About this blog

This blog was first started in 2006 at University College London. Initially set up for the first suburbs project (Towards Successful Suburban Town Centres – or SSTC in short), it is a record of the thoughts and theoretical development of the research in both SSTC and the second suburbs project, the Adaptable Suburbs research project.

UCL’s EPSRC-funded Towards Successful Suburban Town Centres project challenged policy assumptions about suburbs, revealing that they have a great deal to teach us.  Looking at 26 suburban centres in outer London – places such as Barnet and Bexleyheath, South Norwood and South Harrow, Wallington and Whetstone, seen as both unfashionable and unremarkable – the research team delivered new findings about the extent of their adaptability and resilience. The research findings made it clear that often ignored places can be models of flexible form, sustaining successful spatial networks over centuries. Understanding these physical success factors helps planners and designers to create sustainable developments today.

The second suburbs project Adaptable Suburbs ran for four years till 2014. It sought to understand why the networks of street and spaces in twenty of the London suburbs already studied work well.  Extensive, multi-disciplinary analysis was used to explore the influence of social interactions and spatial movement on the economic vitality and adaptability of places. Key techniques included space syntax analysis of street network accessibility; historical analysis of change over time; street-level ethnography, interviewing the people who use and trade in each centre and mapping their spatial networks; and detailed town centre analysis using socio-economic data.

The principal investigator on both projects, Professor Laura Vaughan, continues to post the occasional piece of news on this blog, though it is essentially closed. The associated twitter feed continues at @AdaptableSuburb (https://twitter.com/AdaptableSuburb)

The project’s presentations and peer-reviewed publications can be found by clicking through the links above. You may also wish to download the open access book Suburban Urbanities, which contains several of the projects’ findings.

For further information email: AdaptableSuburbs@ucl.ac.uk

EPSRC reference: EP/I001212/1

Marking 5 years since publication of Suburban Urbanities

I marked the 5th anniversary of the publication of Suburban Urbanities: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street with UCL Press on my personal blog. I’m copying it here for the follows of our suburban project blog.

Suburban Urbanities is an edited collection which offered a comprehensive understanding of urban change, touching on the history of the suburb as well as its current development challenges, with a particular focus on suburban centres. Contributors from the architecture, urban design, geography, history and anthropology disciplines examine cases spanning Europe and around the Mediterranean. My intention in putting together the collection was to propose that – rather than taking the city out of the suburb or the suburb out of the city – to consider the two together: the suburb as a continuum of the city’s spatial-social complexity. It therefore intended to make the case for the suburbs’ (however defined) urbanity.

Stanislawa De Karlowska: ‘Swiss Cottage‘, exhibited 1914. From: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/camden-town-group/stanislawa-de-karlowska-swiss-cottage-r1129515

Since publication our work on suburban high streets has continued to evolve:

1. Continuing to develop the conception of diversity beyond a matter of land use mix to taking account of their spatial patterning, we undertook a study of minority ethnic business ownership in 10 of London’s outer suburban high streets, finding a strong relationship between urban form, commercial diversity, and a presence of minority ethnic businesses. [L. Vaughan, S. Sultan Khan, L. Tarkhanyan, and A. Dhanani, ‘The Impact of Minority Ethnic Businesses on the Spatial Character of London’s High Streets‘, Urban Design International, 23 (2018), 249-63.
2. We also published work on local high street adaptability and resilience, finding that such streets tend to facilitate incremental building modifications and cyclical redevelopment on wide fronted plots. [I. Törmä, S. Griffiths, and L. Vaughan, ‘High Street Changeability: The Effect of Urban Form on Demolition, Modification and Use Change in Two South London Suburbs ‘, Urban Morphology, 21 (2017), 5-28. .]
3. We also continue to engage with the historical evolution of London’s suburbs, for which we have just finished writing a paper on Chipping Barnet (currently under review).
4. And lastly, the importance of local high streets for health and wellbeing continues to a topic of interest, with ongoing research into how the built environment shapes patterns of loneliness and social isolation, and continuing efforts to debunk zombie research concepts such as ‘suburban neurosis’.

Suburban Urbanities has had to date over 34,000 chapter or book copies either downloaded or accessed online; and 185 copies sold. Its agenda seems more timely than ever, with a refocus on the centrality of the local high street (see for example the UK Government’s new Suburban Taskforce).

The top ten downloads are both from expected, but also less expected countries: UK, USA, Mexico, India, Philippines, Australia, Canada, Germany, China, and Indonesia; just as fascinating is to look at the bottom 20, which are equally varied in their location: Bahamas, Cape Verde, Djibouti, El Salvador, Grenada, Guinea, Kosovo, Liberia, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Turkmenistan, Yemen, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Cuba, Curaçao, Moldova, and Somalia.

And some excerpts from reviews:

It is clear that attempts to pinpoint a suburban culture are going to arrive at a dead end (if you will forgive the pun), if suburban culture is seen to be as shallow-rooted as its grassy lawns. A deeper understanding of suburban culture, if we are willing to agree that there is such a thing, will take as its starting point that its inhabitants have had a past life elsewhere. 

Alexandrine Press

Jane Jacobs’ pioneering work on the death and life of the city continues to engage, with UCL Professor Laura Vaughan’s collection of essays analysing the morphology of the UK high street through time and via the likes of Spain’s Toledo, Limassol in Cyprus and urban Tripoli.

RIBAJ

Suburban Urbanities is a hugely important contribution to understanding our suburban world.

Thinking Cities

Figure 9.4: Hand sketch illustrating high street urban blocks on Roman Road (A1818) Redbridge, London: Seven Kings parade of shops including mosque, nightclub and other uses. © Gort Scott Ltd

Debunking Suburban Neurosis and the ‘mundane trap’ of the suburban villa

Prompted by a blog post by the Wellcome Trust on suburban neurosis and the Peckham Experiment, I’m jotting down here my own reading on this supposed illness. In the blog post, Giulia Smith points out that the Pioneer Health Centre (developed by Dr Innes Hope Pearse and Dr George Scott Williamson) was intended to ameliorate the prevalent ‘anxieties about the ability of low-to-middle-class mothers to raise their children by themselves in the privacy of their own houses’. These ideas were based on a hypothetical illness, suburban neurosis, which would mean that ‘unhappy mothers would be unable to produce happy, healthy offspring’.

The conception of suburbs as a mundane trap were widespread amongst the cultural elite. See for example George Orwell’s excoriating ‘A line of semi-detached torture-chambers where the little five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers quake and shiver, every one of them with the boss twisting his tail and the wife riding him like the nightmare and the kids sucking his blood like leeches.’[1]

Image courtesy Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, Middlesex University

Simultaneous with Orwell’s novel, came supposed medical confirmation that suburbs were bad for family stability and structure, and indeed for women’s health. A doctor from the Royal Free, based his The Lancet note, ‘The Suburban Neurosis’ on his work in in hospital’s outpatient department, claiming that a new group of ‘neurotics’ had come to his notice. ‘Less poverty stricken’ but worrying about money, with few friends and not enough to do or think about.

What wonder that the underdeveloped, relatively poor mind of the suburban woman seeks an escape in neurosis…

And as long as life offers the suburban woman so little to live for, so long will she continue at last to pluck up her courage and add to the numbers in our out-patient waiting halls…

We have, I fear, let matters go too far in the jerry-building, ribbon-development line…

If the house can be disposed of, a flat near a few friends may work wonders.[2]

Yet, as Judy Giles points out, escaping to the suburbs from the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions of their parents’ poverty was a sign of progress in which ‘modernity means a bathroom, an indoor toilet, and an ‘up-to-date drawer space’ (p. 49).[3] Suburban modernity was embraced rather than spurned, though this is not to say that ordinary women too did not feel the same longings as modernist male literary elites.

 

Young housewife, Bethnal Green, London, 1937. Bill Brandt (copyright Focus Gallery, http://www.billbrandt.com/bill-brandt-archive-print-shop/sp23-housewife-bethnal-green-1937)

The diagnosis persisted for decades more, further reinforced by a study by Margot Jeffreys of a group of relocated East Enders, who moved into an out-London housing area South Oxhey, in the 1950s. In fact, Margot Jeffreys found ‘no definite symptoms of a higher incidence of a psycho-neurotic illness than women of the same age elsewhere’.[4] One of the authors of the suburban neurosis paper actually refuted it in 1964[5] and, as Mark Clapson has pointed out, many problems were attributable to initial settling in, coupled with high numbers of ill people at top of list for allocations to the area.[6] Nevertheless, a review of the literature today will find that suburbia and the New Towns are continuing to be being blamed for female neurosis, or its analogue: New Town Blues as distinct from the general phenomenon of moving home.

The Oxhey estate near Watford, built soon after 1950 to house people from inner London, had a rate of mental illness higher than the national average, despite having a good layout, greenspace within the estate and good access to Oxhey Woods … Possibly this is an early example of the “suburban neurosis” that has been widely reported from Britain’s New Towns.[7]

The above-quoted article is in fact associating poor mental health with a lack of social contact. There is some truth in this: social isolation (or loneliness – though they are not synonymous) can be as bad for you as smoking 15 cigarettes a day,[8] but the suburbs aren’t necessarily the cause of poor health per se. My new collaboration on the Loneliness and Social Isolation in Mental Health Research Network will hopefully shed some more light on the role of the built environment in this complex issue.

—

Notes

[1] Orwell, G. (1939). Coming Up for Air. London, Gollancz.

[2] Taylor, S. (1938). “The Suburban Neurosis.” The Lancet 231(5978): 759-762. Intriguingly, Taylor refers to the Pioneer Health Centre at Peckham as a model (though without the health facilities) for the sort of solution he offers: to establish a sort of club that would contain, under one roof, ‘a swimming bath and gymnasium, a cafeteria, a day nursery, the public library and reading, smoking and games rooms.’

[3] Giles, J. (2004). The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity. Oxford, Berg.

[4] Jeffreys, M. (1964). Londoners in Hertfordshire. London: Aspects of Change. Centre for Urban Studies and R. Glass. London, MacGibbon and Kee. 3: 207-255.

[5] We found no real evidence of what one of us (Taylor) twenty five years ago described as ‘the suburban neurosis’, nor of what has more recently been described as ‘new town blues‘”. Taylor, L. and S. Chave (1964). “Mental health and environment.” Mental Health and Environment.

[6] Clapson, M. (1999). “Working-class Women’s Experiences of Moving to New Housing Estates in England since 1919.” Twentieth Century British History 10(3): 345-365.

[7] Douglas, I. (2005). Urban greenspace and mental health. Manchester, The UK Man and the Biosphere Committee (UK-MAB).

[8] Holt-Lunstad, J., et al. (2015). “Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: a meta-analytic review.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 10(2): 227-237.

Hooper’s Hedgerow Hypothesis – or, how do high streets sustain diversity?

Figure 1: a hedgerow on a walk between Radcot and Kelmscot. Image from: http://blog.rowleygallery.co.uk/radcot-kelmscot/

I’ve just found an old newspaper cutting showing Max Hooper’s obituary, which is also laid out here in this Guardian piece: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/apr/09/max-hooper-obituary.

Hooper was an English botanist who devised a system for dating hedges. Starting with a selection of several hundred old hedges, which he dated according to their appearance in old deeds, maps, charters, and the Domesday Book, he counted the number of species in a 30-yard stretch along each of them. He found that the number of tree species correlated with the age of the hedge in centuries and that hedgerows tend to have a much greater diversity of plants and animals and tend to be thicker, taller and more continuous as they increase in age ( this became known as ‘Hooper’s Hedgerow Hypothesis’).

The reason I’m interested in Hooper, is that, thanks to a chance conversation with Professor Julienne Hanson during our suburban town centres research project, when we were puzzling over the significance of land use diversity in the longevity of suburban high streets, we were struck by the possible analogy between high streets and hedgerows. The following is a link to the conference paper, An ecology of the suburban hedgerow, or: how high streets foster diversity over time, which we wrote on the subject.

The paper builds on the proposition by Penn and colleagues (2009) that cities provide a structured set of social, cultural and economic relations which help to shape patterns of diversity in urban areas. Far from being a random mixing, it could be said that urban systems are akin to ecological systems where flora and fauna are closely interrelated and in which the richness and evenness of species in a community contributes to the overall resilience of the ecosystem. This study goes further in suggesting how a variety of building types, sizes and street morphologies are more likely to propagate patterns of co-presence over time – providing the minimal but essential everyday ‘noise’ without which generalised sustainability and liveability agendas are likely to flounder when faced with questions of implementation in particular places. This morphological diversity, it is argued, enables the development of niche markets in smaller centres which can support new forms of socio-economic activity. These ideas were explored further in my chapter called “High Street Diversity, part of Suburban Urbanities: suburbs and the life of the high street (2015).

Figure 2: High Street Dversity. In order to explore this idea we looked at the distribution of segments according to residential and non-residential activity and also adopted ideas for ecology based on the notion that thriving eco-systems required richness of species – we also looked at the number of different types of activities that occurred on each segment – to gain an understanding of activity richness. The initial results reveal a clear long tail where there are fewer non-residential segments with fewer segments with have a larger number of different activities.

 

References

Hooper, Max. 1970. Dating Hedges. Area 2 (4):63-65.

Penn, Alan, Irini Perdikogianni, and Chiron Mottram. 2009. Chapter 11: The Generation of Diversity. In “Designing Sustainable Cities: Decision-making Tools and Resources for Design”, edited by R. Cooper, G. Evans and C. Boyko. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.

Vaughan, Laura. 2015. Chapter 7: High Street Diversity. In “Suburban Urbanities: suburbs and the life of the high street“, edited by L. Vaughan. London: UCL Press.

 

 

 

 

‘We are all suburbanites’

The following is reblogged from the UCL Press blog, where it was posted to celebrate the first anniversary of the press.

Suburban Urbanities is an edited collection that is the culmination of over seven years’ research into the urban form and social logic of metropolitan suburbs. The research considered the factors that contribute to the long-term success of suburban town centres. In order to do this we studied a century’s morphological evolution and land use patterns of twenty outer London suburbs as well as, more generally, how cities grow and take shape over time. The research took a multi-disciplinary approach, integrating urban analysis (using space syntax) with ethnographic studies of people, organisations and places on the one hand, and historical studies of land uses and urban form on the other. Towards the end of our project we sought out a comparative set of examples from the UK and elsewhere around Europe and the Mediterranean. The book takes these examples and organises these into three themes: Suburban Centralities – which has a focus on city-wide transformations, showing that local places are shaped and formed over time according to their accessibility to long-term patterns of human, social and economic networks of activity across scales; High Street Diversity – which has a focus on the high street, the active centre of urban and suburban centres. The last section of the book is called ‘Everyday Sociability’.  In addition to the case studies themselves, the book has a clear agenda, to challenge the perception that urbanity only exists in the city. Opening with a pair of theoretical position pieces, it argues that urbanity exists in a continuum from urban to suburban. When discussing suburban life it is vital to get away from the binary choice between suburban versus urbane. Indeed, we are all suburbanites in one way or another, given that urbanism is a temporal process.

As an early adopter of open access through UCL’s repository, UCL Press seemed like an ideal choice for Suburban Urbanities, given that it is a university press dedicated to full open access. A surprising bonus has been the fast turnaround, from submission in April 2015 to publication in November 2015. At the same time the visual and material quality of both online and print version is excellent – indeed, one of the book’s reviewers commented that it is “a book that looks and feels beautiful”. Most important for me has been the immediate impact of the book. Alongside its thousands of downloads (3750 at last count) in eighty eight countries, it has had impact in all sorts of unexpected places: featuring in The Atlantic in its CityLab blogand an activist in New Zealand has been tweeting excerpts of the book at his local planning authority to raise various policy issues. My hope is that it will continue to resonate far and wide as we continue to battle with the complexity of suburban urbanity in future years.

About the Author

Laura Vaughan is Professor of Urban Form and Society at the Space Syntax Laboratory, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and editor of Suburban Urbanities. In addition to her longstanding research into London’s suburban evolution, she has written on many other critical aspects of urbanism today. Follow her on Twitter at @urban_formation.

Suburban space, suburban culture, suburban myth?

“The suburb is neither one thing nor the other; it has neither the advantage of the town nor the open freedom of the country, but manages to combine in nice equality of proportion the disadvantages of both.” From ‘Architect’, XVI, 1876: 33.

Figure 1 – Specifically Suburban Culture: The Rose Theatre, Kingston-upon-Thames, London. Source Jim Linwood (CC BY 2.0)

The latest issue of Built Environment is entitled ‘Suburban Spaces, Suburban Cultures’ and aims to “demonstrate and evaluate the significance of culture – in its various manifestations – in both shaping and reflecting the suburban built environment.” Given that suburbs are commonly viewed as places that culture forgot, it is refreshing to see a built environment journal publication dedicated to suburban space and cultures. My own work on suburban theory points to the fact that attempts to find suburban cultural specificity are as challenging as trying to pinpoint suburban spatial specificity, yet viewing culture as shaping and reflecting the suburban built environment is an intriguing prospect.

Suburban Spaces, Suburban Cultures in fact defines for us a range of suburban spatial-cultural themes that are worthy of exploration. From the point of view of architectural design, the suburban stereotype of low density, detached housing, is mentioned on several occasions in this issue. Here we find a common trope in describing suburban environments as “boring”, “homogenous” and “monotonous”. It is an easy jump from this criticism to the accusation by Ian Nairn that suburbia constituted a “slow decay… to a world of universal low-density mess” – or, as he termed it, subtopia. Putting aside that low density is not necessarily a commonplace feature of suburbia (and several examples in this issue prove this), nor does low density necessarily equates to poor planning. Peter Hall showed in The Land Fetish that there was a limit to the amount of density achievable at the expense of providing the necessary schools, recreation, doctors’ surgeries and shops (let alone the often-forgotten places to produce goods). He showed that much of the gain achieved by density ceases to be beneficial at a point where density arrives at a level similar to that of many existing suburbs. Indeed, the “enigmas” of density laid out in Suburban Spaces, Suburban Cultures, show that it is not merely something to be measured specific to a site, but something that needs to take account of the wider spatial context, the wealth and class context, and vitally, the political context within which decisions on land allocation, growth policies and so on shape everyday life on the urban periphery.

It is actually quite easy to subvert suburban stereotypes. Take the importance, for example, of suburban religious architecture– especially churches – in the context of the evolution of British Modernism. The place of religion itself in the supposedly culture-less, secular suburbs is too frequently viewed as incongruous. Taking a longer view of the UK’s suburban history it is evident how important churches were in providing the foundation for new communities. Putting that aside, there are myriad examples of minority groups being drawn to particular locales due to the availability of a ready-made faith community. In the latter case, it is interesting to observe the way in which the perceived exotic, foreignness of minority religion can provide a “multiculturalism of inhabitance” as Amanda Wise has shown, to the supposedly mundane, prosaic suburban streets; serving to create a public presence for the generally hidden demographic diversity of suburban life.

Suburban public space is another important (and frequently overlooked) aspect worth considering in the context of suburban spatial cultures. My own study of London’s working-class suburbs shows how utopian ideals of village greens in designed suburbs (still maintained in the verdant lanes of Hampstead Garden Suburb) can be ruined by the simple erection of a “No Ball Games” on the wall of a municipal housing estate. The importance of commons, of the woods and fields and indeed of the allotments and front gardens in engendering everyday sociability is essential, not only for functional reasons, but also for ensuring an unpoliced space in which people can roam free. When I read the recent republication by Persephone Books of the 1936 novel Greengates, I was struck by how the protagonists discover their suburban idyll by happening upon it during a walk through the woods on the edge of a newly-built estate. Of course it is easy to slip into a new suburban cliché just as one gets rid of another. Suburban public space is not just about leafy streets and beautiful landscaping. Jan Gehl’s methods of designing ‘in-between space’ have for example been important in the way they aim to ensure that alongside providing the opportunity for micro social connections around the suburban dwellings that additional “weak ties” can be made through social connections from one locality to the next. This is a vital aspect of successful urbanism, where the presumption is that one’s social life is as much dictated by social connections made transpatially (across space) as spatially (within space); the non-correspondence theory laid out so lucidly by Julienne Hanson in her critique of twentieth century neighbourhood design.

 

Figure 2 – Surbiton, London: The Annual Lefi Parade fronted by Thamas Deeton, the giant of Seething. Image by David Jeevendrampillai (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Viewing suburbs themselves as interstitial spaces – neither suburb nor city – is of course at the root of either dismissing them as lacking in culture, or of maintaining that any culture they have is limited to the narrow world depicted in 1950s Hollywood films or 1970s English language sitcoms. It is clear that attempts to pinpoint a suburban culture are going to arrive at a dead end (if you will forgive the pun), if suburban culture is seen to be as shallow-rooted as its grassy lawns. A deeper understanding of suburban culture, if we are willing to agree that there is such a thing, will take as its starting point that its inhabitants have had a past life elsewhere. Anat Hecht illustrates this well in her ethnography of Croydon, a London suburb. In her work she writes of her informant “Nan’s” material culture (or, as Nan herself puts it, her “mishmash of knick-knacks”), an accretion of memories created in a past life led in a city far away (Edinburgh). Arguably suburban culture will never be bland or uniform, once we start to take account of its emergence from the sum total of its inhabitants’ past lives along with its formation in the specific context of place. David Jeevendrampillai’s work on ‘Being Suburban’ demonstrates this, in showing how the suburbs can in fact provide – because of their supposed mundanity – an identity ready to be harnessed for the purpose of creating a new cultural imaginary that builds on a specific locality: whether in inventing a whimsical local culture or in creating a thriving local economy (and indeed the two will frequently go hand-in-hand).

This blog post by Laura Vaughan first appeared on http://alexandrinepress.co.uk/blogged-environment and is reblogged by the author with permission.

References

Gehl, J (2011 (originally 1971)), Life between buildings: using public space (The Danish Architectural Press).

Hall, P (2006), ‘The Land Fetish: Densities and London Planning’, in B Kochan (ed.),London: bigger and better? (London: LSE London, London School of Economics and Political Science), 84-93.

Hanson, J and Hillier, B (1987), ‘The Architecture of Community: some new proposals on the social consequences of architectural and planning decisions‘, Architecture et Comportement/ Architecture and Behaviour, 3 (3), 251-73.

Hecht, A (2001), ‘Home Sweet Home: Tangible Memories of an Uprooted Childhood’, in D Miller (ed.), Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors (Berg Publishers), 123–45.

Jeevendrampillai, D (2015), ‘Being Suburban’, in L Vaughan (ed.), Suburban Urbanities: suburbs and the life of the high street (London: UCL Press), 287-306.

Nairn, I (1956), Counter-Attack Against Subtopia (London: Architectural Press ).

Vaughan, L, Griffiths, S, and Haklay, M. (2015), ‘The Suburb and the City’, in L Vaughan (ed.), Suburban Urbanities: suburbs and the life of the high street (London: UCL Press), 11-31.

Wise, A (2006), ‘Multiculturalism From Below: Transversal Crossings and Working Class Cosmopolitans’, in S Velayutham and A Wise (eds.), Everyday Multiculturalism Conference Proceedings, (Macquarie University 28-29 September 2006 Centre for Research on Social Inclusion, 2007).

About the author

Laura Vaughan is Professor of Urban Form and Society and Director of the Space Syntax Laboratory, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. @urban_formation. Her book Suburban Urbanities was recently published with UCL Press. The book can be downloaded for free here. This blog post is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NonDerivative license © 2016 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

Suburbia: a blast from the past

On 22nd September 2004, my first research into suburbs featured on Professor Laurie Taylor’s BBC Radio 4 programme Thinking Allowed. More on the programme and a link to listen to it in full can be found on this post: from the Mapping Urban Form and Society blog.

Industrious Suburbs

One of the many clichés we have battled against in the Adaptable Suburbs project is that the high street is dependent on retail for its survival. In fact, a growing body of evidence is emerging that shows that town centres that are less reliant on retail are better able to weather fluctuations in the economy (see blog post on The Great British High Street). Research undertaken by Gort Scott for the Greater London Authority shows that it is the ‘thick crust’ of workshops, offices, churches and small industry that bolsters the dozens of high streets around London and is an important (and undervalued) aspect of smaller town centres (see chapter by Fiona Scott in the recently published Suburban Urbanities).

Site of Werndee Hall, South Norwood in 1890, 1910, 1960 and today. Source: © Crown Copyright and Landmark Information Group Limited (2013). All rights reserved 2013.

This brings me to the topic of today’s blog post: H. Tinsley and Co. Ltd., based at Werndee Hall, South Norwood, London. One of the methods we used in our Adaptable Suburbs project analysis was to take the business directories for the four periods studied (1890, 1910, 1960 and 2013) and geocode each of the addresses in our geographical information systems (namely, take each of the buildings within our four case studies, redraw it, then encode the drawn building with its land use at the time). When I was checking through the map for South Norwood, I discovered an industrial activity labelled as ‘Werndee Hall’ situated on this back street of South Norwood. Despite its modest location, the University of Aberdeen collection maintains that over time Tinsley and Co. “became one of the places to go for high precision electrical test equipment”.

H. Tinsley: Galvanometer. Image from the University of Aberdeen’s Natural Philosophy Collection.

The City of London photo collection shows Werndee Hall was a significant building. Previously a private residence, when Tinsley acquired the building in 1917, his was already an established firm, founded in 1904 as Messrs Tinsley and Co., telegraph and electrical engineers. The firm continued to produce sensitive electrical communications equipment over the course of much of the 20th century . But why there? I had an interesting twitter exchange on this recently, and one suggestion was that new firms opened in ‘the sticks’ due to there being room to expand on relatively cheap land, which is the reason that many start-ups in Cambridge tend to be in more remote areas. I believe we can show evidence for some additional reasons.

Werndee Hall © City of London

If we have a look at the space syntax analysis of accessibility in South Norwood, taking account of a large area around the town centre (a 6km area in fact), modelled for network-wide ‘choice’ (similar to the standard network science measure of ‘betweenness’, or how likely is any given street segment to be used from anywhere to anywhere within a given distance) we find that the site of the company (the large purple-coloured building to the south of the map), although situated away from the accessible core of the town centre (the warmest coloured lines in the spectrum), is still within reach of the well-connected Portland Road. Couple to this the high rate of land use diversity and a reasonably-sized population, bearing in mind the quite dense set of dwellings in the area, you can see that Mr Tinsley was able to call upon a good number of local workers, to resources & suppliers both locally and within a wider ambit of the suburb. Indeed, Liane Lang has found evidence to the fact that Tinsley’s provided employment for local people both in the building and working from home.

Space syntax network analysis of South Norwood and environs, showing radius n Choice

Fiona Scott and colleagues have shown how important it is to consider the ecology of skilled work in such instances. She writes how once an industry has established a skilled, trained workforce, particularly if it is situated outside of the city centre, it creates a nexus of valuable jobs and skills which cannot be easily transplanted. The contribution of local industry to the local economy is another vital aspect of their wider contribution. Having local employment creates a positive feedback with the town centre, generating increased activity on the high street.

Tinsley closed its doors in 1960 and Werndee Hall itself was demolished at the end of the last century, with Shinners Close – a collection of dwellings in a cul-de-sac built on the site. The workforce itself has dispersed. While I hesitate to be nostalgic about this once-great firm, it is clear to me that having production in such a minor suburban location contributed something quite essential to the life of the place. Small industry has – and can – play an important part in suburbs and we would do well to assess its true value.

Announcing the publication of ‘Suburban Urbanities’ with UCL Press

The edited collection, Suburban Urbanities: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street was published last week with UCL Press.

The main impetus for publishing this edited collection, was to bring together the core findings of seven years’ worth of research into London’s suburbs, funded by two UK Research Council grants: Towards Successful Suburban Town Centres and Adaptable Suburbs. In doing this, we sought out a comparative set of examples from outside of the UK, which were first presented at our closing conference last year. The intention of Suburban Urbanities is to consider the suburb as an aspect of urban spatial-social complexity, rather than subordinate part of the city. We argue that attempting to define an urban particularity entirely without reference to the suburban is almost certain to fail. Instead, using spatial analysis, historical and ethnographic perspectives the book counteracts the binary opposition between city and suburb and challenges the perception that urbanity only exists in the city. Urbanity is shown to be an issue of degree rather than a binary choice between suburb and city, or suburban versus urbane.

In considering suburbs as a continuum of the city, this book focuses on metropolitan suburban centres. Taking the suburban built environment as a subject of enquiry in its own right and as a distinctive aspect of the spatio-temporal process growth of cities, Suburban Urbanities presents the high street, the core of suburban non-domestic activity, as a special kind of space with demonstrable potential for creating the living heart of the suburb. Local suburban centres can provide a rich diversity of experience for an area’s inhabitants, in many ways offering a more sustainable lifestyle than in the inner city.

Cities are routinely acknowledged as complex and dynamic built environments but this description is rarely extended to the suburbs, which are generally regarded as epiphenomena of the urbs and therefore of little intrinsic theoretical interest in themselves. The book’s first section contains a theoretical critique of suburban conceptions and high street perceptions, in turn. Whilst research broadly recognises the complex interrelatedness across scales that is the essence of urban systems, the particularities and similarities between the spatial structure of the suburb and that of its host city are rarely examined in any great detail. The second – ‘Suburban Centralities’ – section of the book takes the reader from London to Limassol, Toledo and Tripoli, showing that local places are shaped and formed over time according to their accessibility to long-term patterns of human, social and economic networks of activity across scales.

The ‘High Street Diversity’ collection of chapters goes down a scale to focus on the high street, the active centre of urban and suburban centres. The ‘high street’ (broadly equivalent to the US ‘main street’) has many cultural resonances that flow from its functioning as a complex and dynamic entity within both the urban and the suburban streetscape. The last section of the book is called ‘Everyday Sociability’. Here the trio of chapters moves the focus onto the people inhabiting suburban space, with the first two chapters introducing an ethnic dimension to the analysis Reinforcing the points made in the preceding sections of the book, the last chapter illustrates how social productivity in the suburban centre has generated new forms of economic productivity. Just as the suburbs are as old as the city itself, there is no reason to suppose that cities will not continue to grow and adapt to change in similar ways to those which have occurred in the past. The suburbs are an important part of that story.

Suburban Urbanities: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street. is edited by Laura Vaughan. It was published in London on 12th November 2015 by UCL Press. doi:10.14324/111.9781910634134

Visions of suburbia – revisiting Metroland and London’s inter-war growth

Following Adam Forrest’s piece for Guardian Cities yesterday that revisited Metroland a hundred years since it was invented by the Metropolitan Railway company, it’s interesting to reflect on the particularly spatial aspects of this domain and to set some facts against the myths.

Originally referring to the land around the London Underground’s Metropolitan Line extension into the Middlesex and Buckinghamshire countryside, ‘Metroland’ has become synonymous with a particular suburban sensibility – and for the cultural elite a shorthand for the sort of snobbery that would like to view the suburbs as the place that culture forgot, or as Professor Vesna Goldsworthy would have it, the place for which love dares not speak its name.[1]

One key criticism of suburban growth in the era of Metroland is its sprawling nature. It is true in a way. London’s suburbs post WW1 covered much more ground than previous periods, but mainly in contrast with the more compact Victorian and Edwardian city. Their character as a more open, less dense layout was in the spirit of the garden city. Suburbs were connected, but less so in the past.

Other reasons for this perception of sprawl (in many cases misconception) was the dominance of the semi-detached house[2], but in fact mansion flats were a new and widespread phenomenon as were terraces (though some of these were constructed in blocks of four to mimic a pair of semi-detached houses[3]). Some areas of London had as many terraces as semis. There was also much more variety in the density of development as well as the style of design, due to development tending to be quite piecemeal, carried out in many cases by small-scale speculators, with the exception of some larger volume builders, such as Frank Taylor (Taylor Woodrow), who built the Grange Park Estate in Hayes.

Whilst some country houses were preserved by suburban local authorities as museums or public buildings, and many pleasure grounds became parks and many commons and woodlands were preserved for the public good, this isn’t to say that the criticism was unfounded. Builders worked to tight margins in a highly competitive market and it is only at the high end of the market that they took care to retain existing trees and hedges, let alone terrain, preferring clear-site development and hard surfacing (in some cases required by local councils wanting to minimise maintenance costs). There’s an evocative description of this is Molly Hughes’ memoir, where she speaks about the countryside meeting the raw edges of the suburbs along with her own way of life changing both for better and for worse because of improved transport connections.[4] ‘Metro-land’ was slightly atypical in that a company was formed – Metropolitan Railway Country Estates Limited – to develop housing on land retained by the Metropolitan Railway, although other builders developed housing on their land as well.

Another often-repeated misconception is the lack of sociability in the suburbs. In fact, in the early days of inter-war suburbia, associations were an essential part of suburban life, both formal associations such as the Rotary Club for men and Women’s Guild, tennis clubs, amateur dramatics, but also the ubiquitous parade, with its hairdressers, tea rooms and grocers, which formed the social heart of the suburbs. Daily visits became a routine.[5] We should also bear in mind the civic complexes, with town halls in places such as Wembley and Hendon being an outstanding architectural feature of inter-war suburbia (notwithstanding the great Victorian civic architectural boom). Social housing estates fared less well, with many built without any such centres, shops, schools and so on for several years after their construction (if at all – see note 5).

We shouldn’t overlook the fact that this wasn’t just residential expansion. During WW1 many factories producing armaments were clustered in Middlesex to the north-west, which were subsequently transformed into ‘trading estates’, providing “the starting point for a huge industrial sector stretching westwards on either side of the Bath Road from Acton towards Slough”.[6]

Lastly, it is important to dispel the notion that London’s suburbs were built on an empty landscape. There were pre-existing villages with their own centres (with inns, shops and churches), ensuring the continuity of urban grain from previous periods. Buildings were constructed alongside road networks that had a spatial logic in their connecting the local area with the wider urban and inter-urban connections. Pre-existing patterns of land ownership, which determined how land was parcelled and sold off for development and of course pre-existing, in some cases, ancient roads shaped the landscape in which London’s interwar suburbs grew. “The pre-urban castre, particularly existing routeways and more recently constructed railways, had a marked influence on the shapes of the sites within which developers worked, often conditioning road patterns and, especially in the case of established routeways, giving rise to distinct ‘grains’ to the street patterns in many areas.” (Whitehand and Carr 1999:491)

Suburban Urbanities: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street is out with UCL Press in November 2015

Images of semi-detached houses in Edgware, Middlesex are by the author, from 2006

[1] Goldsworthy, V. 2004. The love that dares not speak its name: Englishness and suburbia. In Revisions of Englishness, edited by D. Rogers and J. MacLeod. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

[2] See George Orwell in Coming up for Air: “Always the same. Long, long rows of little semi-detached houses”,

[3] Barratt, N. 2013. Greater London: The story of the suburbs. London: Random House.

[4] Hughes, M. 1979. A London Family Between the Wars (originally published 1940). Oxford, Oxford University Press. Her earlier memoir, A Victorian Family, of growing up in Islington is also highly recommended for its depiction of spatial/temporal shifts in the life of that earlier suburb.

[5] Gunn, S. & R. Bell. 2003. Middle classes: their rise and sprawl. London, Phoenix. A contrasting depiction of working-class suburban communal life can be found in the 1939 study by Ruth Durant (latterly Ruth Glass of ‘gentrification’ fame) of Watling.

[6] Hebbert, M. 1998. London: more by fortune than design. Chichester, John Wiley & Sons, p. 144.