Michael Gilson at Aeon Magazine:
The reaction of the Smiths and millions of other working-class families to their new suburban environments rarely surfaced at the time. John’s quotes above were recorded almost 70 years later as he looked back fondly on that momentous move. And yet this transformation of Britain and the way people lived was a contemporary prime-time, if very one-sided, debate in a manner arguably not seen since. Cultural commentators, Modern Movement architects, preservationists and Left-wing writers filled the airwaves with their damnations of the new spread of suburbia. Here’s the town planner Thomas Sharp with a, by no means extreme, view of the time:
Tradition has broken down. Taste is utterly debased… The town, long since degraded, is now being annihilated by a flabby, shoddy, romantic nature worship. That romantic nature worship is destroying also the object of its adoration, the countryside.
For Sharp and scores of middle-class theorists, the privet hedge of suburbia had become a symbol of a small-c conservative, curtain-twitching, dull new breed of Briton.
more here.
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