Twentieth-Century Suburbs

A Morphological Approach

C.M.H Carr, J.W.R Whitehand

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136411649
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Architektur Allgemein

Garden suburbs were the almost universal form of urban growth in the English-speaking world for most of the twentieth century. Their introduction was probably the most fundamental process of transformation in the physical form of the Western city since the Middle Ages.
This book describes the ways in which these suburbs were created, particularly by private enterprise in England in the 1920s and 1930s, the physical forms they took, and how they have changed over time in response to social, economic and cultural change.
Twentieth-Century Suburbs is concerned with the history, geography, architecture and planning of the ordinary suburban areas in which most British people live. It discusses the origins of suburbs; the ways in which they have been represented; the scale and causes of their growth; their form and architectural style; the landowners, builders and architects responsible for their creation; the changes they have undergone both physically and socially; and their impact on urban form and the implications for urban landscape management.

CHAPTER 1

Conceptions of Suburbs

THE ORIGINS AND GROWTH OF SUBURBS

The term ‘suburb’ has a number of connotations. In medieval times it was frequently applied to those parts of urban areas that lay beyond the city’s physical limits, which in continental Europe at least often meant outside the city wall. In America a distinction between city and suburbs is commonly made on an administrative basis, suburbs being on the periphery of, but outside the jurisdiction of, the city. In this administrative sense, areas originating as suburbs have frequently lost that status as administrative boundaries have been revised to accommodate city growth. In Great Britain in recent times the term ‘suburb’ has a meaning that is scarcely distinguishable from ‘outer city’. However, investigation of the outward growth of cities as a long-term historical process reveals a varied physiognomic pattern over time and space that provides the basis for a more meaningful, essentially morphological, definition of the term.

Historically, one of the most striking aspects of the physical enlargement of cities, particularly within the English-speaking world, has been the change, both over time and with distance from the city centre, from ‘streetscapes’, dominated by fairly continuous building façades, to more open ‘landscapes’ in which dwellings, mostly detached or semi-detached, are separated from the road, and often from one another, by private gardens. The change from a closed ‘streetscape’ to a more open ‘landscape’ was initially a middle-class phenomenon and might be described as the beginning of suburbs in a modern sense. Its antecedents were the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century country ‘villas’ standing in their private parks within a daily carriage journey of London and occupied by well-to-do merchants, bankers and professional men. These residences had in their turn been much influenced by the country houses of the landed gentry and aristocracy.

In this sense of the term, as distinct from its medieval sense, England, or more precisely London, was the birthplace of the suburb. Yet at first sight the fringe of London did not provide the most congenial environment for the upper echelons of urban society. Before the mid-seventeenth century it was a place to which some of the poorest residents were relegated. It was an area of noisome trades and disrepute, in today’s terms much closer in character to a Third World shanty-town than to the suburb of a Western city. But then the entire city was so different both physically and socially. Rich and poor, wholesome and noxious, and home and work were intermixed to a degree that is hard to imagine in the spread-out, geographically segregated twentieth-century Western city. For it was the flight of the middle class to the suburbs more than any other single factor that was to bring about the geographical structure of today’s cities in the English-speaking world.

The first country villas for the well-to-do middle class were probably built during the second half of the seventeenth century. Groupings of large residences existed by the end of the seventeenth century in the hamlets of Highgate and Hampstead, a few kilometres north of London. In the Grove at Highgate there survive three adjacent pairs of semi-detached houses, built in c.1688 (London County Council, 1936, p. 77). These may well comprise one of the first series of semi-detached houses to have sizeable front and rear gardens. They were evidently designed to create a landscape of interrupted façades of semi-detached pairs (figure 1.1A), although this impression has been lessened by the subsequent construction of side extensions: they contrast with earlier semi-detached structures that form part of a row fronting directly on to the street (see, for example, Charles, 1978/79, esp. figures 1, 7 and 11, and plate III (b)).

Figure 1.1. Early examples of suburban, semi-detached houses. (A) The Grove, Highgate, built c.1688 – the two halves of this semi-detached pair are so different in appearance that, viewed from the angle in the photograph, they appear to be detached houses. (B) Frederick Road, Edgbaston, built in the early nineteenth century. (Photographs 1994)

By the early eighteenth century, permanently-occupied, detached bourgeois residences near urban areas already existed outside the English-speaking Old World, near the Dutch town of Batavia in Java (Archer, 1997, p. 35). Near Madras, occupied by the British since 1639, permanently-occupied suburban residences were, by the end of the eighteenth century, superseding, or being constructed in the vicinity of, ‘garden houses’, occupied as temporary retreats (Archer, 1997, pp. 42–44).

The occupiers of early suburban houses near London derived their earned incomes almost entirely from their employment in the city centre. They used their suburban residences as weekend villas in conjunction with ‘town houses’, in or near the city centre, rather than as places to commute from on a daily basis (Fishman, 1987a, pp. 39–51). By the middle of the eighteenth century there was a cluster of nine detached houses, each with a garden of about 0.2 ha, on Hampstead’s Belsize estate (Thompson, 1974, pp. 32–33), and Olsen (1976, p. 187) refers to ‘middle-class suburban villages’ and ‘scattered villas’ surrounding eighteenth-century London. Many, perhaps most, of these houses were principal family residences, the head of the household commuting daily to the city by private carriage (Fishman, 1984, p. 28).

By the early-nineteenth century small estates of villas for middle-class families were being developed at several points on or close to the periphery of London’s built-up area (Prince, 1964, pp. 97–104; Summerson, 1995, pp. 17–27, Thompson, 1974, pp. 84–85). The roads and plots were laid out by land developers rather than by individual owner-occupiers. Probably the first plan for such a scheme – consisting of pairs of semi-detached houses – was prepared in 1794 for the Eyre Estate in St John’s Wood (Summerson, 1962, p. 175), which was then a little beyond the north-western extremity of London’s built-up area. It bears the names of the London auctioneers, Spurrier and Phipps. Though it was not implemented, it may well have been the first estate of semi-detached houses designed to be ‘read’ as such (Thompson, 1982, p. 9). By 1800 there were evidently over forty detached and semi-detached houses occupied by commuters at Clapham, just south-west of London (Fishman, 1984, p. 30). And it was only a short time before middle-class estate developments were taking place near other cities: in the 1810s there were the beginnings of a spacious estate of mainly detached and semi-detached houses at Edgbaston (figure 1.1B) on the south-west fringe of Birmingham (Cannadine, 1980, pp. 94–98).

These suburban estates were the prototypes of suburbs not only elsewhere in Great Britain, but also on the eastern seaboard of the United States and, as the nineteenth century progressed, in numerous British colonies. The characteristic, compact, distinctly urban, formally arranged terraces that had characterized eighteenth-century extensions to cities were now augmented by more open designs, in which houses set amongst trees, shrubs and lawns echoed in miniature the country parks of the English aristocracy. The Builder (1848, pp. 500–501) quotes the Morning Herald’s observations that ‘the villa mania is everywhere most obtrusive’ and that ‘houses spring up everywhere, as though capital were abundant – as though one-half of the world were on the look out for investments, and the other half continually in search of eligible family residences, desirable villas, and aristocratic cottages, which have nothing in the world of the cottage about them except the name.’ This was not just journalistic hysteria. Davies’s (1854) map, London and its Environs, depicts the rash of villas, not only in discrete locations and lining main roads but also occasionally arranged in ‘estates’, within a zone several kilometres wide around London.

Despite the proliferation of detached and semi-detached villas, it was not until the last three decades of the nineteenth century that the suburban villa eventually eclipsed the terraced town house as the predominant form of new middle-class housing in London. Well into the mid-nineteenth century a major part of London’s enlargement, at both its working-class and its middle-class edges, continued to take the form of terraced houses, as it had done in the two previous centuries. Indeed, even in the suburbanizing towns and villages around London, new middle-class housebuilding in the first half of the nineteenth century took the form of a mixture of villas and terraced houses. The fact that at this time a number of estates of villas that had been planned in other major English cities either failed to materialize or did so very slowly has led to the presumption that as well as socio-cultural factors at work there were economic ones, notably the small number of provincial families that could afford to live in villas (Thompson, 1982, p. 12).

Although mid-nineteenth century depictions of suburbanization tend to be those of a process out of control, the period was not without scholars who took an idealistic view of suburbs. One of the main supporters of the suburban idea was the English landscape architect J.C. Loudon, who put forward a set of general principles to be considered when laying out a ‘villa residence’ (Loudon, 1850, pp. 6–43). His influence on one of the main American proponents of suburban development – Andrew Jackson Downing – is indicative of the major influence of English precedents (Fishman, 1987b, p. 242; Simo, 1988, pp. 141–142) in a country in which the pace of suburbanization was rapidly to overtake that in Great Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Beyond the English-speaking world, however, suburbanization was much slower to occur. Even by the time of the First World War, within continental Europe the single-family house standing in its garden was still comparatively rare within major cities. More common was the apartment block (often containing 2–6 dwellings), standing within its own garden and having the appearance of a villa (figure 1.2A). But generally continental European cities (and those in Scotland) were dominated by tenements, and were remarkably compact in comparison with their English and American counterparts (Whitehand, 1987, pp. 107–111). How is this contrast, within the Western world, between nearly all English-speaking countries on the one hand and other European countries on the other, to be accounted for?

Figure 1.2. Contrasting forms of suburban development. (A) Inter-war apartment blocks resembling villas, Lausanne, Switzerland. (B) Late-nineteenth century semidetached houses, Bournville. (Photographs 1994)

Underlying the contrast are some important long-standing historical differences within Europe in the significance, for the ruling class, of rural and urban locations (Whitehand and Arntz, 1999). Within the Mediterranean region the land-owning nobility traditionally lived in urban settlements. Their rural estates were largely run for them by farmers. The high status dwelling in this region was therefore primarily a grand urban house or palace. North of the Alps, in contrast, the feudal nobility was mainly based in the countryside. When towns were founded here, it was the growing burgher class, the newly enfranchised middle class or merchant class, that largely exercised control over the running of them. The nobility remained, in medieval times, for the most part in their castles and manor houses, overseeing their rural lands.

North of the Alps, a geographical differentiation developed in post-medieval times. Within England, unlike in continental Europe, political stability allowed the aristocracy to indulge in the building of unfortified country houses. In addition, the English nobility generally acquired greater wealth and power than their counterparts under the Absolutist regimes that existed over much of Europe. Country houses were erected by the aristocracy in considerable numbers in seventeenth-century England at a time when in France, and the numerous German kingdoms, the life of the nobility became centred on the urban-based royal courts. For the English aristocracy and gentry the country house remained the principal residence. A London terraced house – for it was a house, the diffusion of the tenement having scarcely reached England – was their pied-à-terre.

The upper middle class – the bankers, rich merchants and certain professional people – thus had different role models in different parts of Europe. In England they sought to emulate the aristocracy by building large houses in large grounds within a carriage journey of their city businesses. In Italy, France and the German-speaking areas they generally occupied grand houses or apartments actually within the cities. In Italy, ‘villas’ in country, or peri-urban, locations were common, from the sixteenth century onward, but the principal residence of the rich remained in the city, the villa being a temporary residence from which the family’s agricultural interests were supervised and/or, from the seventeenth century onward, a place of entertainment (G.L. Maffei, personal communication).

By the end of the eighteenth century the English nobility around London realized that money could be made by laying out, on their peri-urban land, spacious roads and plots where the aspiring upper-middle class could build their own miniature versions of country houses. On the whole they had few qualms about taking an entrepreneurial role. Managing the development of their estates with suburban ‘villas’ was, in a way, an extension of the previous management of that same land for agricultural purposes. In contrast, half a century later the nobility in the vicinity of Berlin generally sold their land to middle-class businessmen and it was the businessmen, not, on the whole, the nobility, who acted as developers, selling off plots to individuals, who then commissioned houses for their own occupation. As in the case of the periphery of Paris, early developments of this type near Berlin were often of summer residences, the principal residence being a town house. These early estates tended to have grid street plans and lacked the informality of the early estates of villas around London.

The drive for suburbanization reached its acme in England in the inter-war period. Whereas in the nineteenth century it had remained essentially a middle-class phenomenon, after the First World War, fuelled by a major government housing drive and a powerful reaction against high-density inner-city living, it also became the model for British working-class housing. The pace at which rural land was transformed into suburbia during the 20 or so years between the two world wars far outstripped that of any previous period. Outside the English-speaking world, although the tradition of living in tenements continued, suburbanization quickened but was still slow compared with that in England and was to remain so.

By the mid-1930s the speed of suburbanization in England was dramatic, unlike in the United States where there was a serious slump in residential building (Whitehand, 1981, fig. 1). Under these circumstances it was almost inevitable in such a small country that there was mounting concern over what became widely known as suburban sprawl and the consequent loss of countryside.

There was little opposition, after the Second World War, to measures by the British government to reduce greatly further suburban growth. The considerable success of these measures has meant that cities have been more contained within their limits as they existed at the outbreak of the Second World War than would otherwise have been the case. Attitudes in the United States, in contrast, could scarcely have been more different: both around and far beyond existing cities growth took place on a scale that dwarfed previous suburbanization. Indeed what occurred might be more aptly described as decentralization or counter-urbanization rather than suburbanization. Contact between residential areas and traditional city cores has been greatly reduced as not only houses but a wide range of other functions have been located well beyond the suburbs. An outcome of these differential spatial dynamics is that it is England, more than the United States, that is today the archetypal country of suburbs (Fishman, 1987b, p. 249). Relative to city size, the impress of inter-war suburbs on city configuration, in terms of streets, building forms and land utilization, is probably greater in England than in any other country.

What explanations can be offered for this transformation of peri-urban landscapes, especially in the English-speaking world, in the course of the last two centuries? It would be natural to assume a connection with the process of industrialization, not least the profound changes in personal mobility. The seeds of suburbanization, however, pre-date the Industrial Revolution, and urban growth and the open form of residential development to which we have applied the term ‘suburb’ are by no means synonymous. To understand this form of development it is necessary to appreciate a number of social, economic and geographical changes that were taking place in England in the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

First, there was increased social segregation, reflecting a growing desire among the bourgeosie to distance themselves from the working classes and their increasingly noxious places of work. Secondly, there was an increasing separation of places of residence from places of work, as the growth in the number and size of warehouses, workshops and eventually factories created environments that were increasingly alien to middle-class social life, especially that part of it that Stone (1979, pp. 7–11) has termed ‘the closed domesticated nuclear family’, which, during the eighteenth century if not earlier, had emerged as the hub of middle-class social organization (N. G. Duncan, 1981, pp. 110–111): Handlin (1972) argues that, with the decline in domestic manufacturing, the house became for the first time the centre of family life. Thirdly, the English Evangelical movement provided, at the end of the eighteenth century, a moral underpinning of the movement to the suburbs as it taught that urban life was fundamentally corrupt and that family life and nature were the only legitimate pleasures for a Christian (Fishman, 1987b, p. 240). Fourthly, justifying suburban life still further was the Picturesque Movement, which emphasized the natural, rural and romantic, and buildings, byways and other landscape features that conveyed traditional images of these attributes.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SINGLE-FAMILY HOUSE

These developments provide some of the more important ingredients in an account of the rise of suburbs. Attempts at a more complete explanation, however, need to address th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Dedication
• 1. Conceptions of Suburbs
• 2. The Scale and Causes of Suburban Growth
• 3. The Anatomy of Suburbs
• 4. Developers and Architects
• 5. Post-War Change
• 6. Change at the Microscale
• 7. Conclusion
• References
• Index