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This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, scooch up a bit to make room for language.
Today’s episode is about the word suburbia, how it obtained the connotations that it seems to have, of being a bit too conventional, or homogenous, unadventurous, parochial, that kind of thing. It’s not usually flattering. But what was it about the development of suburbs that made those ideas stick to the words?
We'll be specifically talking about suburbs in Britain because, for instance, the American suburb, development and culture thereof, that is very much somebody else’s PhD thesis or entire filmography.
And I’m aware that in some places like Australia, 'suburb' just refers to a section of the city rather than specifically an area that is not the centre. (Where did English lose the word 'urb' along the way?)
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Content note: this episode contains one category B swear.
On with the show.
HZ: Growing up on the edge of Croydon, how was that for you? What was your sort of relationship to suburbia in your own life?
JOHN GRINDROD: I had a really lovely family, so I had a very happy life at home, but as soon as I left the house, I felt really under siege, like all the time. I felt really threatened. I was quite obviously gay – I was one of those kids where everyone tells you you're gay before you know that you're gay. And all the nicknames for being gay at that point were horrible, and you couldn't adopt any of those in a positivity kind of way; they're all disgusting.
HZ: No reclamation available.
JOHN GRINDROD: Yeah, I'm not doing that.
I used to walk around New Addington, the estate I was grew up on, like, I was invisible. My default thing was no one can see me, and so no one will talk to me. I must have been vibrating with anxiety or something, because nobody ever did really talk to me. It worked – at the expense of making me look worrying, like, all the time. In my head, I just imagined I was like a brain in a tank being wheeled round.
HZ: That's how I still feel.
JOHN GRINDROD: Oh, yeah, I mean, it's weird, isn't it? It's weird, that disembodiment where you just don't really feel like you can inhabit yourself in the street. Like you've got to kind of suppress yourself entirely. So that was kind of my experience of the suburbs, was that I didn't feel like I could be a visible human in them. Like it was best if I wasn't.
I am John Grindrod. I'm a social historian of modern Britain. I write books about modern places and the effect they have on people. And I interview a lot of people about their experiences of them.
HZ: And your latest book is:
JOHN GRINDROD: Tales of the Suburbs: LGBTQ+ Lives Behind Net Curtains.
HZ: John’s book is an oral history of being queer in Britain's suburbs across the 20th century, via archive accounts as well as interviews John did with numerous people about their experiences of growing up in suburbia and, in several cases, as adults continuing to live or returning to live there.
HZ: What took you towards writing that book?
JOHN GRINDROD: I was thinking about my own experience of growing up as a gay kid in this big housing estate where I was born in 1970. It was a big suburban housing estate on the edge of some woods on the edge of Croydon in South London. And I had so many weird experiences to do with my sexuality and the suburbs, like a weird collision of the two things, in that period. because obviously we are way pre-internet pre-app, you can't find out whether other people are gay or not; you don't really know whether you are the only person in the world who seems to be gay. It seems to be a really odd period. And the place I grew up in, just really sprawly and, you know, very difficult to make any connections with anybody because classic suburbia.
And I thought, God, I had so many weird experiences. I bet other people had those really weird experiences. And also we're all gonna forget those, because the longer we've got the internet and apps, the easier it is to forget that these things ever happened, the yawning boredom of endless hours of being by yourself, where you imagine that one day there might be this magical thing that could connect you to people that you've got something in common with, but that just feels more like an E. Nesbit novel than real life.
HZ: Some of them were set in Lewisham, which at the time might have been considered suburb.
JOHN GRINDROD: Yeah, absolutely. Well, that's the weird thing about the suburbs: even the actual physical places themselves evolve over time, without actually even having changed much. They just evolved because what was built as a suburb becomes the inner city because more suburbs get built on the outside of it, or the other way around. I like the fact that suburbia is a constantly evolving and changing. It's not as fixed, I think, as the word evokes in people's heads. The word ‘suburbia’ sort of evokes a very fixed idea of a place that is identikit, that all suburbs are the same, that within the suburb everything is the same, that all people are the same, all experiences are the same. I think it has this kind of flattening-out facility, that word, that isn't true.
HZ: Like I said, I’m curious about this word’s flattening facility, the connotations that it has of, say, conformity, respectability or toxic respectability. 'Suburb' is an old word; it came from, Latin the 'sub' meaning 'under', and 'urb' from the word for 'city'. 'Suburbani' some 2000 years ago were the areas outside of the centre of Rome where the wealthy politicians would retreat to their villas.
JOHN GRINDROD: This idea of living on the edge of a city goes right back. It's a very, very old ancient phenomenon where you would go and, you know, live in your lovely villa that was outside the city and travel to the city when you needed to.
It's almost like the country house, you know, the idea that you would go out to your villa on the edge of the city. This a very, very select small group of people that were suburban back then. That becomes a kind of ideal that we lose, you know, that isn't something that mediaeval states is something that people are doing.
HZ: Nevertheless, the word 'suburb' appeared in written English from the 14th century – it was preceded in Old English by the word 'underburg' – to mean the outer parts of a city, or the areas of it outside of the city wall.
HZ: In the 17th century, the word 'suburban' was already quite negative. It meant licentious, inferior.; there was this sex work association a bit. And then already by the early 1800s, it was like people who are less mannered and have like trifling little outlook which is like, I dunno, 100+ years earlier than I would've thought that that connotation had come about, and yet there it is.
JOHN GRINDROD: Yeah, absolutely. So I live fairly near where William Cowper lived. He was a poet. He wrote an amazing poem called ‘London Suburbs’ in 1785. In it, he says suburban villas “delight the citizen who, gasping there, breathes clouds of dust and calls it country air." And then later on in the same poem, he says, "They're prisoned in a parlour, snug and small like bottled wasps upon a southern wall."
HZ: Jeepers, William.
JOHN GRINDROD: That idea of, as you say, the licentiousness and that feeling that people living on the edge of the city are getting it wrong and they're not really part of the city, they're a dangerous fringe – I don't think he's necessarily writing about people living in a suburb in the way that we would think of the suburbs now. But it's interesting because some of that stuff he's saying, that sneeriness, you could easily still transfer onto the critiques of the 20th century of suburbia, and it would just sound like somebody had written it then, it wouldn't necessarily sound that different.
HZ: When William Cowper wrote that poem in 1785, the Industrial Revolution is under way in Britain, and that was a factor in the boom in suburbs in the 19th century.
JOHN GRINDROD: Suburbs start to grow up in the Victorian period in a very big way, because cities have grown so much. Because of the industrial revolution, there's a middle class who have got money, they want to live somewhere where they've got a bit of a garden they can pretend to be like in their mini stately home on the edge of the city. I was reading this great quote from John Burnett, who wrote a book, A Social History of Housing – and he was talking about the Victorian suburb, but it's very applicable to the 20th century suburb, I think – where he says:
The home had to fulfil these many functions: to comfort and purify; to give relief and privacy from the cares of the world; to rear its members in an appropriate set of Christian values; and above all to proclaim by its ordered arrangements, polite behaviour, cleanliness, tidiness, and distinctive taste that its members belonged to a class of substance, culture and respectability. The house itself was to be a visible expression of these values.
HZ: And those values were brand building for the brand Britain.
JOHN GRINDROD: These homes in the late Victorian period become a symbol of the British Empire's reach back home. They're a sort of ostentatious symbol of "Look what Empire has brought you! It's brought you these great big suburban mansions and that sort of thing."
The thing that happens with the suburban house also at that point is everybody's decorating them in the latest fashionable styles, and the latest fashionable styles of home decor hasn't really been something that generally most people have ever had the opportunity to express themselves with before.
Even at this point, it's still only some very wealthy middle class people that will get the chance to do this to these homes. But it does allow people to express incredible bad taste, or incredible kind of personal taste, the fact you can get now amazing patterned wallpaper, you can get paints for your home, you can get extraordinary decorated furniture. You've got all these fashions of Japanese design. The last two decades really of the 19th century, you start to get a lot of these influences on home design coming in, and people really clashing all these things together.
A lot of people's relationship with British suburbia is via the sitcom. But it is interesting to see that even then, all the way back in Victorian England, we've got a kind of sitcom idea of snobbery and those kind of keeping up the Joneses sort of class stuff going on with suburbia and bad taste, and all those jokes that become a real mainstay of British situation comedy actually are all playing out in real life, in real time, all that time before the sitcom even exists.
HZ: Among the affluent late 19th century Brits, there was a trend of fetishising rural life, ascribing to it qualities like honesty and authenticity, as something of a reaction to industrialisation over that century and cities expanding and more being built and becoming ever more crowded and polluted - so the creation of suburbs in this era included considerations of fresh air and green space.
JOHN GRINDROD: One of the great kind of influences on the 20th century suburb was the garden city: this idea that it's going be somewhere between the town and the country, and it's the best bits of the town and the best bits of the country, but you're going to have these self-sufficient communities really.
HZ: The garden city was first proposed by Ebenezer Howard in 1898, with aspirations of, quote, “no smoke, no slums, no sweating”. Garden cities were to include opportunities for work, leisure and access to nature, and all encircled by agriculture. Howard’s early diagrams to demonstrate the concept also included waterfalls at regular intervals, and such facilities as a jam factory, and homes for waifs and inebriates.
JOHN GRINDROD: And this is all based on, as you say, those Victorian ideas of "Isn't the city awful? Isn't the country an idyllic thing? How can we make urban living feel a bit more like the country?" And so the garden city is a way of doing that. The garden cities that get built are lovely and very enviable, and they come out of the Arts and Crafts idea of bespoke planning and design and everything being sort of hand-tooled and that sort of thing, rather than mass-produced.
HZ: One of Ebenezer Howard’s ideas for the garden city movement was that rents would stay low, landlords would not be part of the equation, and the labourers living there would be so happy with their utopian combo of urban and bucolic that they would be devoted to their community, and so healthy living there that they’d be double plus stalwart at doing their jobs. Yeah there’s always a catch, look after the workers so they can work work work without collapsing.
In 1903, Howard founded his first garden city, Letchworth in Hertfordshire, where my granny used to take me swimming in the 1980s at the big pool with the wave machine. Letchworth also boasts the UK’s first roundabout. I’m not saying the roundabout was to blame, but Letchworth proved a popular enough place to live that it soon became too expensive for the blue collar workers of Ebenezer Howard’s somewhat condescending plans. So Howard made a second attempt and in 1920 founded Welwyn Garden City, also in Hertfordshire just to the north of London. But those were the only two garden cities begat by Howard’s garden city movement. Howeer, it did become adapted into something else.
JOHN GRINDROD: You get to the 1920s and 1930s, and basically these developers have looked at how popular garden city houses are and just copied a cheap version of that as a template. And that's sort of where the British classic suburban house comes from, is from copying a really bespoke version that was meant to be the total opposite of that, meant to be total opposite of a mass-produced house, but then making a mass-produced version of it. In Britain, we've got loads and loads of examples of that over the centuries, of people opportunistically looking at something that somebody else has done in a really bespoke artistic way and kind of going, "Oh, if I did a really like mechanical, mass-produced, basic knockoff version of that, I could make loads of money really quickly."
And so this is sort of what happens with the 1920s and 1930s suburban house, is they're all a knockoff of a garden city house. Bit smaller, bit cheaper, bit more the same; idea of the green space, but less green space, not really the great big green space that you've got in a garden city. It is interesting sort of seeing how these ideas evolve and how people kind of magpie bits off of other things and kind of go, "Oh yeah, we like that bit. We don't like that bit." And mainly the developers were like, “We like the houses. We don't like all of the amenities that go with it, so we won't bother with those.”
HZ: In the 1930s, England was the country in the world with the most suburbs; four million new suburban houses had been built that decade.
JOHN GRINDROD: Yeah. And one of the reasons that happens is there are very, very lax planning laws in Britain and planning laws only really kind of kick in after the second World War. So we get through the 19th century, and loads of these suburbs are being built; and then there's a massive rush of them that are built between the First and Second World War.
HZ: Why is that?
JOHN GRINDROD: Partly because there's a drive called Homes for Heroes, which happens after the First World War, where this idea that people have gone away and fought and then they're coming back for a better life, but the life that they've got is kind of awful because they live in places that are slums and decrepit and they weren't built for a good life, they were just built for factory workers to be churning out stuff in a nearby factory.
Definitely one of the aims of the suburbs was to provide homes for families. The Homes for Heroes thing that kicks in after the First World War is all about soldiers coming back and starting a family and being able to live somewhere where you can have two or three kids and you can live there comfortably. You can find a job; you can live a very kind of nuclear family, heteronormative lifestyle; and all of the turmoil of that conflict is all forgotten, because suddenly we're living in a very sensible, calm, ordered place.
HZ: Definitely forgotten. Definitely not just like suppressed.
JOHN GRINDROD: Well, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And one of the things about both the First and Second World Wars, certainly with Britain, was that it collided together all sorts of people that would never have met otherwise, whether they were the people away fighting or the people at home. You've got lots of women at home who are working in industries that they would never have had the opportunity to ever work in before. Suddenly they're thrown together with lots of other people. You get a lot of same sex relationships happening in that environment in the same way that you do among guys that were off fighting – and then those people are sort of then expected to come into this very ordered heterosexual world: "Look what we've built for you! We've done this!" That's not appropriate for everyone, and yet there's not an understanding about that. And also the understanding is that if you are that kind of person, then you are just like some kind of filthy pervert and you shouldn't really exist anyway, so you should be pushed to the margins. You need to be downtown, you need to be somewhere else. You don't wanna be in lovely, healthy suburbia, with all the schools and lovely churches and these lovely planned roads, and, look, cherry trees – that's not for you.
HZ: No. Queer people are renowned for not enjoying cherry trees. Can't go near 'em.
JOHN GRINDROD: No, exactly. I come out in hives.
But suburbs – I think the reason that it's become this very flattened thing in culture, is because there is a massive sort of establishment backlash, in Britain particularly, to the suburbs.
HZ: Between the World Wars, the backlash grew as the suburbs did. With more people owning cars, more roads were built.
JOHN GRINDROD: All of these farmers’ fields, all next to these new roads: farmers are going, “I could sell off that land, and then make loads of money. It'll be brilliant!” So they flog all that off to developers, who then build what are essentially quite identikit sort of houses, these semi-detached houses which become really ubiquitous around cities and towns in Britain. So you start to get this huge growth in private houses rather than council houses or places that are owned by the local authority. And at that point there's a massive kind of cultural backlash by the establishment around the idea that these awful little people want their little house and garden, and they want their chichi middle class lifestyle, but aren't they vulgar and appalling little money-grabbing oiks.
And that is the tone of a million articles that are written in the press at that time and novels. And particularly if you look at somewhere like the Bloomsbury Group, who are these real kind of like toffs, you know, artistic toffs who come out of the Arts and Crafts movement.
HZ: The Arts and Crafts ethos was: things should be hand-made, non-industrial, beautiful, individualistic…
JOHN GRINDROD: And then all of these great big identikit houses are being built by these developers, and there is a kind of notion that all the houses are the same, all the people that live in them in the same. And it becomes this horrible crushing stereotype, which the suburbs have really struggled to shrug off over the decades, that has become in Britain the defining stereotype of what the suburbs are like.
HZ: Wow. Because aristocrats in the early 20th century were like, "Well, we need to maintain hierarchy because otherwise our status doesn't work if no one else is worse off"?
JOHN GRINDROD: Absolutely. That somebody needs to be doffing a cap, and it needs to be these guys. They need to know their place.
HZ: So they were happier when people were living in slums.
JOHN GRINDROD: Oh, absolutely. Well, it's a lot easier to control people when they feel like they've got less autonomy. The thing about the suburbs in Britain is there's the cliché about the Englishman's home is his castle – and they don't want all these people to have a castle! They want them to be living in little terrace houses, with no garden, and going to the factory and doing their work. They don't want them feeling like they could put up a defensive wall and that they could develop their own kind of lives and personalities and experiences that aren't regulated by a sort of overriding culture.
HZ: Yeah. Give them indoor plumbing and they will not stop taking your things.
JOHN GRINDROD: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. That William Morris wallpaper has really done for social cohesion.
HZ: The suburbs were sneered at; cities were like, "Oh, it's dangerous; it's dirty," and also a lot of them had decades of dealing with World War II bombings and damage. So where were people supposed to live? Country? That's not that practical.
JOHN GRINDROD: Yeah. That's a constant conundrum, I think; and I think this is a political conundrum pretty much everywhere, in every country, of ideologues saying, “Places are overcrowded. We can't have anybody else living here. We've gotta get rid of these people.” And then at the same time, absolutely no idea of where people are actually gonna - no desire to create places for people to live. And no understanding that by saying that, it doesn't create a kind of magic effect where that solves things. It doesn't solve anything. It's just rhetoric. And that isn't useful or helpful to actual human beings trying to find an actual place to live.
HZ: Yeah, well, ideology never strove for practicality, did it?
JOHN GRINDROD: No, not really. It doesn't help you do the shopping or put up a bunk bed.
HZ: This ideological direction shifted considerably by the later 20th century.
JOHN GRINDROD: The establishment figures that were slagging off the suburbs in the 1930s and 1940s: by the time you get to the last 50 years, those equivalent people are now all the saviours of the suburbs. They've realised that the suburbs are the home of Conservative thought, and so now they want to be the defenders of the suburbs.
HZ: Oh. Because they're like, “Social revolution won't be fomented there. Is that the...?
JOHN GRINDROD: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. In the 1980s in Britain, we get a sort of revolution in home ownership, which comes about due to the Thatcher government, which is to do with selling off local authority council houses that have been built with the Right to Buy, it’s called. So if you are the tenant paying the local authority money, at a really kind of reduced rate, to live in these houses, you can then buy them at a really reduced rate.
HZ: Since 1919, local authorities had been legally obligated to provide council housing. Right to Buy had already been underway before Thatcher’s government, ramping up during the 1970s – in 1970, 7,000 homes were sold to their tenants; by 1972 that number had risen to 45,000. But with the passing of the Housing Act in 1980, private ownership boomed: by 1987, more than one million council homes had become privately owned; by 2025, that number was two million. This is a lot of social housing to no longer have, and the shortfall has never been made up, one of the factors that has led to an ongoing housing crisis.
JOHN GRINDROD: So it basically robs the country and the local authority of all of these council homes that they would have had otherwise, and it totally changes the complexion of home ownership and where people live in Britain. And that was done deliberately to try and make more people into homeowners, because the Conservative Party at the time thought that more home owners would mean more people would vote Conservative, because that was their natural voter base. So they were trying to increase their voter base by knocking off the people that might vote against them who were living in council houses by making them into homeowners.
HZ: Once these homes were privately owned, they stayed privately owned, and not necessarily by the people who had previously been council tenants; they could sell them on to anyone. Now, more than 40% of homes purchased under the Right to Buy scheme are owned by private landlords; in fact, the son of the Thatcher Government’s housing minister Ian Gow owns… Forty. FORTY of them. Puuuke! But hey, the Conservative Party’s cunning plan worked.
JOHN GRINDROD: Did it work? Yes, it did work. You see a kind of increasing rise of right wing suburbia in ex-local authority areas that you probably wouldn't have seen had they remained local authority areas. That's a kind of interesting cultural shift that happened.
HZ: But shifting does continue.
JOHN GRINDROD: We see this in cities all the time, how areas go kind of in and out of being fashionable or being prosperous. People are being sort of pushed out of the city - the story of the 20th century was decentralisation in Britain; you know, we're gonna build new towns, we're gonna move people out cities, we're gonna move people out of these old crowded slums. And then you get to the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, and it'll becomes, oh, we could make the city really cool and people could live in loft apartments and we could build loads of urban flats. So suddenly there's a move back into living in the centre of cities again. Except now since COVID, the way that we live has changed again, and now working from home means that now the suburbs are back in vogue again as somewhere that you could live and move out to.
HZ: Well, also reflective of the prices of housing <cries in forever renter>.
JOHN GRINDROD: So there's a really mixed story of people leaving the suburbs, coming back to the suburbs, how desirable it is to be in them or not. It's constantly evolving. Our relationship with the suburbs and what the suburbs mean and how we feel about 'em, I think will just change forever. It's never fixed.
But I think there's a certain slightly camp snobbery that will always follow the suburbs, whatever happens, because I think that stuff is so embedded in our culture in Britain, that idea that the suburbs are fundamentally a bit hilarious, that I don't think we'll ever lose that. And that'd be a sad thing to lose in a way, because that has really moulded so many of us in our relationship with the suburbs.
HZ: In the course of your book, what did you discover that surprised you?
JOHN GRINDROD: One of the things I thought was really surprising is Edward Carpenter, who was the big Victorian social rebel really. He lived in this country pile near Sheffield. He wrote all of these books that were advocating things like vegetarianism and feminism – and homosexuality, because he was gay. He was having a relationship with his gardener. It's interesting that it get always characterise as "his gardener", not "his partner was also doing gardening". But the prism of it is always that he has a gardener, and that also they were having sex.
HZ: They were a couple for 37 years! 37 years!! And they lived together for thirty of them, Edward Carpenter and George Merrill, his partner who gardened. Merrill died in 1928, Carpenter in 1929, and they lie in the same grave. Yeah, sharing a grave is totally what someone would do with a person who is just their gardener with whom they happen to have sex.
Meeting the couple inspired E.M. Forster to write his novel Maurice, wherein - and spoilers here for a book mostly written more than 110 years ago and published 55 years ago - the titular Maurice has a relationship with Alec, the gamekeeper at the country pile of Maurice’s unrequited crush from college. And D.H. Lawrence is thought to have read a manuscript of Maurice and then borrowed the posh person-gamekeeper relationship for Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Albeit turning them heterosexual.
JOHN GRINDROD: One of the other people that was inspired by him, or a group of people, were the people that designed the garden cities. So the garden cities begin to get designed at the beginning of the 20th century. A lot of those designers really interested in Carpenter, go and visit him,. They take on loads and loads of the aspects of Carpenter's life and his home into the designs of the garden city houses that they design. They're the same houses that then the developers in the 1920s and 1930s then copy. And so I do like to think that there is a sort of bit of a queer ghost in these ultimate heterosexual homes, that they're all based actually on this queer lifestyle.
HZ: In your book, you are reflecting on how a lot of the suburb construction is meant to be based around heterosexual families. Would you say that the way that the suburbs were formed and the way that they were described and talked about forced a kind of conformity, and yet when you are queer, you're kind of forced into non-conformity, whether you like it or not, in that environment at that time?
JOHN GRINDROD: Yeah, definitely. And the people that I interviewed talked a lot about feeling like on the edge of stuff, and feeling like an outsider looking in and never being at the centre of things, and therefore that idea of being the observer but not really being a participant was very prevalent, I think, among a lot of queer people living in the suburbs. Because to fully embrace living in suburbia, you sort of had to do the route one husband and wife children thing. And so if you're not doing that, or if you are doing that but also you are bi, that is complicating.
A lot of people talked about trying to navigate the world where you are sort of two people: you are your authentic self, or you are trying to discover who your authentic self is, you don't really even know but you're trying to work it out; and then there's the person you have to be to get by in suburbia. And because suburbia is like incredibly surveilled as a space, there's a sense that you can't ever let your guard down, that you've got to keep up this appearance all the time – suburbia being a home of gossips and people that kind of spy on you, and then it becomes a home of Neighbourhood Watch. You've got people that are constantly looking at what you do and reporting back to your parents, "Well they were walking around in bare feet," as one of the people I interviewed said.
HZ: Scandale!
JOHN GRINDROD: Exactly! Shocking!! And so reporting about absolutely bloody nothing, but reporting it nevertheless, because it's something to do and something to say. And you've got all these bored people just looking out of their net curtains, just wishing for something to comment on, just wishing something exciting would happen. And if the most exciting thing that's gonna happen is a really repressed and confused young, queer teenager is wandering along, trying to discover themselves doing something a bit eccentric, well, that's gonna be something that people are gonna comment on.
HZ: Why do you think it is that in the suburbs specifically, people were so lacking in other pursuits, other hobbies, other sources of interest and entertainment?
JOHN GRINDROD: Well, one of the troubles with the suburbs is that often you've got enormous estates of houses with very little else. In a neighbourhood in a town or city, you might have all of your facilities that you need to live a kind of exciting, interesting life nearby. You might have loads of social things you can do: nice pubs, nice cafe, shops, church, lots of different things that you could do, parks, sporting facilities, that kind of stuff. But in the suburbs quite often you've got very limited version of that, and so people become quite isolated. Or you join your local community to do whatever it is they do. But that's gonna be fairly limited because it's harder to participate when there's not really anything to participate in. We can't all participate in Little League or you can't all be a school governor. It's an odd thing to sort of realise that your options to join in in those environments are really limited. There's not like loads of stuff. And certainly if you are feeling like you are already on the edge of a community and you're not really feeling being part of it, the suburbs won't really offer you a lot of options to do legit stuff that where you can be visible, you know?
And that was, I think, one of the real issues for most of the people I spoke to was, certainly in the 20th century, very hard to be queer and visible in the suburbs. It was hard to do that in a city anyway, but particularly hard to do it in the suburbs because you want to be visible on your own terms, but in suburbia you are visible on everyone else's terms. Everyone else is looking at you and talking about you – or you think they are. I mean, for the most part, people don't give a shit do they? But, when you’re a teenager, if you haven't got a visible queer community around, you've got nobody to hang on to and think, "Oh yeah, that's who I could be"; or "That isn't who I could be." But it's a real lovely symbol that you could be somebody different here, you don't have to conform to these sort of heteronormative stereotypes that you're constantly kind of fed. So it's interesting, that dichotomy between being seen and being observed.
HZ: After being that kid in New Addington who wanted to be invisible, and then living in London for much of his adulthood, a few years ago John moved from London back to the suburbs.
JOHN GRINDROD: And we've got gay neighbours and it’s all very exciting, and all very different from when I lived in the suburbs before, partly because you've got the internet and apps, so you can kinda see not only are other people gay in the area, but somebody is gay 200 metres away. But I was aware when I moved back that I was really super comfortable with being visible and being part of a gay couple, living in a small cul-de-sac in a close, so that when we got other queer neighbours, it was lovely; but it also, it didn't matter as much, because I already felt like I was much more at peace with being visible, and I no longer feel like I need to put up a force field all the time. Generally I feel like I'm able to walk around feeling pretty chilled and comfortable in my own skin. So at some point in that intervening period where I wasn't living in the suburbs, I grew up and chilled out, and now I'm able to put that into action – or inaction – in suburbia.
HZ: But did the suburbs also change in that thirty-year period?
JOHN GRINDROD: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, the suburbs have changed enormously. And I do think equal marriage actually has had quite a big effect on the suburbs, because you've got a lot of queer people who have rejected equal marriage as a really conservative, boring way of living and don't want to be part of that; and then you've got people that really embraced it and have really, really happy with it. And so suburbia feels like it's a bit of a draw, if you've got married, it feels like it's part of the deal. Like you can have this suburban life.
I'm not married, because we're still a bit suspicious about being part of an institution that has rejected us for majority of our lives. But we live in suburbia, which is also another thing that has rejected us for most of our lives, and yet we're doing that. So life is a sort of series of weird compromises and suburbia is sort of a series of weird compromises that you pick and choose really.
HZ: The town where you now live, Milton Keynes, was kind of built with queerness in mind.
JOHN GRINDROD: Yeah. Milton Keynes was a new town that started to be built at the end of the 1960s, pretty much exactly at the same time that the partial decriminalisation of sex between men over the age of 21 happens in England and Wales. And actually in Scotland and Northern Ireland, that doesn't happen till the 1980s, which is quite amazing.
HZ: Not amazing in good way.
JOHN GRINDROD: Not, not the good amazing that we like, no; the other amazing. And then by the early 1970s, loads of social groups of queer people start to be formed because you can then do that stuff legally, and you don't feel so under threat and imperil as you might have beforehand, even though it is still illegal to kiss other men in public and that sort of thing - it's ridiculous.
And so Milton Keynes, or the area where Milton Keynes is being built, have got one of these local groups. And in 1974, the Development corporation, who were building Milton Keynes, give the group space in one of its places that it's built, actively give them that. They don't just have this space and it gets rented out; it's actually given as an office to this group. And as a result, it becomes one of the first places of any size in Britain where the idea that you would have different lifestyles and different sorts of people living in your town, it's really embraced right from the beginning. Because at the sort of earlier waves of new towns, they've got loads of modern 1950s and 1960s gizmos going on, but they haven't really got that many different sorts of homes that you can live in, in these new towns.
Whereas in Milton Keynes, they really actively built completely different sorts of places you could live in for different sorts of lifestyles. They weren't necessarily going, “Oh, this is gonna be somewhere for queer people to live,” it was just this idea that that places were gonna be more flexible and less prescriptive about people's lifestyles from the off. So it wasn't expected that you would have two or three children and being a heterosexual couple. It was expected more that you might end up with lots of single people, and also also you might end up with lots of couples who won't have kids. So the idea that people would live different lifestyles here was baked in right from the beginning, and especially in the fact that they physically acknowledged us, right from the beginning, which I thought was brilliant, which is a lovely thing to find out about the place you live.
HZ: In the book you have a lot of accounts of very non-homogenous experiences, even though the idea of the suburbs suggests homogeneity; but for a lot of the people you talk with or a lot of the people's archives that you include, there was something kind of liberatory about it, rather than stultifying and closeting.
JOHN GRINDROD: Yeah. And everybody's attitude was very different. There were certain people that I interviewed who were like, "I am never, ever going back to the suburbs ever again." And then other people were quite happily going back and forth; or, even though they'd left, they had very fond memories; or were quite conflicted and ambivalent about it, and were working out their relationship with the suburbs. There was no unifying “this is what we all experienced” kind of theme to everybody's story. It felt like a peek through lots of privet hedges into people's lives, that didn't necessarily tell a straight line narrative. But together, they're like a constellation of experiences that tell you a lot about the suburbs cumulatively – and also just a lot about social history and social life over the last like a hundred years really.
it's very interesting, for example, chatting to non-binary people about their experience of the suburbs. One of the really interesting things that somebody said was they really liked suburbia because it felt like it was a middle space, because it wasn't the country and it wasn't the city. Like it's a sort of contested space where everything is slightly up for grabs and the rules are still a bit mutable. And they felt like that sort of represented their gender in a way that that worked for them. And I found that really fascinating actually, that was a really original way of looking at it that I would never have thought of.
HZ: John Grindrod is a social historian and author of books about places and the people. His marvellous new book is Tales of the Suburbs: LGBTQ+ Lives Behind Net Curtains; and another is Concretopia: A Journey Around the Post-War Rebuilding of Britain, which is one of the books I’ve recommended the most to people. It really changed the way I saw a lot of unloved 20th century architecture. John also hosts the podcast Monstrosities Mon Amour, which celebrates places and things that have been unfairly maligned. Find John and his work at johngrindrod.co.uk, and I’ll link to him, plus links to further information about topics within this episode and the transcript, at theallusionist.org/suburbia.
Earlier we mentioned the E.M. Forster novel Maurice, and there’s a really good film adaptation which we watched together in the Allusioverse community a couple of years ago during our Merchant Ivory Season. Watching in each other’s company made it even more fun, possibly changed me at a molecular level. There’s plenty else to recommend becoming a member of the Allusioverse, one being you keep this independent podcast afloat in the feculent slurry of late stage capitalism, and it stays free for everyone to listen to, so, socialism?
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Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is… bagasse. That’s B A G A S S E, not badass.
bagasse, noun: the dry pulpy residue left after the extraction of juice from sugar cane.
Try using ‘bagasse’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Music and editorial advice were provided by singer and composer Martin Austwick, hear his songs via palebirdmusic.com and Bandcamp – and hear us both on our long-running other podcast Answer Me This.
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