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"Suburbs are not so bad I think": Stevie Smith's Problem of Place in 1930s and '40s London
Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Fall 2003 by Bluemel, Kristin
"London and its outskirts became Greater London in the inter-war period" (Bowdler 103). With this simple declaration, geographer Roger Bowdler identifies the physical transformation of English landscape that underlies my analysis of Stevie Smith's literary fantasies about the suburbs. Described at the time as the "outskirts" and "fringes" of the capital, London's suburbs achieved their regional identity as intermediate or in-between spaces-between town and country, commerce and agriculture, bricks and birds, crowds and calm. Semi-detached houses, arterial roads, new underground stations, building societies, mortgages, vanishing woods, disappearing hedgerows, consumed villages, diverted streams-all of these geographical signs of tremendous social change accompanied the post-World War I mandate to build "Homes fit for Heroes."
Suburbs had existed as identifiable regions in landscape and the public imaginary long before the 9 199 19 Housing or Addison Act led to the first interwar development boom. Yet never had suburbs so troubled people's ideas of what it meant to be a Londoner or to be English. Smith merits special consideration in studies of this suburban trouble because, in contrast to the vast majority of 193Os and '4Os writers, she does not naively celebrate or thoughtlessly excoriate the suburb in her writings. Instead, she uses her position as suburban insider to describe and anaIvze more acutelv than others the ambivalent role of the suburb in Enelish life. To explore the relations between suburban geographical fact and Smith's suburban literary fantasies and to show the importance of these relations for the study of twentieth-century English culture, I attempt to do three things in this essay. First, I provide a geographical framework based on study of the architectural, social, and economic landscape of the London suburbs, focusing particularly on the transformation of the village and countryside, two regions traditionally regarded as the base of English national feeling. second, 1 show how popular period texts in the two subgenres of the ramble book and the series novel represent a nostalgic effort to reclaim the lost world of pre-suburban England at the very moment the suburb was perceived as England's most dynamic, developing region. Third, I analyze the implications of these suburban spaces-real and imaginary-for literary scholarship, which is biased toward texts written by intellectuals who tend to demonize the suburbs and their inhabitants.1
As John Carey argues, most intellectuals of the early to mid-twentieth century found the suburb so distressing they came in their writings to equate suburban geography with a degraded humanity, treating both with venomous contempt. Many fantasized, in private if not public forums, that the suburbs and their inhabitants would disappear.2 Writing from the margins of London and its literary circles, Stevie Smith provides us with texts that challenge in delightful and instructive ways the disturbing literary norm that Carey presents.3 I conclude this essay with an analysis of Smith's affectionate representations of her lifelong home, the suburb Pakners Green, focusing on materials that distinguish her from the most famous "highbrow" writers of her time in order to complicate our understanding of the generating sites of twentieth-century English literature.4 While Smith is not immune from the widespread tendency Carey describes of conflating suburban homes with the people living inside them, in her three novels, selected short stories, poems, and in the sketches "Syler's Green" and "A London Suburb," the suburb becomes an extraordinarily suggestive, dynamic site for discovering the conflicted meanings of Englishness during the 193Os and '4Os. My analysis of Smith's writings emphasizes the political and ideological implications of her suburban constructions, focusing especially on their gendered resistance to and reproduction of middle-class, or more particularly lower-middle-class, suburban ideals.5
The story of the English interwar suburb starts during World War I, when the Ministry of Munitions became the first arm of the central government to involve itself in suburban residential building. Following the example of the London County Council, the Ministry formed estates that were designed for workers in munitions and aeroplane factories (Bowdler 103). Such direct involvement on the part of the central government in suburban development was unusual. After the war, the government's involvement was represented by the 1919 Housing or Addison Act, which came out of Lloyd George's Homes Fit for Heroes movement. In Bowdler's words, the Addison Act "encouraged the building of suburban housing and thereby enshrined-for the first time in official housing policy-the desirability of the suburb" (105). The London County Council estates, some of the largest estates in Europe, were the most dramatic instance of new housing created from this Act. The LCC oversaw the development of the huge Bellingham, Downham, and Beacontree estates, the latter eventually housing some 120,000 people (Bowdler 108). Government policy makers and developers regarded such scale as necessary for cost reduction and as a response to the ever-expanding population of the capital. And that expansion was astonishing. John Stevenson records that "the south east of England absorbed almost two-thirds of the total population increase of the whole country during the inter-war years and the London conurbation increased from 7 ½ million people in 1921 to 8 ½ million by 1939" (95). Stevenson sees in the mushrooming suburbs of London and in the new industrial estates of the mid-1930s signs of England's recovery from the Depression and support for his argument that the '3Os deserve to be remembered as much for the affluence they brought to a majority of the population as for the unemployment and hunger marches they brought to the distressed areas (92).
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