It is all brilliant sunshine and long evenings as England approaches midsummer. The kids are out plotting ever more Machiavellian schemes. I am witnessing, as we speak, scooter football outside in the close, and I can hear a camp being made noisily in the woods behind my house.
Cars are reclining on drives after a Tuesday out scurrying, and the smell of dinners both delicious and dubious steals out from front doors to haunt those walking from door to door. I can hear families talking companionably. Dogs are barking, but no-one seems to mind much today.
Pots of pansies abound, and box trims the drives. It should, by rights, be smug: but somehow it’s not. It’s home.
When Rome was a great city and everyone wore sandals and spoke Latin, the suburb was born. We all know that ‘sub’ means under, and ‘urbs’ is the Latin term for a city; Rome was cradled by hills and under these, just a little further away from the power and wealth, lay areas of housing where lesser mortals lived out lives of infinite small-scale detail.
Shakespeare makes a lovely comment on the status of these places, a little bit further from the madding crowd. He chooses Portia as his mouthpiece. She is arguing for her own worth, and pleading with the great Roman warrior, Brutus, to show he sets store by her.
She asks: “Dwell I but in the suburbs of your good pleasure? If it be no more, Portia is Brutus’ harlot, not his wife.”
Those suburbs are much maligned: Shakespeare makes the suburb the harlot, further away from the centre of Brutus’ affections, and the goodly wife is the city, the centre of his regard.
Well: it’s not the real thing, is it? The suburb is far from the action. Here in the UK, suburbs were made possible by transport links. One could live quite a long way from the city and still work there, if the trains and the omnibuses were providing a service right past one’s door.
Diary of a Nobody, that gem by George and Weedon Grossmith, sites its hero, city clerk Charles Pooter, in Holloway, then a suburb of London. Every day he gets an omnibus to work, although his son Lupin is rather fast and hires a pony and trap to get into his highly dubious city job. Charles gets two pounds off the rent because the train runs past the end of his garden.
Many a common man – or Man On The Clapham Omnibus, as the legal term goes – benefitted by the new transport links.
Take the rise and rise of London’s Metropolitan , which began its life as the world’s first underground in 1863.
It all began at Baker Street. Passengers marvelled that they could make their way out to Swiss Cottage on the iron horse. And what’s more, they could live in a place with a little more living space.
The line crept westwards: it reached Harrow in 1880, Rickmansworth in 1887 and Chesham of the rolling hills in 1889. Onwards it pressed, along the Aylesbury and Buckingham Railway through the lush Chilterms, and onwards, reaching Uxbridge in 1904 and finally screeching to a halt at Stanmore in 1932.
Thus began Metro-land. A sprawl of cosy middle English housing with neat lawns and well-planned roads, it became a haven for a measured middle class existence. The satirist and author GR Sims wrote: “I know a land where the wild flowers grow; Near, near at hand if by train you go, Metroland, Metroland.”
It was John Betjeman who crystallised the strength of feeling towards the special kind of settlements which sprang up around those rails. The Times dubbed him Metro-Land’s hymnologist. The rise and fall of his verse never ceases to lull and delight, and his compassion for the minutiae of our lives never fails to fill me with profound gratitude to the little man, who now lies beneath the earth at St Enedoc church on a windswept Cornish beach.
His poem, ‘Middlesex’ is haunting:
“Parish of enormous hayfields, Perivale stood all alone,
And from Greenford, scent of Mayfields
Most enticingly was blown
Over market gardens tidy
Taverns for the bona fide
Cockney singers, cockney shooters,
Murray Poshes, Lupin Pooters,
Long in Kelsal Green and Highgate silent under soot and stone.”
Betjeman presented a wondrous, lyrical documentary on this, one of our favourite suburbs, in 1973. He looked frankly at what the middle classes had done to the Utopia which had been there before. For every settlement there is a cost.
Self taught architect and broadcaster Ian Nairn, who was of the same school of thought as Betjeman, commented: “…by the end of the century Great Britain will consist of isolated oases of preserved monuments in a desert of wire, concrete roads, cosy plots and bungalows..”
And he found a new name for this uneasy assimilation of the old landscape into the new settlement: Subtopea.
I look out on a settlement not forty years old, for which acres of ancient woodland were massacred.
But I live here: and listening to the companionable murmur of the lives of many families who live around me in this settlement, I cannot help but think that for me, Shakespeare’s harlot and the wife have swapped roles. This is my subtopea.
I watch the cats sidle and the dogs amble and the children politick; and I cannot help but adore suburbia.
Kate Shrewsday 
Wonderful, Kate and me too! Your urbia sounds like mine.
We’re each part of the overspill of a very big city, Penny. It can be a lovely place to be 😉
My feeling towards living in the ‘burbs is rather ambivalent, Kate. “We all know that ‘sub’ means under, and ‘urbs’ is the Latin term for a city” – I didn’t, so thanks 😀
😀 Glad to be of service, BB, I must be really careful not to turn into a prefix bore 🙂 You are in the most excellent company in your feelings about suburbs, what with Shakespeare and Betjamin and Nairn, not to mention EM Forster, who said success was indistinguishable from failure there….
I think different occurrences of suburbia, like people, have different personalites. Some, like yours, are amiable, pleasing to the eye rather than perfect in appearance, congenial rather than functionally perfect.
Interesting comparisons with the wife and the harlot. I think I have a brain-wig and this will run as an undercurrent through my day, making me think more. Thank you
Phil and I spent ages discussing it….he felt Shakespeare’s analogy was all wrong, and the cosy wife was the suburbs, while the exciting harlot reeks of the city. I wonder if Will’s Portia was given these words because for her, love and power walk close together. Or is she using the language of power to speak straight to the heart of a hardened, powerful man?
“Dwell I but in the suburbs of your good pleasure? If it be no more, Portia is Brutus’ harlot, not his wife.”
Is she suggesting that if his affections have fallen away so that she is no longer the centre of his being and love, but now on the periphery (the suburbs) – she becomes to him more like a mistress than a wife?
(A different emphasis from your interpretation, I think, the bit I can’t quite agree with is this as I feel it takes a step too far…
“Those suburbs are much maligned: Shakespeare makes the suburb the harlot, further away from the centre of Brutus’ affections, and the goodly wife is the city, the centre of his regard.” )
but now I’ve written it down I’m not so sure….
We talked and talked about this last night, Pseu. I change my mind with every new comment 😀
Still finding myself thinking about this one!
When the answer comes make sure you leave it here…
The suburbs appeal to me far more than cities or the uneasy isolation of desolate marshes.
Enough to do, enough to see . . .
Without being smothered by people elbowing me. 😉
We watched a Disney movie that you might enjoy: The Crimson Wing ~ Mystery of the Flamingoes. Sent in Tanzania Africa. Fascinating circle of life.
Must seek it out, Nancy, thanks 🙂
I like to live here, but get to the city at the drop of a hat. Such a buzz for short spells, but oh, so nice to come home.
I love this post, Kate. It’s so warm and alive, I almost imagine myself in your suburb, especially since your summer is blooming, while winter is on her way here!
It is the first year I have closely followed both hemispheres, Naomi, and I will confess those beautiful photographs on your site meant a lot in the dark winter months. Anyhoo, here we are eating, drinking and being merry, for in time it will be dark again.
Subtopia in England is pretty to me. In South Africa we’ve had some seriously misguided architects and the result is some pretty ugly suburbs.
Must Google, Cindy, thanks for that. This blogosphere broadens my world every day 🙂
Me north – you south – we no get good weather – you steal it all.
🙂
Gales and rain today, isn’t it, Tilly ? 😀
“Dwell I but in the suburbs of your good pleasure? If it be no more, Portia is Brutus’ harlot, not his wife.”
I believe that line did NOT appear in the textbook version of Julius Caesar, at least the last time I taught it. We taught a particularly refined version of Shakespeare to our 15-year-olds.
I love trains, but the US prefers to build highways. So automobiles will have a place to park.
LOL cars have their drawbacks….but I still need mine…. 😀
In my part-time job delivering for Waitrose I’ve frequented suburbia a thousand times. Sometimes I stop to take photographs. Apart from a country pile, perhaps, I’d sooner not live anywhere else.
Tooty, I’m with you there. Hamsters wouldn’t be half as much at home in a mansion.