiton. He may have put Surbiton on the map,

because his radio show in 1940 had an amazing 3.5 million listeners.

RADIO: 'This is the national programme In Your Garden,

'and here's Mr Middleton.'

'Good afternoon.

'I suppose one of the most difficult jobs to explain over the wireless

'is the pruning of fruit trees, and I've had a good many tries,

'but I doubt whether I've ever made much of a success of it.

'The trouble is that the different varieties of apple trees

'have their own individual habits and characteristics,

'and there are so many different opinions about

'that I can well understand how confusing it must be to a beginner.'

Mr Middleton's Dig for Victory sounds so united,

yet the campaign did not unify everyone

in ploughing up their petunias.

One dissenting voice distraught at the prospect was

Stephen Chavley in his 1940 book 'A Garden Goes To War'.

He wrote "Sad to think of all the work that must now be undone.

"But, after all, it's a small sacrifice.

"Let's hope that some day we can restore

"all that now has to be destroyed."

It must have been a little irritating

for the suburbanites to have to dig up

their carefully manicured lawns and flowerbeds,

however, it had to be done.

So they must have been over the moon in the summer of 1945 -

the long war was finally won.

There was one flower in particular

which came to symbolise this return to tranquillity -

the Peace Rose.

It was a pretty rose.

It was yellow and it was tinged with pink edges,

and suddenly after the war everyone was happy

and wanted to show their happiness and would buy such a thing.

And it became like a symbol almost, at the end of the war,

the end of austerity, the end of rationing and so on,

and there was a great craving for colour and enjoyment

and a bit of glamour in your life again.

After the flowers came back to life,

it was as if colour returned to the cheeks of the masses.

New consumer goods made light work of gardening,

and life in the garden became the muse for aspiring filmmakers.

Nigel Betts' father, in a revitalised Welwyn,

documented the family's life

in Cine films featuring his children and wife Kathleen.

-Do come in.

-Thank you.

This is the fish shop?

Yeah, that's when it was an open frontage shop.

And it was ruddy cold, I might tell you!

1951 that was.

But then we had a shop front put in.

This is our front garden at number 4, the Green.

I can't get over the length of that skirt.

And who is that? Who's that in the film?

This is my eldest sister

when she joined the Royal Navy in the late 1950s.

That's a camellia there which actually grew in

to be quite a large plant before it was taken out completely.

Back garden there.

And there's a lovely rockery garden at the back there,

and you can see the bottom of it, and there.

And this was the grass. That's me there.

And, of course, that's the tortoise,

everybody had tortoises in those days.

But down here you can see the gladioli.

And this idea of the kids all being in the back garden

rather than out the front,

and having the swings and the toys in the back.

Yeah. I mean that wasn't unusual. I mean maybe, you know,

having a roundabout like that might have been,

but I think most of the time people had a swing,

because you could make swings quite easily.

Did you just get the kids going into the garden

and leave them there and let them get on with it?

My kids were quite good, they never touched the flowers.

I drummed it into them, you know,

they mustn't pick flowers and that, in the garden.

You got your backside smacked if you'd have done that.

It's quite a joyous thing, isn't it,

when you see it's being used in that way?

It's not just a place to grow vegetables and flowers.

-It's been used in other ways.

-No, we didn't do vegetables. No.

But I mean if you look at that, you know, I was saying to you

about gladioli, my dad wouldn't put ten in, he'd put 110 bulbs in.

Oh, look how small your father looks there and how fat he got!

Before the war, suburbia had been dominated by the railway lines,

but now a new generation of suburbanites

owned cars as well as homes.

Not for them the mail order seed catalogue

or a quick trip to Woolworths.

As the '50s gave way to the '60s their favourite destination

would be suburbia's new Mecca, the garden centre.

You'd go along with your trolley

and pick and mix and put things in.

-And the car gets you there, of course.

-Yeah, absolutely.

The car gets you there and it become a day out, doesn't it?

You know, it still is.

A garden centre, it's a good afternoon out.

Going into a garden centre, it's halfway there,

you're not waiting for the seed to grow,

you're buying more or less a plant that's well on its way if not there.

And you come home and suddenly you put it in the garden

and you've got a garden.

Pat and Cyril Barker were typical

of the next wave of the working classes to move out.

They moved to Welwyn in 1962

and forked out £3,550 for a suburban semi with a garden.

The Barkers were now part of the property-owning democracy

trumpeted by Harold Macmillan and his Conservative government.

You two are both Londoners, so does that mean that you grew up

without any gardens at all in your life?

-We had yards, not gardens.

-That's it, it was always yards.

There was no such thing as gardens in the,

on the East side of London or...

No, over where we were as well, as Cyril's just said, it was a space,

it would be a yard which was with an outside lavvy, even down to a small

little fridge type thing was where you kept your milk and your butter.

It was all outside out in the open, that was all you had.

You even had to share your clothes line.

You know, you could do your washing one day

and the lady downstairs had the minority of it really, you know.

So you actually got married and then your thing was to buy a house

-and then you'd have a garden?

-Upgrade a bit. Yeah.

Well, when we got married I said to Pat, I said,

"I'm going to give you a promise, we're going to have our own home."

That was our first house.

This is like an Ideal Homes house, isn't it?

Yes. That's way back in, let me see..

-'62.

-'62.

And then we, just a year later we had Tracey

and it was lovely to have a garden where you could have a child.

And there's our baby. We called this a little piece of heaven.

-And that was how you felt about it?

-Yes.

-It's how we feel about this, you know.

-Just the openness.

I would have been cooped up in rooms, you know.

-We got privacy.

-That's basically what it was.

I mean, when you're in rooms, I can remember as a child,

you'd go in and that's where you stayed, really,

apart from going to the loo at the bottom of the garden,

there was nowhere for you to go.

Along with the Barkers, taxi drivers and market traders

were also moving to those original working class suburbs

of Welwyn, Bexley and Eltham.

My relatives had stuck it out on the Old Kent Road,

but now decided they too could be part of this exodus.

It wasn't until the 1960s when someone in my family

actually bought their own home.

My grandparents were local market traders and publicans

before they made this move.

You can imagine how remarkable it must have been to move

from the inner city to suburbia, and own your own house.

And uncle's Cine film captures our visit to the relatives

that had left our slate-grey streets for greener pastures.

They capture the neighbours,

model villages, holidays...

..but mostly the house and garden.

That's me with the bald head and the decapitated doll.

The elderly aunts, justified and ancient.

My dad with a Ford Anglia and the boxer's nose.

These suburbs were 40 minutes away from where we lived

near the Old Kent Road, the cheapest street on the Monopoly board,

but it felt like another country and another language.

Trains instead of tubes, avenues instead of streets,

fences instead of walls.

There's the make-shift swing, the magical shed.

My mum, still life of woman with dead turkey, Christmas 1964.

The families featured in these home movies

offered a glimpse of the future.

They were the shape of things to come.

The masses were moving in.

But for some critics it was the masses who were the problem,

clogging up our green and pleasant land.

Here's architectural historian, Reyner Banham, for example,

speaking in 1964.

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 its own piece of ground, with greenery,

became dynamite as soon as every citizen came to mean

every Tom, Dick or nobody with a vote.

The principal charges were that suburbia

was destroying the English landscape,

and that it was too inward looking.

But personally, I quite like the way it has colonised

part of the English countryside and kept a bit back for itself

by way of front and rear gardens.

And as far as being too inward looking, that was about to change.

The package holiday introduced Britons to foreign climes,

and also to the exotic world of the continental garden.

You're the only person doing his garden in this street

and I just wondered why you were up so early?

Early? It's quarter past nine.

But you're the only one around, no-one else is doing it.

-People are working.

-Are they?

Yes, it's only us retired people that can be around actually

working during the day on their own property.

-This has a continental feel.

-Deliberately, yes.

-Oh, intentionally?

-Yes. It's deliberately to... I like Spain.

Oh, yeah.

And it was to give us the sort of Mediterranean feel

in the awful English weather, like summer.

So you brought a bit of the Mediterranean

-to Welwyn in your English garden.

-Yeah, in a way.

The terracotta pots were deliberately Spanish

and every year - a bit boring - but every year

we put in red Geraniums which you see all over Spain.

I tell you what I like about your garden even more,

talking to you, is the fact you don't have to do much to it,

it's neat, and it's my kind of garden for that.

-I think it's great.

-Cheers.

By the 1970s, although the suburban garden was changing

it was already carrying 60 years of history.

And with history, of course, comes cliche.

What had been the target of the literary elite

now also became a hunting ground for sitcom writers,

and the archetypal butt of their jokes was Surbiton.

Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!

-Pardon?

-Which way is Mecca, then?

Easterly, I suppose. Why?

Well, you and your prayer mat, you know?

Oh, I see, one of your jokes? Very good.

Angela and John Howell live in modern Surbiton.

-What do you actually think of those cliches?

-Well...

-We laugh through gritted teeth a bit.

-Yes.

I mean, I think it's partly the name.

-Suburbiton, Surbiton is an unfortunate thing.

-Yeah.

But it is interesting,

'The Good Life' which gave Surbiton its brand, if you like...

That was filmed in Northwood.

It wasn't even filmed here, because Surbiton

was not sufficiently like Surbiton to be worth filming,

so they filmed it in North London,

-which is I suppose a kind of oblique compliment.

-Yes.

The Howells enjoy a more modest lifestyle

to that of the original owners who bought their house in 1924,

during the halcyon days of suburbia.

The people who lived here would have been able to afford a servant,

it would have been big enough, the house, to have a servant,

and we were told by the elderly people who lived here that they

wouldn't have wanted a kitchen window looking over the garden

because the servants would then be looking at the family in the garden.

But that makes me think that they would have been quite well off then.

Well, no, because servants were very cheap in those days,

they earned very, very little.

It would have been a Mr Pooter kind of person, wouldn't it?

-Yes, exactly. Diary of a Nobody.

-Diary of a Nobody. Yes.

And there was an element of snobbery about it, I'm quite sure,

you know, living in a modestly sized house in an out of London suburb

was something that the wealthier people

somewhat turned up their noses at.

It's curious that the central London wealthy

were looking down at the Surbiton wealthy.

I can't help feeling this stemmed

from a kind of uncomfortable suspicion

that life was perhaps better in the suburbs after all.

From the fictional character, Mr Pooter,

to 'The Good Life' and beyond, snobbery dogged suburbia.

Its big crime was that it attracted those with aspirations,

ideas above their station, questionable taste.

Should ordinary people have a house quite so grand?

But don't you think it's kind of brilliant

the way suburbia is content to be something it's not,

to settle for the fake, the mock, the ersatz?

It's this that bothered the aesthetists and the radicals

who believed they had the monopoly on taste.

They're being criticised for being fake,

they're being criticised for being pastiches,

they're being criticised for not being somehow proper architecture.

And I've always thought there's an extraordinary hypocrisy,

that if the lower middle classes

want to move in to Tudorbethan suburb,

somehow that's fakery, somehow that's not authentic,

and that just doesn't ring true to me.

I think an enormous amount of that is about class.

First it had been the aspirations of the lower middle classes

that were attacked,

and then the perceived pretensions of the Surbiton class.

Now in the '80s, the home-owning working classes became the target.

They had begun customising their homes and gardens,

and in this high season of consumerism and individualism,

the garden was not merely a place to plant your pansies,

but perhaps even to build your own Versailles.

The garden is fantastic in that sense,

because it's a blank canvas in many ways.

It's a place where you can do quite radical things

for not necessarily a large amount of outlay,

financially, and even psychologically.

You know, if you completely redesign the interior of your house

the stakes are an awful lot higher, actually,

than if you redesign the exterior of your house.

The suburban gardener now ripped up the manual.

Gone were the days when one trellis fits all.

1980s self expression came in all shapes, colours and sizes.

But you've put your stamp on it in other ways, Pat,

there's all these figures and faces.

-What's...?

-To me they're like characters.

They're just like little people to me.

That sounds weird, doesn't it?

People say to me, "Where do they come from?"

And I say well, people grow bushes, I grow faces.

-For what reason, why is it faces?

-I just like them.

I think the first time I ever saw faces was gargoyles,

I love to see gargoyles. I know some people don't like them

because they're a bit gruesome looking,

but I just like them, they're characters.

There's the owl over there. There's the sun faces.

I started it really basically

when our grandsons were small, weren't it?

-Yeah.

-They used to be here, spend a lot of time in the garden

and they used to find the fun in it really, you know,

and I've just carried it on from there.

So if I see faces I've got to have it.

By the 1990s there was no way you could tell

from the front of a house what was going on at the rear.

I wouldn't expect to find this behind a semi-detached house.

Did you have a plan for this?

No. No, it's ad hoc really, it's all been done as and when.

There was nothing here, it was just..

-I can't quite take it all in.

-No, there's lots to take in.

Here in Surbiton, engineer, Andy Hutchins,

has created his own secret garden.

So it was just a standard suburban garden when you moved in?

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

I mean the majority of the structure within the garden is all

made from reclaimed materials, a lot of reclaimed timber, bricks.

Did you intend it to be like an extension of the house,

-with different rooms?

-Absolutely, yeah, very much so.

With a long garden like this you can play around with it

a bit more than a wide garden,

so you're not quite sure what's round the next corner.

But there's a bit of exotica.

That's so exotic, it's called rhubarb.

Yeah, oh, is that rhubarb? It looks foreign to me!

If it was rhubarb with custard on it, I'd recognise it!

It'll all creep over eventually.

There's rhubarb here, but rainforest too.

And in the middle of it all, a quiet place to feed the ducks.

Customised gardens are typical of the 1990s onwards.

Although the architecture of the suburban house

may not have changed since the '30s,

its gardens have continued to evolve.

Suburbia's century-long history has brought with it

a set of traditions and, in my view, the important thing is

it has progressed from being a nowhere space

between city and country,

to being a very definite somewhere.

I really think you can see that process of suburbia becoming

somewhere in its garden.

It's been there for 80 years, and you can get these little

traces of the people that were there before.

You've got those kind of layers of history within it, you know,

making a history for a place isn't just about sort of monuments

and grand gestures, it's about the little traces that people leave,

and those are so there in a garden.

It's within the ordinary.

Yeah, I think that's right, within the ordinary and the everyday.

And I think suburbs perhaps more than anywhere else

are where people have made their own histories.

From the early days of suburbia

to the Tudorbethan villas of the middle classes,

and the semis and bungalows of the working classes,

the 20th century suburb has broadly stayed the same.

But what of the 21st century?

Here in Greenhite, in Kent, is a brand-new suburb,

it's right next to Europe's biggest shopping mall.

Bluewater opened in 1999, occupies 240 acres, and employs 7,000 people.

Many of the Bluewater employees

live here in this spanking new suburb, Ingress Park.

Ingress Park is set amongst 72 acres of landscape grounds

next to the River Thames.

But don't be deceived by its retro mish-mash of looks.

With its proximity to the mega-mall

I think Ingress Park's real prototype

is the self contained post-war American suburb.

When you move here you buy the kit,

the lawn, the bushes, the hanging baskets.

What I find surprising is in this new type of suburb,

miles out of London,

the gardens are only the size of the old inner city backyards.

That's certainly not a problem

for Ingress Park resident Sue Butterfill.

I open my door and I'm out in the fresh air and I love it,

because I've got bricks, and then I plant up pots,

I come out with my watering cans and water and snip and do things.

But I don't get out the lawnmower because I haven't got any grass.

Well, interestingly enough, the street is there,

-so it's a different...

-It's actually a walkway.

People walk by with their dogs and their children,

and they go, "Hi, Sue, how are you?" And that's how I love it, you know.

Around the corner,

another arrival who moved from the ancient streets of South East London

is builder Karen Roberts.

Her garden is also pint sized.

Karen, you started out in Bermondsey.

-Yeah.

-You end up in Ingress Park.

-Yeah.

-How does that happen, and what is special about Ingress Park?

A lot of hard work, two parents that love their children

and want to get them the best in life.

Not easy, but...

I'm not saying we're the Brady Brunch and go,

"Woah, look where we are!"

But at the same token, you can achieve it.

Ingress Park is dope. It's dope.

They say living the dream on Ingress Park, I live the dream, to be fair.

I can spend hours out here just doing nothing really,

and I'm gardening, but I'm not really doing anything, to be fair.

I get guided by Pat next door, I get guided by Ron,

and they give me plants, they say, put this in.

I haven't got a lot of money to spend, so I don't spend a lot,

but I can go snip, snip, I'm doing my garden, I'm here for the day.

I love that, I love that.

I've got a thing here, weeds as well,

if you flower you can stay, if you don't flower, you're gone.

But this is small, but you've done a lot with it.

I think you have to, don't you?

Like the grass, this cost me £700 on the internet, who wouldn't do that?

No, I'd do it, this is my ideal garden.

It's the best buy I ever bought in this house.

No, I love the astro turf.

Yeah, the snow just melts in to it,

and if I move you can unpin it and take it with you!

Mobile garden!

How good is that? Roll it up, take it!

This is a 21st century consumerist, satellite community

to an American-style mall.

But that's far from the whole story.

In funny ways there are references back to things

like Hampstead Garden Suburb in this place here.

How would you say this references Hampstead Garden Suburb?

Well, it feels to me like quite a planned environment.

I mean there's a sort of strong sense of organisation and control,

a kind of masterplan to this.

This isn't that kind of suburbia where...

-Sprawl, no.

-Sprawl. Yeah.

But also where, you know, there's more autonomy,

there's more sort of independence for the people that live there

in controlling the sort of overall environment.

So in some ways things have gone full circle.

You could see here, and this probably sounds slightly mad,

you could see here

something of what the Barnetts had hoped for Hampstead Garden Suburb?

I think elements of that.

I mean, I think they'd come here and they'd be disturbed.

I mean, they'd look at the prices, they'd look at what you have to do.

I'm not sure the Barnetts are going to enjoy Bluewater though.

-They would hate Bluewater.

-Very much.

People shop here, work and socialise here.

It's a self-contained world.

Unlike the previous suburbanites, they have little need of the city.

London itself is not the place it was a century ago,

and the reasons for leaving it now have totally changed.

Homes are scarce, house prices astronomical.

Mass immigration has transformed neighbourhoods

once familiar to native Londoners.

And now the migrants' children too

are heading for the foothills of Kent, Surrey and Essex

in search of a house and in search of a garden.

It's the garden spaces between the houses, roads and stations

that help define suburbia,

at the heart of which is the private garden, front and rear.

This has become the most English of landscapes,

and gardening as a hobby, part of our national identity.

I love the garden and I find if I'm upset about anything, I think

I'll go out there for a little while. And you feel peace in the garden.

If I feel tired and I come out into the garden I'm energised again,

so I'm very lucky.

If I can't get out here, watch out!

The truth of the matter is that suburbia is all our history,

right across the country.

Nowadays, an amazing 80% of us in England live in the suburbs.

And as for me, even I finally said goodbye to South East London.

We may fool ourselves into thinking we're different,

but we're almost all suburbanites now.

Throughout the last century, suburbia has become as much a part

of British identity as the city and the countryside.

But it deserves its place among those English icons

that George Orwell believe made England a living thing -

the fried breakfasts, the red pillar boxes,

the gloomy Sundays and the smoky towns.

It's up there, it's iconic, a garden for the masses.