The Sound of the Suburbs

Johnny's upstairs in his bedroom sitting in the dark / Annoying the neighbours with his punk rock electric guitar

Out on the patio it is not quite yet dark, the sky above a powdery, deep, book-of-hours blue. An ice cream moon, gibbous and shining, hangs amongst next door's chimney pots, while the opposite horizon is golden from the just-set sun and only Venus is yet visible over the dark houses. Under the lilacs, still glowing with the hoarded light of the afternoon, the lanterns are lit like a Singer Sargent. A jet passes overhead and, closer, a bat jinks and flutters between the trees. The sound of TVs, laughter from a distant garden, the endless soft rush of the A road.

The suburbs in summer.

This was the summer of my childhood. I was a child in the suburbs, and the moment I was old enough, I got out. I got to the city. Until recently I lived in the East End of London, but unforeseen circumstances (though if anyone else called her that I’d be furious) mean I am now an adult in the suburbs too.

Summer evenings in Bethnal Green, where I used to live, are very different. Outside the pub on the corner, sun-crazed drunks bellow and shriek. Drug addicts are shouting incomprehensibly at each other in the street. More distantly there is the booming of a concert in Victoria Park, the thudding of helicopters, the wailing of sirens and the screaming of foxes.

I still find it hard to sleep when it's quiet outside.

This kind of thing makes people assert that the city is more ‘gritty’, more ‘real’ than the suburbs; that the suburbs are not serious places. Both the country and the city have their genres. The country is the place for fantasy and escape, for cosy crime and folk horror. The city is the setting for thrillers and rom coms, for gangsters and serial killers and maverick cops and meet-cutes in the local deli. The suburb, meanwhile, merely has sitcoms: sad-sack dads, harried mums and cheeky, wisecracking kids; the sad comedy of the niche class warfare of the bourgeoisie, the schadenfreude of other people’s tiny lives, the comforting discomfort of the comfortable.

Let us disambiguate. By ‘city’, I mean a place where art, justice, history and law -- the abstract nouns that delineate a culture -- have dedicated buildings with their names carved on the front: gallery, court, museum, assembly. Cities are the engines of culture; they are the sources, literally, of civilization. From Çatalhöyük to New York, cities are the places where humans have come together to share exciting new ideas and exciting new diseases, and to build complex social structures that allow for the specialisation of knowledge and expertise. These things give rise to the brewer, the plumber, or the twat in a top-heavy haircut who dreams up new cocktails in an overpriced bar full of exposed pipework.

And by ‘country', I mean a place where people do jobs out of picture books: farming, fishing, thatching, and inheriting estates that now belong to the National Trust. The animals make noises we learn as children: ‘baa’, ‘oink’, ‘moo’, ‘get orf moi land’. In Britain, at the edges, ‘country’ can mean a sort of wilderness, but even here the wilderness is thoroughly mapped by the Ordnance Survey, with rights of way and permissive bridlepaths that lead to a nice pub.

There are, in the country, ‘towns’, which we might posit as larval cities. They have markets and magistrate’s courts and a combined shopping and leisure facility where the shambles used to be. They have, in miniature, all the facilities of a city.

They are not the suburbs. The suburbs are something different.

What distinguishes the suburbs is the lack of those abstract nouns. There are not museums or galleries or hospitals. There is a high street with some shops and a post office; there are schools and a library; and then there are houses. There are streets and closes and roads and avenues and crescents and there, on all of them, houses. Three bedroom, four bedroom, detached and semi, extended and conservatoried, pebble dashed and plastered; Dad’s saloon in the drive, Mum’s SUV on the curb out front, a tricycle abandoned in the front garden; high hedged or fenced, numbered or named: Tree Tops, Hillview, The Gables; in this house we live, laugh, love and put the bins out on Wednesday nights.

My favourite surrealist is Magritte, and my favourite Magritte paintings are in his series ‘The Empire of Light’. These are paintings of suburban-looking houses, usually with streetlamps outside. The house and the street are in night time, but the sky above is bright blue day with little fluffy Magritte clouds.

The scenes, in other words, are at no time, although they look like nothing so much as a suburban street at dusk, when the dark has collected between the houses, but the sky is still lit by the sun beyond the horizon. They remind me of the silhouettes that used to run around the edge of the dome of the London Planetarium, a mural of suburban rooflines, over which bent the glories of the universe.

Jonathan Meades memorably claimed that Magritte was not a surrealist, but merely a realist from Belgium. And what is Belgium but a suburb of Northern Europe? And what is Magritte but a documenter of suburban mysteries, of fireplaces and pipes and bowler hats; the whole tiny, unfathomable, humdrum world of the bourgeoisie?

The city and the country are opposites. Ever since man started building conurbations, the shepherds out on the hills with their fierce, fiery and febrile gods have seen cities as sinks of vice and waste. The literates and sophisticates of the city have glimpsed those hills in the dim distance, between buildings, and pitied and mocked those poor muddied fools who have to live in such a rude wilderness.

Part of the scorn for the suburbs is that they are neither of these places. They are nowhere; they are in-between. They are the places you glimpse from a train window on your journey from one to the other: buddleia, back gardens and bowling greens. They are neither hot nor cold but lukewarm, and therefore to be spewed from the mouth.

The suburbs are new places. Unlike the city and the country, they are not ancient. They are inventions, largely, of the last hundred years or so, when Victorian infrastructure and bureaucracy met the internal combustion engine and twentieth century building materials. Between railways and cars and the telephone and the supermarket, it became possible to work in the city and not live in it; to have a house and a garden and yet not have to live in the wilderness of the country.

This novelty and strangeness explains why so many twentieth century writers of fantastical fiction are fascinated by the suburbs. Saki fills suburban shrubberies with fauns and panic; Charles Williams fills them with magic shops. In The London Adventure (1924), Arthur Machen describes finding his way from Enfield to Enfield Lock: ‘I was as true an explorer as Columbus, as he who stood upon a peak in Darien.’

The suburbs, as Magritte saw, are liminal: neither day nor night, but twilight. In the city, all is public; in the country, all is open. In the suburbs, the doors are shut and the curtains drawn. Privacy, the great secret treasure of the bourgeois, the drawbridge pulled up on the Englishman’s castle, and only the occasional blind twitches at an unaccustomed sound in the street, as we all wonder what our neighbours, who have lived a mere six feet away for ten years, might be like. All is as quiet and as secret as a mausoleum.

As Rowan has pointed out, the lack of sound in the suburbs is highly class coded. It is a symbol of how the bourgeois have acquired control not only of their space, but of their careers and education. The medieval conception of society imagined three noisy estates: the bellowing aristocracy, the tolling church and the yammering peasants. The merchants of the cities were anomalies who escaped classification. Now, those merchants have moved to suburbia, but they have brought their city walls with them in microcosm. They guard their small differences, their independence from the bosses, their employees and each other.

Suburbs are also known as dormitory towns, where people who work in the city go to sleep: silent and somnolent, dead to the world, unconscious to the life of the night. The streets are full of dreams, and every house is full of strange and unguessable visions, nightmares and wonders. Like places in dreams they are fluid, spectral. Roads and houses melt into each other, each full of doppelgangers and half-recognised faces.

The suburbs also, of course, nurture a cultural dream: a safe community, a house of one’s own, a domestic unit. A realistic kind of success. Like their cousin, the light industrial estate, they are warehouses of small ambitions and reasonable dreams: hand car washes, suppliers of engineering sundries. These are the people who make things run, the overlooked people who do all the unseen work. They don’t grow food or run revolutionary restaurants; they don’t hew wood or inscribe law. But they do the accounts for the people who do. They figure out how Section C, Paragraph 2 applies to the hewing of wood in a designated green belt area. From the big houses of the retired civil servants and stockbrokers, through the commuter belt of white collar office workers, to the semi-detacheds of the plumbers and supermarket managers, these are the stagehands of cultural performance, the unacknowledged executors of the twenty-first century.

Like those industrial estates, the suburbs are small factories, but factories for families. They are where twenty-first century children are made. Where people come to stop being wholly themselves: to become couples, to become community, to become someone else’s parents and the parents of school friends and the kids next door, indistinguishable pairs of legs in the supermarket, shadowy figures in unfamiliar kitchens.

They are, thereby, the arbiters of the mainstream culture against which those children will rebel. The stultifying conformity of the suburb is the engine that feeds cultural revolution. The story of post-war pop culture has been the story of kids escaping the suburbs of their childhoods -- Strawberry Fields and Penny Lane, Bromley and Basildon and Salford and Crawley -- and heading for the city, where they reinvent themselves, the culture and the world.

The suburb can so often seem a place where culture has died and been interred in serried ranks of whited sepulchres; but it is also where culture is born. It is where the next generation dreams of the future. In that quiet, purple evening, the next day is inevitable; that endless onward rush of the dual carriageway is tomorrow, forever on its way, full of boredom and horror and promise, and utterly unstoppable.

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For Generation X the suburbs were also the site of great adventures, which you could easily discover by just getting on your bike.