Turning Cartwheels

I remember, back in the early/mid 80s, driving to and fro in the suburb with my dad, on ordinary journeys, spotting the houses that had cart wheels in the front garden.

These were usually propped against the wall, underneath the living room window.

Often, the house had coach lamps, either side of the front door, too. And these are more likely to survive; the archaeology of the suburb.

The wheels are all gone, replaced by a rash of solar lamps evoking Greek or Floridian holiday apartment complex paths. Were the wheels a reaction to the dismantling of the narratives of life undertaken by the government of the day? A retreat in the imagination in time of anxiety to a pre or early industrial state? Is this what the solar lamps now represent, showing, too, that the imaginative refuges of the suburb are finally no longer instinctively the rural past but the TV and the dream holiday?

But the old ways still lurk; the place names, the irritating curve in a street to the 4x4 driver, the veneer of civilisations but thin.

And The Devil Will Rise

Yesterday was the annual family blackberrying trip, and a fine time was had by all.

The hedges were packed with blackberries, aswell as rosehips and haws; and were all picked to the scents of honeysuckle (still in the hedge) and fennel and the annoyance of a group of linnets. And drizzle. The panic was on because this was the last weekend we could make it before 29th September, when the devil rises from below to piss on the blackberries. I don't think we would allow the picking to go ahead after this date.

I remember when I was small we used to be sent out beyond the suburb, the cul-de-sacs and Closes, armed with buckets, and a bottle of orange Corona, to the common beyond. We wouldn't come back until all the buckets were filled and we wouldn't go up there after 29th September - my mum wouldn't allow it.

This was, and is, a truly felt tradition of folk suburb.

Sweet Chestnut Poesy

See this sweet chestnut tree in our local park, which has characteristically twisted its bark and then become the site of graffiti. This is folk suburb.

Suburban Yokel

Was reading English Heritage's The Heritage Of Historic Suburbs. In it they take a brave stab at defining the suburb as "outgrowths or dependencies of larger settlements - somewhere with a clear relationship with a city or town but with its own distinct character."
Later, they say "understanding how...suburbs work and the role they play in relation to their adjacent urban areas is an important aspect in determining how they should be managed."

While it is interesting to see the dead hand of historical beauracracy descending on the suburb, and especially the inter-war suburb, and English Heritage's acknowledgement of these places as having their "own distinct character", the inter-war suburb I grew up in was much more related, almost exclusively so, to the countryside on its doorsteps; and not the city at all, which was only rarely visited. Also, lots of the older folk and families became suburban because the suburb came out to them, in their villages and farms, and not them moving outwards from a city centre. There were old barns tucked behind houses, old farm gateposts left as playthings in the park, scraps of commons and cottages in our suburb, and fields seen beyond. The city was but a dim, almost alien sensation, well into teenage years.
Even as the barns were demolished and the gateposts removed, their memory remained, as does the tight curve of a street away from the shops, which was once a lane.
It is surprising, then, that English Heritage do not mention once what the suburbs are generally built on and against (the 'country'), as these must be important factors in the sense of there being a "historic environment" of suburbs, as much as, and often more than, the city.