Reading London's Suburbs: from Charles Dickens to Zadie Smith

Home , The Diary of a Nobody, Zadie Smith

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© Ged Pope 2015 Photographs © Salim Hafejee 2015 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–1–137–34245–4 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available froe British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pope, Ged, 1962– Reading London’s suburbs : from Charles Dickens to Zadie Smith / Ged Pope, Visiting Lecturer, London Metropolitan University, UK; with photographs by Salim Hafejee. pages cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–1–137–34245–4 1. English literature—England—London—History and criticism. 2. Authors, English—Homes and haunts—England—London. 3. London (England)—In literature. I. Hafejee, Salim. II. Title. PR8471.P67 2015 820.9'358421—dc23 2015002148

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Contents

List of Abbreviations viii Acknowledgements x

Introduction: Suburban Realities 1 1 ‘Houseless – Homeless – Hopeless!’: Suburbs, Slums and Ghosts 1830–1870 20 2 ‘A World of Mud and Fog’: The High Victorian and Edwardian Suburb, 1880–1914 53 3 ‘The Third England’: Suburban Fiction and Modernity, 1918–1939 90 4 ‘Your Environment Makes as Little Sense as your Life’: Post-War Suburbia 1945–1980 125 5 ‘I Tried to Work Out Where I Was’: Contemporary Suburbia 161 Conclusion: ‘All Stories are Spatial Stories’ 203

Notes 211 Bibliography 216 Index 232

vii

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Introduction: Suburban Realities

‘Where is Clapham? Does Clapham even exist?’: suburban invisibility

This book is a reading of London suburban fiction. More exactly it is also a study of the complex connections between fiction and the human need to belong to a particular known habitat, that is, to make a home. In this sense, writing and dwelling are intimately connected. Peter Brooks argues that ‘fictions arise from our need to build a space or even a shelter for ourselves in an alien world’, in a world not our own (Brooks, 2).The art work, the ‘poem’, then, ‘is our attempt to humanize that world’ (2). Cultural work, literature, does not merely reflect our place in the world; it renders an alien, incomprehensible world meaningful. It helps bring that world into being. The century and a half of suburban fiction dealing with mass suburbia is really the story of writers struggling with the suburb as a site capable of providing the basic features of what home should be; it is part of that creative struggle to produce what Raymond Williams has called ‘knowable communities’ (Williams, 1985b). The suburb has long been considered, in a dominant strand of fiction and other cultural work, as not all the kind of place that could ever be called home. Suburban-set fiction, in fact, often presents the suburb as the antithesis of the homely. This, in despite of the fact that the suburb’s purpose, of course, was to promote the possibility of controlled homeliness. Mid-twentieth-century urban theorist Lewis Mumford provides a classic example of anti-suburban thought. It is, he reckons, ‘a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age

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2 Reading London’s Suburbs group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless pre-fabricated foods, from the same freezers’ (Mumford, 509). This kind of criticism of suburban habitat, rendering it as bleak and unhomely tundra, can be seen right through the 150 years or so of London suburban fiction. Criticism of the suburb, as repetitive and featureless, as standardised and passively consumerist, necessarily renders it as a problem site for representation. As a bewildered Psmith, lost in south London, asks, in P. G. Wodehouse’s Psmith in the City (1910): ‘Where is Clapham? Does Clapham even exist?’ (Wodehouse, 15). The suburb’s ubiquity and perceived large-scale uniformity, for many observers, makes the place at the same time both horribly visible and yet disconcertingly illegible. This anxiety, that the suburb is both very much there, and yet, at the same time, weirdly unknowable, both real and yet inchoate, informs much suburban-set fiction. The suburb also, if it is deemed to lack meaningful connection to a locality or landscape and to be devoid of cultural and familial continuity, and furthermore is largely domestic, withdrawn and private, then clearly seem to presents a set of fascinating problems for its fiction rendering. The London suburb, especially around the time of its initial appearance as the increasingly dominant form of settled mass civilisation, around 1900, evokes anxiety that this is indeed the place where nothing ever happens. Popular Victorian historian of London, Walter Crane, is quite clear on this. ‘The life of the suburb’, he points out, is one ‘without any society; no social gatherings or institutions; as dull a life as any man imagined’ (in Porter, 52). For T. W. H. Crosland, writing in 1905, in The Suburbans, the modern suburb is the natural home of overlooked tedious everday necessity. The ‘whole of the humdrum, platitudinous things of life’ he notes, ‘all matters and apparatus which, by reason of their frequency, have become somewhat of a bore to the superior person, are wholly and unmitigatedly suburban’ (Crosland, 8). Much late nineteenth-century London suburban-set fiction, indeed the fiction that is now perhaps best known, concentrates precisely on the almost imperceptible trivia of this kind of everyday domestic life, focussing as it does on semi-visible suburban ‘Nobodies’. Formulated most clearly, and famously, in the Goldsmith brothers’ Holloway set The Diary of a Nobody (1889), the suburban Nobody is a lowly clerk employed in the burgeoning field of City finance and commerce, a lower-middle class Everyman: home-oriented, downtrodden, dull, con- ventional, trivial and, above all, insignificant. Nobodies are invisible because they are deeply embedded in the dreary quotidian. Along with

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Suburban Realities 3 other characters in work by H. G. Wells, by popular Edwardian writers like Shan Bullock, William Pett-Ridge and Jerome K. Jerome, and later influencing Arnold Bennett, E. M. Forster, George Orwell and Stevie Smith, and even post-war writers like V. S. Naipaul, Hanif Kureishi and John Lanchester, we observe Mr Pooter engaged in numerous minor domestic tasks: tidying, rearranging and ineffectually mending things, arguing with his wife, disputing with tradesmen. These Nobodies are actually submerged in the everyday, smothered in material excess and horribly embroiled in physical detail; they are identical to the stuff of the everyday. They cannot see anything clearly of what is all around them. This perceived suburban banality also means that the suburb may be hard to actually see. The suburbs have long been considered an imperceptible and unknowable landscape. Another Edwardian commentator, C. F. G. Masterman, in The Condition of England (1909), worries that the suburb, precisely because it is an unremarkable and predictable space contains elements that can never actually become visible. Here, this ‘homogenous civilisation’ which ‘covers the hills to the north and south of the city’ has provided the long-desired wish to furnish the basics of economic sustenance, only to produce a dulled security: ‘the City civilisation is established. Progress pauses – exhausted, satisfied. Man is made’ (Masterman, 134). The Edwardian suburb here, in a version of Wellsian entropy, is the placid, sensible site of modern economic and social agreement. Masterman points to a ‘certain communal pov- erty of interest and ideals’ (33). This ‘modern type of all civilisation’, is difficult to know and represent, because most of its ‘activities are dull to the point of invisibility’ (65). There is indeed a literary/sociological tradition of outside visitors to the London suburbs who emphasise the baffling illegibility of what they can see. Roger Silverstone’s influential collection of essays Visions of Suburbia (1996) opens with our editor-guide taking a disorientating walk along an unreal Bromley High Street. Silverstone sees ‘a ravaged shopping precinct’, churches, suburban villas, a 1959 pink Cadillac, and, most revealingly, an eccentric restaurant ‘made to look like a fin de siècle prostitute’s boudoir’, packed with a miscellany of silks, satins, pearls, toys, dead clocks, and ‘misassembled as if in a car boot sale in Marrakesh’ (Silverstone, 2). The suburb here will not come into focus, it doesn’t make sense. In The Freedoms of Suburbia (2009), Paul Barker here also wanders around Bromley, trying to weave together the dispa- rate signs of suburbia into a coherent narrative. Here, past (H. G. Wells’ birthplace) and present (Anne Summers sex shop now opposite) merge and change: but into what?

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4 Reading London’s Suburbs

Barker, however, is a supportive evocation of the suburb, viewed as admirable product of what he terms the ‘Non-Plan’: ‘suburbia seems to give most people what they want most of the time, at a price they can afford’ (Barker, 45). Barker argues that this curious suburban miscellany is precisely the point of the suburb. Here, Barker’s sense of Bromley’s incoherence, where everything is ‘as fluid as a wave-motion leisure pool or a domestic Jacuzzi’, is seen as homely sign of suburbia’s potential for openness, for freedom (46). These are the ‘Freedoms of Suburbia’: withdrawn privacy, familial domesticity, social homogeneity, the emphasis on the physical space of the building of the home, home-ownership, independence and perceived security. In this view the suburb is flexible and adaptable, can change to adapt itself to different circumstances. Indeed, this kind of approval for the suburb is a slender but important strand in suburban commentary and some fiction. Contemporary historian of Greater London, Nick Barratt, lists those ‘elements of the suburbs that made them so attractive’, and lists ‘essentials of life such as food and water’ and its status as a ‘quiet retreat from the hustle and busle of a cramped and often filthy city’ (Barratt, ix). Defenders of the suburb often cite the drastic difference in evaluat- ing suburbia as the huge gap between those who actually live in the suburbs and those outsiders (planners and architects, urban theorists and writers) who visit and comment on them. In the view of this latter group, as Paul Oliver notes, the suburb ‘was an evil which had destroyed the amenities of the countryside, damaged the integrity of the city, and had created an environment lacking in human warmth or dignity’ (Oliver 18). This view persists Oliver remind us, despite ‘the evident suc- cess of the suburbs . . . to provide a satisfactory, and satisfying, home environment for so many millions of people over so long a period’ (23). Again, the question of visibility informs suburban thinking: it cannot be seen or rendered from the inside. Voices from the inside, so to speak, are unheard. This, of course, makes the suburb a problematic object for suburban writing. After all, suburbia establishes itself as modern form of mass metropolitan living, in London, beginning in the 1860s (before then grand, com- muting, villadom was an aristocratic pursuit), that is private, domestic and familial, at a distance from the city. London’s suburbs are predicated precisely on the idea of maintaining distinction by controlling distance and what can be seen. Historian Donald Olsen outlines a lengthy move toward just such a geographic urban social differentiation in London, starting as far back as seventeenth-century developments at Covent Garden, around St James and Bloomsbury, and reaching an advanced

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Suburban Realities 5 stage in the Victorian period, which saw ‘the systemic sorting-out of London into single-purpose, homogenous, specialised neighbourhoods’ (Olsen,18). The modern metropolis instigates systems of specialised function, and becomes a means of constructing and maintaining specialised social spaces and boundaries. Geographer Miles Ogborn terms this drive to order the ‘social production of distance’, a vital compo- nent of modernising power which imposes classification and order, an ‘urgency and ferocity of boundary-drawing and boundary-defining’ (Ogborn, 18). The creation of the suburb is part of this ordering. Suburbia, then, is founded precisely on controlling what can be seen. It is established as a peripheral and private zone, aimed at marking and maintaining distinct social, economic and gender zones. Privacy, the withdrawal from others’ gaze, is promoted. For philosopher Henry Lefebvre the suburb offers the possibility of variation: ‘there is a sort of plasticity, which allows for modifications and appropriations’ (Lefebvre, 79).The suburb, on this reckoning, is an aspirational space that can offer individuals some form of flexibility and control over their immediate environment, over where to go, who to associate with, or precisely what kind of community to create. Here the suburb, ideally, can be managed: it can be comfortable and knowable. It offers a balance of privacy set within a public milieu. Yet, on the other hand, most suburban fiction tends to repeat one key theme: the problem of knowledge in the suburb. Again and again, in fiction, we meet isolated individuals agonising over what can be seen and what can be known, in this new-built, peripheral and inscrutable domestic habitat, inhabited by displaced strangers and new arrivals. Information is crucial and scarce: in the suburb no one knows anything for sure, no one can see anything. As we shall see, this inability to fully read the suburb means that any full or rewarding sense of place or belonging is unavailable and is replaced by a feeling of alienation from place and local historicity and by a profound sense of the unreality of the world. Suburban fiction foregrounds anxious epistemic dilemmas concerning what we can know of neighbours, visitors and strangers, about others’ class, social status and origins, and later, around race and ethnic- ity. Suburban fiction is populated by characters who fail to properly see and know their habitat, who are entirely reliant on glimpses, hearsay, gossip and incomplete interpretation. There is an ongoing concern and anxiety in suburban life here with reading the signs: the correct signals must be sent and must be decoded. Where reading the signs in a private and isolating environment is so difficult, subtle indicators of status,

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6 Reading London’s Suburbs worth and intention are everywhere: exterior decoration and the front garden, doors and windows, curtains, cars. Much suburban writing revolves around the comedy of misreading these cues. This concern with visibility and information, with display and concealment, can be seen, for instance, in the concern with that key Victorian suburban architectural feature: the bay window. This offers both a useful vantage point for an individual’s scrutiny of the street, and a convenient place to hide. Victorian memoirist Molly Hughes recalls her Canonbury childhood: ‘The main attraction was the window. Our house stood at the corner . . . and gave us a good view down most of the length of one of them, affording us plenty of information of the doings of our neighbours and passers-by’ (Hughes, 5). Reading suburban environment also means trying to establish the precise boundaries of the place (where does it begin and end, who fits in, who is an outsider) and, particularity in early, piecemeal suburban development, assessing its economic viability. Lack of vision and knowledge also produces an ongoing thematic concern, in suburban fiction with various aspects of performance, with theatricality and spectacle. We witness in suburban-set writing many depictions of snobbery and anxiety around social etiquette, of display and dissembling, of suspected falseness and fakery. Many suburban individuals turn out to be playing a role, to be faking suburbanism in some way or to be excessively acting out suburban fantasies. George Orwell’s archetypal downtrodden Thirties suburbanite, George ‘Fatty’ Bowling, bites an ersatz Frankfurter, made mostly from fish, and has a blinding insight, as if he ‘had bitten into the modern world and discov- ered what it was made of’ (Orwell, 2001: 23). This fact that the suburb never seems to come into sharp focus and is unknowable – hence the familiar figures of the inscrutable net curtains and the privet hedge – also produces in much fiction a sense of the suburb as a very weird place. Suburban sites can be banally over- familiar, the long streets and avenues of terraces and semis, and yet at the same time disconcertingly strange. This combination frequently evokes in the observer a kind of unsettling uncanniness. The calmly normal, as we shall see, easily flips into its opposite. The more normal the suburb seems the stranger they are: the familiar is also unfamiliar. Related to this sense of the suburb as strange is a perception of the suburb as always a projected fantasy space. The early suburb in particular offered a rus in urbe existence; a private, domestic pastoral life set within touch of the city, or rather the illusion of this. This experience of the suburb as sustained fantasy frequently results in the place

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Suburban Realities 7 appearing as phantasmagoric. Indeed this feature is even built into some Victorian suburbs. The influential Arts and Crafts, proto-Garden Suburb of Bedford Park, in West London, become, in Chesterton’s The Man who was Thursday (1908) a fin de siècle fantasia. The suburb here is ‘wild’, ‘fantastic’ and ‘could be regarded not as deception but rather as a dream’ (Chesterton, 1990: 9). The suburb, then, is presented in fiction as a problematic object of knowledge within modernity: it is both that place which guarantees secrecy and privacy, but also that place where it is extremely difficult to see and know anything of others. A recurring motif in suburban fiction is a dream of total visibility, an anxious desire to know and see what is happening by magically peering straight through the walls or roofs of the suburban home. Dickens expresses the desperate urge, in Dombey and Son (1848), to ‘take the housetops off . . . ’ and so ‘peer within’ (Dickens 1991: 738). Conan Doyle’s famed detective, much more of a suburban investigator than is often imagined, dreams of flying over the metropolitan roof tops ‘gently remove the roofs’, and so ‘peep in at the queer things which are going on’ (Conan Doyle, 1998: 147). In A Man from the North (1898) Arnold Bennett has a Mr Aked, a believer in suburban individualism argues that ‘once the house roofs are removed’, then ‘beneath, there is character and matter of interest waiting to be expounded’ (Bennett, 1994: 102). One common response to this notion of suburban invisibility and illegibility is to create an easily consumed version of what suburban life may be like. If the suburb cannot be properly seen, known and represented, then we can at least re-present it by producing a show of handy suburban archetypes. We thus have, in a tradition going back to the 1860s and still going strong today, melancholy, frustrated, petty, house-proud women, with infantilised, incompetent and trapped men, subsisting in a boring, status-conscious, frequently weird, sometimes desperate, standardised nowhere. This is the basis of John Carey’s influential critique of anti- suburban thinking, especially in the thirties, in his The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992). Carey accuses suburban commentators of simplistic thinking: if the suburbs seem standardised and placid then so are its inhabitants. These kinds of ideas, he argues, conflate ‘topographical with intellectual disdain. It relates human worth to habitat’ (Carey, 53).

‘Is this London?’

These questions about what kind of space the suburbs are exactly, what can be seen and known here, and how this relates to the act of

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8 Reading London’s Suburbs their writing, is raised in a curious incident described by Iain Sinclair. Descending Shooter’s Hill, in suburban southeast London, Sinclair, poet, novelist, diviner of urban esoterica, ‘London’s Magus’ even ( Jackson, 2003), is collared by an evidently lost French tourist with an intriguing question. ‘“Is this London?” he demands, very politely’. Sinclair doesn’t think so: ‘Not in my book’, the writer answers. Sinclair points northwest and offers simple directions; ‘Keep going. Find a bridge and cross it’ (Sinclair, 1999b: 40). Sinclair’s encounter raises some intriguing questions. It asks, first, what counts as ‘London’. The bewildered tourist cannot integrate this particular section of south Greenwich as actually being part of what London might be. London starts somewhere else, over there, across a bridge. Interestingly, this inability to read the signs of London is imme- diately transposed into a question about writing itself, how what we perceive as ‘London’ is the London as it is traditionally represented in culture, in writing. Sinclair himself is, of course, the renowned investigator and writer of unseen London, so is keenly attuned to the marginal and obscure. But this, an undistinguished South London suburb, does not even count as one of those numerous London spaces that cannot be written about. It simply doesn’t exist. This London is ‘not in my book’. This complex doubling and intertwining of physical place and its representation, the material city and the imagined city, is, of course, central to much recent urban and suburban study. Rather than seen as a set of observable and quantifiable objects and practices the city itself is text: Richard Lehan, in his highly influential study, The City in Literature (1998), arrives at ‘the city as an evolving construct by superimposing urban upon literary modes and vice versa’ (Lehan, 3). In recent years we have the imaginary city, the discursive city, the palimpsestic city, the (neo-)gothic city: this is place created, mediated and transformed by cultural discourse. We also have of course the literary city. Any place gains meaning and identity, from its production and position in a network of cultural work. London is seen and known through its fiction. ‘More so than any other city’, Sebastian Groes tells us, ‘London is covered by a thick crust of poetry, urban legends, historical narratives and literary fictions and mythologies.’ Indeed most London districts have long been carved up, and, from Chaucer to Iain Sinclair, parcelled out to a presiding literary figure. Thus, in the ‘Get London Reading’ guide, orchestrated by the London Mayor’s Office, we learn that though London is often considered a loose assemblage of semi-detached quarters, ‘waves of novelists, poets, playwrights and playwrights over the centuries’ have written

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Suburban Realities 9 about London and ‘developed its identity’ (Bullough, 3). A moment’s reflection will conjure Jonson and Shakespeare’s Cheapside, Dickens’ rookeries, Wilde’s West End, Conan Doyle’s Baker Street, Woolf’s Westminster, Waugh’s Mayfair, and Martin Amis’s West London. But, of course, this only seems to be true of certain London sec- tors. Where some areas, such as Bloomsbury, the guide explains, are ‘synonymous with literature’ (Bullough, 6), others are less well presented. Suburbia, we are helpfully informed, ‘has been previously overlooked in literary circles’. At least, that is, until the appearance of Willesden Green in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. These writers are what Sebastian Groes calls the ‘masters of London’. They ‘make sense of the madness’, by observing and processing London’s vast labyrinthine complexity and sensual onslaught on our behalf (Groes, 4). Here, London, though vast and incomprehensible, is worked through a particular idiosyncratic psyche that can provide us with some clarity. The underlying theme of this book, and the reason why studying suburban fiction fascinates, is that, for a number of reasons, this particular cultural work hasn’t much been done for the London suburbs. Indeed, London’s suburbs, the world’s first modern, industrial mass suburbs just haven’t appeared that much in serious fictional work. As Roger Webster baldly states: ‘suburbia has no history: its archive are empty’ (Webster, 2). This is shocking as the suburb has long been a popular and well- populated site of mass domestic habitation. According to a recent study it is now home for an estimated 80 per cent of England’s population, yet is largely invisible in canonical literature (HELM, 2011). It has remained unwritten. It can be difficult to even find serious and direct mention of the suburb in fiction: quite often they are usually glimpsed in writing that is primarily focussed elsewhere. We have already noted that there are reasons for the lack of important London suburban-set fiction. There is a concern that this kind of everyday terrain and experience may be resistant to being worked into literary material; this is simply not the kind of experience that literature deals with. The suburb is also opaque: it deflects inquiry. We have to also consider that, historically, the suburbs have been socio- economically and culturally (at least since the late nineteenth century) less powerful and important. They are the home of the widely despised lower-middle class (and later working-class) and the experiences of this group – everyday concerns of family life, domestic incidents, romance, aspiration, snobbery, boredom and routine, have not been considered important. In addition, of course, the London suburb, for many reasons the first extensive suburbs in the world, were planned and shaped to

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10 Reading London’s Suburbs support the private sphere. From its origins, on any scale, in Clapham and Hackney, in Peckham and Camberwell, the suburb promoted the domestic, the single family, to be peripheral and dispersed; also domestic, familial and private, thus hard to see. Furthermore, suburban experience seems to lack the necessary materi- als needed to tell a story. In suburban fiction a common theme is the individual’s inability to construct a convincing narrative. Tim Lott’s memoir of post-war life in Southall, The Scent of Dried Roses (1997), for instance, testifies to just such a failure to build a meaningful narrative from the disconnected experiences and memories of his suburban life: ‘I wish I could tell a story, a single narrative’ he laments (Lott, 58). His conclusion is that ‘we have no common story now’ (Lott, 58). Lott’s inability to tell a meaningful narrative here means that he is incapable of rendering a connection to place. This anxiety, that the suburb is just not the kind of place that can produce a convincing narrative is touched upon by literary geographer Franco Moretti’s provocative argument of ‘the place-bound nature of the novel’. Again, place and writing are intimately connected. Moretti argues that ‘without a certain kind of space, a certain kind of story is simply impossible’ (Moretti, 1998: 100). Perhaps the suburb is the wrong kind of space.

Suburban reality

Importantly, though, I want to argue here that it is precisely this very notion of the invisibility and illegibility of the suburb that makes it such a fascinating object of study. So, rather than seeing suburban fiction as primarily enacting a struggle with verisimilitude, that is with accu- rately seeing and noting experience and getting it down on paper, with attempting an accurate portrait of what suburban existence is like, it is far more useful, I will argue, to pursue the idea that suburban fiction itself enacts a key struggle of cultural modernity – how the individual struggles to make any lived place meaningful and habitable. In other words, the suburb presents us with a keen semiotic challenge: suburban fiction is of vital importance because it foregrounds the very ways in which individuals make sense of and inhabit the world. Suburban fiction foregrounds the broader processes (and related difficulties) by which individuals can be said to construct and inhabit a rich and meaningful habitat. Suburban-set fiction, then, dramatises and enacts the struggle that all individuals face in creating a convincing life-world. In this sense reading London suburban-set fiction of the last 150 years we can see that such work foregrounds a particular crisis of cultural and social

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Suburban Realities 11 modernity. Suburban narratives dramatise the semiotic difficulties faced by individuals struggling to read and interpret the modern sites of mass, private domesticity, to form a knowable community, to be at home there. A useful way to discuss suburban fiction in this light is to use some approaches from the fast expanding field of ‘global semiotics’. For think- ers such as Thomas Sebeok, Jesper Hoffmeyer and others, and building on original work in semiotics by C. S. Peirce (not, I must emphasise, the semiology of Saussure, which is concerned with human verbal signs alone), semiotics is the study of sign production and interpretation in all creatures inhabiting specific environments. What I usefully take from Piercean semiotics is the key insight that there is a reality which we (and all living things) can, and must, grasp – however partially – if we are to survive (and evolve). Crucially, this reality is the semiotically mediated reality of our species: the personal ‘lifeworld’ that the individual creates in everyday semiotic interaction with the world. Broadly speaking, this is what semiologists call the ‘umwelt’; the constitutive ‘reality’ of a particular environment for that individual being. ‘Umwelten’, as Wendy Wheeler points out, ‘are signifying environments composed of signs which are meaningful in the survival of any species’ (Wheeler, 140). Semiotics can provide a helpful theoretical model for discussing suburban fiction, then, because it can offer a useful account of how ‘real’ physical material environments are read and moulded by the creative cognitive faculties, and other capacities, of the perceiving subject. These kinds of concerns are exactly what we see in suburban fiction itself: anxieties around seeing and reading environment, and various failures in making it a home. The suburb is a semiotic problem then, precisely because it challenges the construction of traditional human life-worlds, the creation of a home. The signs by which individuals read traditional communities become increasingly occluded in the spaces of the modern mass suburbs. This repeated anxiety about what can be known for sure in the suburbs – its perceived lack of the necessary co-ordinates of homeliness – is presented in much fiction as reanimating old philosophical debates around the problem of the individual’s personal contact with, and knowledge of, external reality. Fiction repeatedly plays out concerns as to how the individual can know anything for sure about this new suburban habitat and repeatedly questions even the substantive material nature of the suburb: is it real? In suburban fiction, in many cases, the suburb is figured as materially problematic. Thus in Conan Doyle’s early Sherlock Holmes stories,

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12 Reading London’s Suburbs the south London suburbs are muddy and inchoate, and their opaque sliminess a serious challenge to Holmes’ famed investigative method. Holmes, we find, cannot read the signs. On the other hand, in other suburban fiction, the suburban interior is presented as suffocating and over-dense, crammed with household objects and knickknacks. Another twist is that these household items can also appear as wayward and wilfully troublesome, as if they enjoy seemingly forming an independ- ent salience. In, for example, the clerkly ‘Nobody’ fiction of the late nineteenth century, most notably in the Grossmith brothers’ 1892 Diary of a Nobody, objects seem to conspire against human control and deny individual human agency. Yet again, in other work, as we shall see, the mid-nineteenth century suburb is figured as precisely the opposite, as a place that is materially insubstantial and even haunted by ghost-like presences. This curious lack of substance, the sense that the suburb is ghostly or unreal in some way where individuals cannot read and create a habitat, leads to profound anxieties as to whether the suburb can ever be considered a home. This is clearly an urgent question for suburban writing because the suburb itself is precisely predicated on the notion of offering the individual an opportunity to create a real home. Indeed the promise of suburban living, particularly the growth of the mass lower middle-class suburb at the end of the nineteenth century, is that this site is amenable to acts of personal meaning-making: the individual, with the family, can create an ideal balance of remote privacy with room for individualism, set within an affordable and comfortably predictable and standardised environment. The suburb offers a chance for self-fashioning and control over the immediate environment. ‘I like to be at home. “Home, Sweet Home” that’s my motto’, Charles Pooter insists in Diary of a Nobody (Grossmiths, 3). But what we go on to read in this novel is not his snug homeliness but rather his comic alienation and incomprehension, his profound unbelonging. The suburban house is very much not a home for Pooter and the novel illustrates in much painful detail exactly how much Pooter does not belong. Suburban unreality is enforced by the paradoxical sense that their peripheral location is rendered both as both generically interchangeable and yet is often presented in some detail. Thus suburban fiction must necessarily have the suburb as their primary location, must engage with the specific particularities of, say, Holloway, Camberwell or Acton, yet these sites are then denied validity as substantive places. This is precisely what Alma Frothingham feels, in George Gissing’s 1897 novel of metropolitan life The Whirlpool: ‘it must be nice to have ancestors’ she

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Suburban Realities 13 muses, having just moved to a newish suburban semi at Gunnersbury, ‘Nobody’s ancestors ever lived in a semi-detached villa’ (Gissing, 342). Of course, as Gail Cunningham point out, Alma does have ancestors, like everyone else, but not in ‘any spatial, social, or temporal dimension to which she, a dweller in the new semi-detached suburbia, can relate’ (Cunningham, 422). Cunningham argues that suburban Alma now inhabits a curious intermediate space, ‘floundering between fantasies of rural idylls and illusions of metropolitan glamour . . . fatally unable to settle the new territory she now actually inhabits’. She has ‘moved beyond the bounds of the historically known and culturally defined’ and now ‘inhabits a terra incognita’ (423). Suburban space is characterised here, by Gissing, as deficiency, as lack. Using a broadly Peircean perspective we can fruitfully unite the two key poles of suburban experience discussed above. That is the experien- tial contact with ‘real’ existing suburbs, the phenomenal suburb, along with the fact of suburban writing itself. Both activities – the individual ‘feel’ of life in the suburbs and those attempts to observe and write that experience – foreground the urgent need to ‘read’ and fully inhabit environment. Suburban fiction itself actively rearticulates the process of meaning-making: not place, but how we respond to place. Suburban place is always in the process of coming into focus, of being imagina- tively rendered (or not) as meaningful place. Both are inevitable modes of the same human need to create a semiotically comprehensible lifeworld, to construct a meaningful home. Suburban fiction in this sense is part of the human creative drive to make the world legible and liveable. This book aims to expand this insight by suggesting that suburban fiction addresses a keenly felt semiotic anxiety concerning illegibility. My concentration here on reading suburban fiction as itself a cultural arte- fact and thus as part of that broader semiotic drive to produce models of a given environment, to make the suburb legible, means that we can avoid the deadlocks and sterile thinking that tends to divide suburban- set fiction into positive or negative camps (for or against, convincing portrayals or caricature). Accordingly, the range of texts read here is broad; I cover both popular genre works (ghost stories, detective and science fiction) and canonical literature (Dickens, Woolf, Forster). In this book I argue that cultural artefacts and culture, both cities and texts, can best be considered as part of the same living semiotic processes. Both the suburb and suburban writing are products of the deep urge for meaning, for modelling a particular modern environment, or lifeworld. Suburban fiction is, then, in this sense, the reflective recur- sive attempt to give meaning to and to shape the suburb. This is how,

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14 Reading London’s Suburbs in John Hartley’s words, the ‘semiotic sphere of culture both generates and cohabits within the physical, architectural space of suburbia’ (Silverstone, 1997: 183).

A note on chapters

My selection of suburban-set texts progresses chronologically and has been governed by the wish to discuss those works which best exemplify the book’s wider argument that the suburb presents an acute semiotic challenge to how we can find meaning and a sense of home in the modern mass suburb. It is in the nature of a widely perceived problem (here, that of the suburbs and semiotic illegibility) that each generation of writer should sometimes repeat and develop its varying implications. I will briefly discuss these implications, with my chronological framework, and outline below how each generation of writers address the problem and develops different ways of formulating responses to an evolving suburban reality. In Chapter 1 below, ‘Houseless – Homeless – Hopeless!’: Suburbs, Slums and Ghosts: 1830–1870, I discuss semiotic anxieties around seeing and knowing during the dramatic reshaping of new metropolitan boundaries and zones (including the suburbs) during the mid- nineteenth century (1830–1870). At this time, social and economic distinctions were being mapped onto metropolitan spaces. The boundaries between the social spaces of private/ public, home/work, family/city were increasingly contested. After briefly outlining the shape of mass London suburbs in the mid-nineteenth century I discuss, in ‘Suburban views’, how the anxiety of reading the visible signifiers of an expanding and compartmentalising metropolis produces fiction (popular proto- reportage like Pierce Egan’s 1820s ‘Tom & Jerry’ romps, the ‘Silver-fork’ novels of the 1830s and 40s, best-selling ‘sensation’ fiction of the 1850s and 60s) and social reportage of the mid-century, in investigations by Edwin Chadwick, Henry Mayhew and, later, by Charles Booth. This writing is all concerned with the legibility of metropolitan boundaries. Here the spaces of the newly fashionable West End, and the newly blos- soming peripheral suburb, need to be investigated and illumined, and, above all, distinguished. In Section two, ‘Always wandering: sketches by Boz’, I move on to a more detailed discussion of how Charles Dickens underscores the anxious need to illuminate, categorise and place these new metropolitan sites and identities. In the Sketches Dickens highlights the theatricality of metropolitan roles. Lastly, in ‘“Houseless – homeless – hopeless!”:

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Suburban Realities 15 suburban ghost stories’, I discuss how anxieties around such suburban legibility (decoding neighbours, noting indicators of economic stability, reading marks of social status) testify to a fear of porous metropolitan boundaries. Here there are numerous spectres – whether ghosts, risky financial speculations or the dreaded return of the disavowed slum – and all threaten bounded suburban security. The suburb threatens to dematerialise altogether. In Chapter 2, ‘“A World of Mud and Fog”: The High Victorian and Edwardian Suburb, 1880–1914’, I discuss how this concern with legibility in the expanding and subdividing city focuses on a semiotic problem of locating the signs of the individual lost in the suburban mass. The fearful image of the depersonalising urban mass swamping the isolated individual is increasingly found, not among the poor of the undifferentiated dense city centre, but out on the new mass lower- middle and working-class suburbs at the metropolitan periphery. More exactly, this illegibility is dramatised by writers of the period as a problem with the materiality of the real. In Section one, ‘“A bad business during the night”: South London detection’, I will look at how that genre is particularly concerned with uncovering and reading the traces of the individual. The inaugural Sherlock Holmes tale, A Study in Scarlet (1887), is actually largely set in suburban South London and famously displays considerable anxiety over the ability to decode signs, read the clues and establish the outline of the individual in an opaque, literally muddied, environment. Indeed Holmes’ famed rational ‘method’, for making the mysterious legible, turns out, in fact, not to be deductive scientific reason after all: it is what semiotician Thomas Sebeok (after C. S. Peirce) calls ‘abductive’ reasoning (Sebeok, 1994). This does involves logical reasoning; but also much creative guesswork and fictional imagining. In Section two, ‘Just because I do not happen to be a “Somebody”: stories of Nobodies’, I focus on suburban writing which also aims to identify the individual in the rapidly expanding ranks of City clerks. Here, no distinguishing marks of the individual can readily be seen and the clerk is, therefore, a ‘Nobody’. H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, George Gissing, the Grossmiths and E. M. Forster focus on the City clerk as representative figure of (unknowable) London suburban masses. Crucially, a primary char- acteristic of these clerks is an inability to make their own environments legible. They cannot read either their environment or other people, and are equally blind to their own inner selves. Crucially, their semiotic defi- cit is figured in this fiction as affecting the material world itself: the material world here robs the individual of free will. These Nobodies are absurd puppets, jerked by unseen and incomprehensible forces.

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16 Reading London’s Suburbs

Section three of this chapter, ‘“An epoch of rest”: suburban arcadias’, looks at suburban fiction through elements of utopian thinking. The suburb itself, as suburban commentator Robert Fishman reminds us, was considered a ‘bourgeois utopia’, mixing in a happy balance the ideal elements of town and country (Fishman, 1987). The utopian is also that place which is perfectly legible. The utopian in fictional suburbs discussed here, by William Morris (News from Nowhere (1890)) and Jerome K. Jerome (Three Men in a Boat (1889)) are both imaginary (distanced in time and place), but also material (dealing with the nature of work and leisure, creativity and how the individual can effect change in the environment). Chapter 3, “The Third England”: Suburban Fiction and Modernity, 1918–1939’, discusses writers’ reactions to the expansion of inter-war suburbs, to middle-class ‘dunroamin’ ribbon development, and to the spread of the lower-middle-class and working-class suburban estates of the twenties and thirties. The growth of Greater London, the new suburbs of the car, modern modes of communication, leisure and con- sumption, are presented by writers here as an increasingly semiotically illegible environment. The predominant theme here is a perception of strangeness in the mysterious unreadability of the suburb, and how this landscape, as a version of cultural and technological modernity, can ever be constituted as an acceptable version of England. In ‘“Pudding, suet pudding”: Virginia Woolf, the suburb and middlebrow cultures’, I take a cue from Virginia Woolf’s seminal 1925 essay, ‘Modern Fiction’ (Woolf, 1966), where Woolf identifies the mundane suburban scene (‘Mrs Brown’ is a suburbanite) as precisely the mysterious everyday raw material that must be the focus of literary creativity. In this view Modernism (and modernity) is self-consciously considered a problem with materiality and the practice of realism. Woolf attacks Edwardian realism as a form of materiality (reading surfaces as signs pointing to a deeper reality) that no longer functions as a way of apprehending the world. I also discuss how ‘middlebrow’ fiction, the likes of Pamela Hansford Johnson and Elizabeth Bowen, approach everyday suburban life, and how the suburbs are presented as ‘Modern’ in the sense of being rootless and uncentred. In Section two, ‘“Dear Suburb of my Infancy”: Stevie Smith’s “Syler’s Green”, and others’, I discuss the work of Stevie Smith and how this writer’s complex (and rare) engagement with the suburb produces a paradoxical ‘radical eccentricity’. Smith is an example of that slippery notion intermodernism: ‘modernist’ in technique and use of voice, middlebrow in content. She is both engaged with suburban themes but also

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Suburban Realities 17 curiously detached from them and just like the suburbs themselves she occupies no easily definable position. The strangeness and eccentricity of Smith’s suburbs, that place which will not quite come into focus, is also the focus of the final section, ‘In search of lost England’. Here I discuss George Orwell’s hugely influential suburban ‘little man’, George ‘fatty’ Bowling, in his 1939 novel Coming Up for Air. Bowling is the exemplary Thirties suburbanite, natural heir to hapless Charles Pooter: troubled by the shifting unreality of ersatz streamlined modernity, disconnected from place, biography and history. Bowling is always out of place, even in his own body. Chapter 4, ‘“Your Environment Makes as Little Sense as your Life”: Post-War Suburbia 1945–1980’, continues my discussion of writers’ engagement with the suburb as a problem of semiotic interpretation. The suburb in fiction discussed here is presented as a type of uncanny space: it is both banally familiar and yet also unfamiliarly odd. In ‘“Croydon underpass”: suburban apocalypse’, I theorise a suburban uncanny and discuss fiction where stolid suburban normality sud- denly reveals itself to be deeply odd and disturbing. In the next section ‘“Wimbledon may be washed out”: Suburban SF’, the everyday routine and dull ‘nothing happening’ of the London suburbs, as presented in fiction by J. G. Ballard (The Unlimited Dream Company (1974)) and John Wyndham (The Day of the Triffids (1951)) is pressured and fractured until it reveals a deeply disturbing core. The ‘alien’ is the most familiar and routine of habitats. Conversely, the apocalyptic itself, a familiar trope in fifties Cold War-tinged writing, is paradoxically rendered as drearily familiar, as suburban. ‘Apocalyptic normality’ is here regarded as the uncanny. In the next section ‘When it had a kind of unrealness about London’, the strange unreality of the post-war London suburbs is stressed in writing by post-war migrants new to London. The London experienced here, especially in work by V. S. Naipaul, Mr Stone and the Knight’s Companion (1963), The Mimic Men (1969) and The Enigma of Arrival (1987), is both that which is already seen, mediated and made familiar by prestigious literary sources, by writing, but which is also experienced as troublingly unfamiliar. The suburbs themselves, it turns out, are not written, they are not the expected London of prior literary creation, and are experienced as completely unknown. In the final section here, ‘“Pseudowimbledonia”: suburban pop and the popular suburb’, I address, through a brief study of pop culture and a detailed reading of Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), the specific creation of suburban and urban identities in the seventies. Here the substance of the

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18 Reading London’s Suburbs suburban and urban are revealed to be increasingly nebulous and unsta- ble. Indeed in the novel they even swap particular features: the urban becoming trite pop commodity, the suburb rendered as radically unpre- dictable and site of creative individualism. They are both finally revealed as creations of increasing pop commodification. Finally, in Chapter 5, ‘Contemporary Suburbia’, I discuss how suburban fiction reflects the fact that today suburbia reworks the traditional relation of urban centre to periphery. Here supposedly uniquely ‘suburban’ features are now increasingly found dispersed throughout the metropolis, indeed throughout all forms of landscape. Again suburban legibility is figured around problems of everyday material being: the suburb is, alternately, either flimsy and unreal or densely unaccommo- dating. The first section ‘“The sole author of the dictionary that defines me”: Tim Lott’s Southall and Zadie Smith’s Willesden’ outlines these writers’ struggles to produce a meaningful narrative of the suburb as home. The suburb is seen as a place that fails to provide any useful con- texts for constructing personal, social or cultural identity. The following two sections discuss work by J. G. Ballard and Iain Sinclair that tend to view the peripheral exurb as a species of weightless ‘non-space’, as a version of the globalised, mediated and technologised contemporary landscape consisting of car parks, air ports, supermarkets, business parks and suburbs. For Ballard, in ‘The everywhere of suburbia, the paradigm of nowhere’ this form of unattached homelessness is the inevitable condition of contemporary life and generates fascinating extremes of pathological behaviour. Iain Sinclair’s writing on the urban periphery, on the other hand, discussed in the section ‘The interesting move was out to the margin, to the Motorway, to the M25’, desperately attempts to read and re-enchant these most unpromising spaces by dredging up ever more ingenious historical and literary ballast. Sinclair attempts to conjure up a sense of particularity, a dimension of location, to illegible globalised non spaces. In direct comparison, in the final two sections, I discuss how these versions of a ‘weightless’ contemporary suburb contrasts strongly with an alternate strand of contemporary fiction where suburban reality is characterised as excessively and oppressively material. This overpow- ering everyday materiality is presented in two different, gendered, forms. I discuss it first, in ‘“The English passion for DIY”: the material suburb (i)’ as a kind of centrifugal force which ejects individuals, mostly men, from any meaningful relationship to place. Here, incompetent male characters, in work by Nigel Williams, Graham Swift and John Lanchester, who are incapable of interpreting and shaping the suburb

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Suburban Realities 19 are expelled from it. I then discuss, in the final section, ‘The material suburb (ii): “wading through mud”’ how the suburb is presented at the other extreme, as a centripetal force which crushes individuals, here mostly mothers, largely through an oppressive corporeality. Here I discuss fiction by Helen Simpson, Dear George (1996), Hey Yeah Right, Get A Life (2001) and Rachel Cusk, Arlington Park (2007). This suburb here is sluggish, sticky even, trapping its female inhabitants.

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Index

Abercrombie, Patrick Bluemel, Kristin ‘Greater London Plan’, 125 on ‘intermodernism’, 107 Ackroyd, Peter ‘Suburbs are not so bad I think’ London: The Biography, 24 (essay), 116 Adorno, Theodor Bowdler, Roger, 90 Minima Moralia, 86 Bowen, Elizabeth 102–3 Aldiss, Brian ‘Attractive Modern Homes’, 103 Billion Year Spree, 137 To the North, 102 Augé, Marc ‘A Walk in the Woods’, 103 on ‘non-places’, 163 Bowie, David, 157 Bowlby, Rachel Ballard, J. G., 136, 176–80 Feminist Destinations, 98 Crash, 139 Bracewell, Michael, 132, 162, 194 The Kindness of Women, 176 Bradbury, Malcolm Kingdom Come, 178–80 No, Not Bloomsbury, 134 Miracles of Life, 176–7 Brah, Avtar, 167 The Unlimited Dream Company, Brooks, Peter, 1 139–42, 176 Brottman, Mikita Barker, Paul, 164 ‘Apocalypse in Suburbia’, 132 The Freedoms of Suburbia, 3, 206 Brown, Bill the ‘non-plan’, 4, 153 ‘Thing Theory’, 74 Barnes, Julian Brummel, Beau, 28 Metroland, 144 Bullock, Shan Barnett, Alfred (R’Andom’) Robert Thorne, 76 Neighbours of Mine, 113 Burgess, Anthony, 135–6 Barratt, Nick, 4, 35 A Clockwork Orange, 135 Baxter, Jeanette, 175 The Wanting Seed, 136 Bellamy, Edward Burnside, John Looking Backward, 79 Common Knowledge, 161 Bennett, Arnold, 11 A Man from the North, 7, 54–5, 57, 76 Carey, John Bennett, Jane The Intellectuals and the Masses, 7, Vibrant Matter, 190, 197 90 Bentley, Nick Carter, Angela ‘Re-writing Englishness’, 168 Wise Children, 207 Betjeman, John, 116–19 Chadwick, Charles Ghastly Good Taste, 117 It’s Alright Now, 190 ‘Parliament Hill Fields’, 118 Chadwick, Edwin, 30 Shell Guides, 116 Chaudhuri, Nirad ‘Slough’, 117 A Passage to England, 143–4 ‘A Subaltern’s Love Song’, 119 Chesterton G. K. ‘Summoned By Bells’, 118 ‘The Blue Cross’, 60–1 ‘The Surrey Homestead’ 118 ‘A Defence of Detective Stories’, 66

232

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Index 233

The Man who was Thursday, 7, 66 ‘The Blue Carbuncle’, 62 The Napoleon of Notting Hill, 66 ‘A Case of Identity’, 58 Childs, Peter Holmes’ deductive methods, 62 ‘Suburban Values’, 205 Sherlock Holmes stories, 57–66 Clapson, Mark The Sign of Four, 64–5 Invincible Green Suburbs, 125, 126, A Study in Scarlet, 59, 62–3 151, 152, 165, 196, 206 Dyos, H. and Reeder D. Cobley, Paul ‘Slums and Suburbs’, 22 ‘The Semiotics of Paranoia’, 289 Cohen, Phil Eagleton, Terry ‘Subcultural Conflict and Working After Theory, 109, 207 Class Community’, 246 Egan, Pierce Collins, Michael Life in London, 28–9 The Likes of Us, 166 Eliot, T. S. Collins, Wilkie ‘The Waste Land’, 95 Basil, 51 Conrad, Joseph, 135 Farley, P. and Roberts, M. S. Crosland, T.W. H. Edgelands, 187 The Suburbans, 54 Felski, Rita, 205 Cunningham, Valentine Fisher, Mark, 181 British Writers of the Thirties, 90 Fishman, Robert Curry, Patrick, 188 Bourgeois Utopias, 20, 25, 78 Curtis, James Flint, Kate The Gilt Kid, 105 ‘Fictional Suburbia’, 53, 57 Cusk, Rachel, 200–2 Ford, Ford Madox Arlington Park, 200 The Soul of London, 57 Saving Agnes, 200–2 Forster, E. M. Howards End, 68–70 Davidoff, L. and Hall, C. Frayn, Michael Family Fortunes (‘Separation of Towards the End of the Morning, 128–9 spheres’) 24–5 Frith, Simon De Certeau, Michel ‘The Suburban Sensibility in British The Practice of Everyday Life, 185, 203 Rock & Pop’, 154 Delderfield, R. F. ‘Avenue’ Sequence, 129–30 Gardham, Jane, 196–7 Dentith, Simon Gibbons, Stella ‘Thirties Poetry and the Landscape My American, 113–14 of Suburbia’ 95, 117 Westwood, 114 Dickens, Charles Gilbert, Pamela K. Dombey and Son, 7, 21 Imagined Londons, 146 ‘A House to Let’, 44 Giles, Judy Oliver Twist, 43 The Parlour and the Suburb, 63, 99, Sketches by Boz, 31–41 196 Dickens, Monica Gillett, Charlie The Heart of London, 130 The Sound of the City, 154 Disch, Thomas, 135 Ginzburg, Carlo, 62 Donald, James, 208 Gissing, George, 54 Doyle, Arthur Conan In the Year of the Jubilee, 72–3 Beyond the City, 59 The Whirlpool, 12–13

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234 Index

Glaisher, James 28 Karl, F. R. Gordon, Richard A Reader’s Guide, 100 Good Neighbours, 151 Kermode, Frank Greene, Graham A Sense of an Ending, 133 The End of the Affair, 101 Keiler, Patrick, 181 It’s a Battlefield, 101 Kersh, Gerald Groes, Sebastian Night and the City, 104 The Making of London, 8, 9, 177 Kristeva, Julia Grossmith, George and Weedon The Power of Horror, 75 The Diary of a Nobody, 12, 71–8 Kureishi, Hanif The Buddha of Suburbia, 155–60 Hamilton, Patrick Hangover Square, 146 ‘Lad-lit’ sub-genre, 191 The Slaves of Solitude, 201 Lanchester, John Hanley, Lynsey, 127 Capital, 170 Hapgood, Lynne Mr Phillips, 195–6 Margins of Desire, 78 Le Corbusier, 94 Hardy and Ward Le Fanu, J. Sheridan Arcadia for All, 80 ‘A Glass Darkly, 49 Harris, Alexandra ‘Green Tea’, 48–9 Romantic Moderns, 107 ‘The Watcher’, 50–1 Head, Dominic Leavis, Q. D. ‘Poisoned Minds: Suburbanites in Fiction and the Reading Public, 96, 99 Post-war British Fiction’, 205 Lefebvre, Henry, 5 Hornby, Nick, 309 Lehan, Richard Howard, Keble The City in Literature, 8 The Smiths of Surbiton, 55, 71 Leigh, Mike Hubble, Nick, 162 Abigail’s Party, 151 Hughes, Molly, 6 Light, Alison Humble, Nicola Forever England, 113 The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 96, London 102 Arts and Crafts Movement, 79, 90 Huq, Rupa Barnet, 187 Making Sense of Suburbia, 162, 167 Barnsbury, 128 Huxley, Aldous Battersea, 99, 101 Brave New World, 92 Beckenham, 155 Bedford Park, 105 James, Henry Bermondsey, 299 ‘The Suburbs of London’, 80 Brixton, 59, 63, 68, 125, 144, 162 Jefferies, Richard Bromley, 3, 156 (as representative After London, 81 suburb, 157) Jerome, K. Jerome Camberwell, 33, 59, 106, 125 Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, 85 Catford, 216 Three Men in a Boat, 73, 84–8 Clapham, 1, 10, 25, 29, 33, 54, 66, Johnson, B. S. 67, 68, 98, 99, 101, 106, 213 Christy Malry’s Own Double Entry, Cricklewood, 171 214 Croydon, 102, 129, 131 Johnson, Pamela Hansford Crystal Palace, 27 This Bed Thy Centre, 99–101 Dagenham, 152

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Index 235

Dalston (‘as Dulston’), 182 Penge, 191 Deptford, 33, 134 post-war development, 125–6 Dulwich (as ‘Dulburb’), 182, 191 River Thames, 80, 101 Dulwich and Sydenham Golf Club, shared image of, 26 191 Shaw, Norman, 79 Ealing, 154 Shepherd’s Bush, 144 Earl’s Court, 128, 146 Shepperton, 139, 140, 185 East End, 53 South London, 128, 138, 191–6 Elephant & Castle, 166, 185 the sights, 26, 33 Eltham, 167 Southall, 127, 162, 165–8 as fantasy, 159, 160 Southwark, 23, 35 as fictional place, 177, 186 Stoke Newington, 104 Forest Hill, 59, 191 Surbiton, 66, 212 Garden City Movement, 66, 79 surveys of, 53 gentrification, 205 Sydenham, 114, 194 Great West Road, 92 as ‘system for sorting inhabitants’, 24 Greater London, 90, 154, 167 terrorism, 134 Greater London Plan (1944), 125 Tufnell Park 60 Greenwich, 128, 162, 184 Upper Norwood, 64 Hackney, 10, 128 Walworth, 25, 36, 129 Harlesden, 278 Wandsworth, 194 Hayes, 123 Wembley, 144 Heathrow, 175, 178 Willesden, 171 Hendon (‘living death’), 182 Wimbledon, 60, 66 ‘heritaged’, 184 Lott, Tim Herne Hill, 27 The Scent of Dried Roses, 10, 127, Highbury, 113 165–8 Highgate, 114, 118 Luckhurst, Roger Holloway, 33 (Upper) 71, 114, 162 The Angle Between Two Walls, 138–9 Honor Oak Park, 191 ‘The Contemporary London Howard, Ebeneezer, 79 Gothic’, 181 imagined in the suburbs, 153–5 investigative reports, 28–9, 31 Mabey, Richard Islington, 42, 67, 128 A Good Parcel of English Soil, 188 Lambeth, 47 Machen, Arthur in literature, 230 ‘A Fragment of Life’, 65–6 London County Council, 90 MacInne, Colin London Transport, 144 Absolute Beginners, 153 M25, 175, 178, 183, 184, 185 MacNeice, Louis ‘Metroland’, 187 ‘Autumn Journey’, 92 ‘neo-gothic’ writing, 57–8, 181–2 Malkani, Gautam New Towns, 125, 187 Londonstani, 167 North London, 118, 191 Mantel, Hilary Norwood, 59 Beyond Black, 183 Notting Hill, 66, 130, 153 Marcus, Sharon, 22 Old Kent Road, 128 Marshall, Steven, 162 Palmer’s Green, 107, 108, 112 Masterman, C. F. G., 3, 54, 63 panoramic writing, 169–70 McLeod, John Peckham, 10, 106, 133–4 Postcolonial London, 143

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236 Index

Meades, Jonathan, 105 Pearsall, Phyllis The Fowler Family Business, 191–2 London A–Z, 116 Mieville, China, 183 Peirce, C. S., 11 Miller, D. A., 52 Pett Ridge, William, 54 Moretti, Franco 69 Birnham Road, 68, 71 Atlas of the European Novel, 10, 28 ‘Outside the Radius’, 72 Morris, William, 81 Phillips, Mike ‘Art under Plutocracy’, 83 London Crossings, 143 News from Nowhere, 83–4 place Morrison, Blake and imagination, 143 South of the River, 190 defining location, 157 Mortimer, Geoffrey and writing/literature, 78, 208 The Blight of Respectability, 68 Priestley, J. B. Morton, E. V., 116 Angel Pavement, 104 Mumford, Lewis, 2 English Journey, 92, 115 Murdoch, Iris the ‘third’ England, 92, 115 Under the Net, 127–8 Pugh, Edwin The City of the World, 68 Naipaul, V. S., 145–9 The Enigma of Arrival, 14, 143, Raban, Jonathan, 128 145–6, 208 Soft City, 128 The Mimic Men, 147–8, 208 Rankin, Robert, 192 Mr Stone and the Knight’s Companion, realism, 35, 104, 169 148–9 ‘proletarian realism’, 167 Nairn, Tom Reeder, David, 22 Outrage, 126 Rett Ridge, William Your England Revisited, 132 Outside the Radius, 114 Nord, Deborah, 49 Richards, J. M. The Castles on the Ground, 213 O’Farrell, John Riddell, Charlotte, 43 The Best a Man Can Get, 190–1 ‘The Old House in Vauxhall Walk’, Ogborn, Miles, 5, 24 46 Oliver, Paul, 4, 90, 153 ‘The Uninhabited House’, 44–5 Olsen, Donald, 4, 24, 39 Rose, Jonathan Orwell, George, 27 The Intellectual Life of the British Burmese Days, 120 Working Classes, 68 A Clergyman’s Daughter, 195 Ruskin, John, 27, 81 Coming Up for Air, 116, 119–24 Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 96, 122 Saegert, Susan ‘On a Ruined Farm Near the HMV ‘Masculine Cities, Feminine Gramophone Factory’, 92 Suburbs’, 99 Sala, G. A. Pain, Barry Twice Around the Clock, 29 The ‘Eliza’ Stories, 70 Sandhu, Sukhdev Papadimitriou, Nick London Calling, 142 Scarp, 187 Sansom, Ian Parr, Martin, 131 ‘Emotional Sushi’, 195 Paxton, N. and Hapgood, L. Scott, James, 126 Outside Modernism, 106 Seeing Like a State, 126–7

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Index 237

Sebeok, Thomas Spender, Stephen anxiety, 21–2, 56 ‘Landscape Near an Aerodrome’, 93 ‘proxemic shell’, 56, 205 suburb ‘semiotic self’, 77 anachronistic, 197–202 ‘world modelling’, 146 apocalyptic, 17, 132–5 (as ‘showing Self, Will through’, 261), 134–5, 162 How the Dead Live, 182 as arcadia/utopian, 16, 78–89, 107, Selvon, Sam 188, 213 The Lonely Londoners, 144 banal, 55, 65–6, 132, 140–1, 150, semiosis, 16, 21, 31 158, 160, 161, 204 lifeworld, 17 body, 68, 67: abject 75; feminised reading signs, 24, 34, 89, 194, 177, 76; ‘flabby’ 198–9; incompetent 183 74, 191; ‘labouring’/’sluggish’ semiotic anxiety, 39, 65, 90, 122 198, 199; ‘pummeled’ 202; as semiotic processes, 13 ‘thing’ 74, 120; ‘tubby’ 121, 148; the semiotic self, 77 ugly 75–6 signs of the individual, 15, 95 boundaries, 14–15, 22, 32, 47–8, 75, suburb as semiotic challenge, 14, 77–8, 141, 148, 154, 183 (‘eco- 35, 41, 56, 67, 161 tone’, 188) umwelt/’world modelling’, 56–7 cannot be written, 127, 203 Sheriff, R. C. 129 chance, 171 Silverstone, Roger, 3 claustrophobic/imprisoning, 101–2, Visions of Suburbia, 94, 157 104, 120, 165, 202 Simpson, Helen, 197–200 clerks, 3, 68–78, 104, 195 ‘To her Unsteady Boyfriend’, 199 cliches of, 109–10, 113, 122, 149, ‘Hey, Yeah, Get a Life’, 197–8 151, 152, 154, 204 ‘Lentils and Lilies’, 198–9 colonies, 144–5, 147 Sinclair, Iain, 180–7, 302 comfort/discomfort, 307 City of Disappearances, 180 consumerism/commodities, 72–3, Downriver, 182, 183–4, 186 84, 86–8, 155, 157–8, 160, 179–80 the ‘Fugue’, 185 ‘cosy catastrophe’, 137 Lights Out for the Territory, 184–5 council estates, 127, 160, 172–3 Liquid City, 8, 184, 185 culture, 144: culture of the suburbs, London Orbital, 185–7 156, 158; high culture 69, 157 ‘When In Doubt, Quote Ballard’, 175 as destructive, 82–3, 103 Smith, Stevie, 26, 107–13 detection, 178–9, 296 ‘A London Suburb’, 107 detective fiction, 57–66 Novel on Yellow Paper, 112–13 development/growth of, 23, 25, 53, ‘Suburb’, 111 90–1, 162–4, 185 ‘The Suburban Classes’, 110 DIYer (incompetent), 74–5, 190, Smith, Zadie, 9, 168–75 192, 156, 189–90 NW, 174–5 domestic, 38, 55, 101, 137, 156 On Beauty, 171 domestic things, 47, 70–8, 84, 86–7, White Teeth, 170–2 141, 156, 162, 190, 196, 197–9 Spalding, Francis, 109 Dunroamin’ housing, 90, 201 Spark, Muriel ‘eccentric’ (writers), 16–17, 108 The Ballad of Peckham Rye, 133 eccentricity, 159 Spencer, Bernard economic precariousness, 42–6 ‘Suburb Factories’, 93 The ‘Edgelands’, 187–8

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238 Index suburb – continued middlebrow culture, 96–106 Empire, 65, 155–6 mimicry, 146–7 enchantment, 188 modernity, 94–5, 101, 116–17, 139, Englishness, 2, 26, 143, 117, 122, 181: ‘conservative modernists’, 127, 130, 165–72, 171 124 everyday life, 129, 140, 158, 194–5 modernism, 16, 94–5, 107 exurbia, 178–9, 180, 214 mourning, 193 fake, 115 (George Bowling’s ‘fishy multiculturalism, 135, 156, 166, Frankfurter’, 121–2) 173–4 fantastic, 38, 66, 161 murderous intent, 192–3, 201–2 ghostly/doubled, 143, 147, 172, narratives of the self, 165–9, 173 182, 185 nature, 103 gossip, 39 ‘The Nobody’, 3, 15, 67–78, 195, 207 haunting, 41–52 as ‘nonplace’, 102, 165, 175 home/homeless, 12, 18, 46, 70, 79 nostalgia, 116–17, 120, 123, 214 (unbelonging, 88), (habitat, 91), not being pyschogeographic mate- 95–6, 101, 103, 117, 120, 128–9, rial, 144, 184, 187 155, 166, 192, 194, 206–7 as palimpsest, 181–2 hostility towards, 2, 4, 90 (by panorama, 27–8, 92–3, 104, 129, Clough Williams-Ellis, 150) 130, 169–70: panopticism, 27–8, house, 41, 44 100 hybridity, 168–9, 171–3 perception, 67–8, 127 Identity, 38, 87, 121, 156, 158, 159, performance, 9, 37–9, 107, 109; 168, 172–4, 173–4, 213 mimicry 38, 61, 108, 140, 151, as imaginary site, 127, 146, 148, 158, 204; home theatricals, 40 153–5, 155, 187 as place of fantasy 7, 37–8, 155, immateriality, 77, 83–4, 123, 142–9, 160, 128, 135, 140, 159, 160, 204; 145, 147, 148–9, 156, 164 fantasy of destruction 81–3; as a immigration, 269 place for fantasising the city, 153, information, 40 159, 160 investigation (city ‘Sketches’, 32–3), poisoning, 192 53, 68 pop culture, 17, 149–50 (TV sitcom, knowledge, 7, 57, 58–9, 108, 178 150), 151, 153–4, 157 lacking history, 203 pop music (punk, 150, 160), 157 language, 88 postcolonial writing, 145–9 legibility/illegibility, 13, 15, 16, 37 as postmodern space, 163–4 (seen from the outside, 54), 120, and the private sphere, 25 126, 131, 139, 143, 151, 183, 186, race, 166–7, 179 204 reading the clues/signs, 34–5, 60–2, ‘lifting the roof’ figure, 55, 58, 152 178, 184 and the literary, 1, 143–4, 145, 146 reading the suburb, 14, 20 mapping, 30 respectability, 59 materiality, 18, 26, 29, 41–3, 52, ‘sensation’ novels, 51–2 55–6, 62–3, 93, 67, 130, 189–202, sense of community, 164, 179–80 195; material smothering, 197–8; ‘silver-fork’ novels, 28 material waywardness, 70–8, 86–7, skin (as boundary), 76, 122 120–3, 148, 165; ‘resistenialism’, slums, 22, 30–1, 42–6, 95 212; ‘vibrant materiality’, 190 as spectacle, 40–1, 43 mess, 63, 198, 201–2 spectres and speculation, 44–6, 147

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Index 239

spatial function, 25 Thorns, David C., 23 status, 38 Trotter, David strange, 9, 27, 25, 92–4, 103, The English Novel in History, 31, 53 108–13, 131–4, 135, 142, 242 Cooking with Mud, 63 ‘subtopia’, 126, 150, 162 Vidler, Anthony surfaces, 35, 133, 139 The Architectural Uncanny, 132, 139 surrealism, 225 surveillance, ‘curtain twitching’, Waugh, Evelyn 39–40, 77, 79 Vile Bodies, 92 temporality, 197 Webster, Roger, 9, 35 Thatcherism, impact of, 167 Expanding Suburbia, 175, 203 ‘Tudorbethan’, 90, 116 Wells, H. G., 82–3 unmapped, 86, 145 The History of Mr Polly, 73, 76 the individual, 24, 58, 62, 165 A Modern Utopia, 131 uncanny, 17, 75, 132–42, 177, 198 The New Machiavelli, 82 unreadable/unknowable, 3, 35–6 The War of the Worlds, 82–3 unreal, 17, 195–6 When the Sleeper Awakes, 83 vision/visibility, 3, 6, 7, 9, 15, Wheeler, Wendy 21–2, 26–8, 35, 42–3, 47, 54, ‘Postscript on Biosemiotics’, 11 103, 108–13, 124, 130, 131, 139; Whelan, Laura, 30, 42 as ‘anti-vision’, 78, 146; dream, Wilde, Oscar 141; exposure, 48–51; focus, 93, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 62 100, 114–15; impenetrable, 152; Williams, Nigel transparency, 148–9; visionary, The Wimbledon Poisoner, 192–3 78–84 Williams, Raymond, 1 voyeurism, 332 Wodehouse, P. G and women, 196–202 Psmith in the City, 2 work, 84—6; leisure, 81–9, 97 Wolff, Janet, 25 as zone of the dead, 105–6, 138, Wolfreys, Julian, 26 142, 182–3, 202, 214 Wood, James Swift, Graham, 193–5 ‘Hysterical realism’, 169 The Sweetshop Owner, 194–5 Wood, Michael, 34, 52 Symons, Julian Woolf, Virginia 97–9 The Blackheath Poisonings, 192 ‘How it Strikes a Contemporary’, 99 ‘The Tigers of Subtopia’, 150 ‘A London Adventure’, 155 ‘Middlebrow’ (essay), 97 Taylor, Elizabeth ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 98–9 At Mrs Lippincote’s, 101 ‘Modern Fiction’, 26, 97 Taylor, Teddy ‘The London Scene’, 97 Baron’s Court, 154 ‘Street Haunting’, 97 All Change, 154–5 Wyndham, John Theroux, Paul The Day of the Triffids, 136–9 The Family Arsenal, 134–7 The Kraken Wakes, 137 ‘Thing theory’, 74, 197 Thomas, Edward, Young, M. and Willmott, P. The Heart of England, 54, 56 Family and Class in a London Suburb, Thomas, Leslie 152 Tropic of Ruislip, 152 Kinship in East London, 152 Thompson, F. M. L., 23 ‘Yummy-mummy’, subgenre, 196