Suburban enthusiasts are not just confined to London town or blighty's shores. It seems that old prejudices are being displaced by the realisation that the suburban semi is the epitome of flexible living space with scope for knocking through walls, extending outwards and upwards – modifications rendered impossible in, say, the riverside penthouses of Manchester, Newcastle and Liverpool, where residents are unhappily trapped in negative equity to a higher degree than their suburban counterparts. Planners and architects have been among suburbia's biggest critics, accusing it of breeding ugly buildings and featureless uniformity, so it is significant that the Royal Academy of Arts recently hosted an event celebrating London suburbia as part of its architecture lecture series. Forthcoming spin-off events include Friday night DJ-led dance events in the name of suburbia – surely the very reverse of the idea of the 'burbs as drab and boring. A new London Transport Museum exhibition also revels in the home of mock-Tudor that's more usually just mocked. Sneery suburb-bashing by the commentariat is repetitive to the point of being predictable, but given recent developments it's starting to look a little old-fashioned.Ī new book from Paul Barker entitled Freedoms of Suburbia counteracts the usual notion of suburbia as a place of cloying claustrophobia. Only last month the Guardian's review of the reformed Spandau Ballet accused the New Romantic mainstays of being 'stuck in an 80s suburban wine bar', hurling the ultimate insult their way. semi-detached torture chambers' is from 1939. George Orwell's much quoted description of suburbs as 'a prison with the cells all in a row. Suburban criticism has been longstanding and voluminous over time.

Memoires of a suburban utopia