Snobbery in the garden: U and non-U borders

Richard Sudell is the forgotten hero of the gardening revolution in Britain between the first and second world wars. A Quaker, born in Lancashire in 1892, the son of a straw and hay dealer, he left school at 14 and became a gardener, worked at Kew, then went to prison as a conscientious objector in 1916. On furlough from his first prison sentence, he worked with the Vacant Land Cultivation Society to help create allotments for London’s poor. When the first world war ended, he moved to Roehampton with his first wife. There he began writing a monthly gardening column in the Roehampton Estate Gazette advising his neighbours, most of whom had never had a garden before, on how to ‘beautify’ the debris-strewn patches of mud outside their new front and back doors. His columns were drawn together in his first book, The Town Gardening Handbook (1924), aimed at promoting horticulture throughout London County Council’s innovative housing estates.

A Sudell-inspired garden was structured, full of bright colour and labour-saving. It was not ‘a gardener’s garden’, where children, animals and games were taboo, but a small, practical space, easily maintained at weekends. Sudell recommended pyracantha, hanging baskets, manicured lawns, tea roses and pansies; he was also an advocate of crazy paving and suggested paths should be straight, so that washing could be dried alongside them. The estate tenants lived under permanent threat of eviction:

In those days if your garden was not up to scratch, the superintendent in his bowler hat, striped trousers and umbrella – the treatment – would knock on your door and give you a fortnight to put it right. If not, goodbye. 

Michael Gilson’s Behind the Privet Hedge combines biography and social history to resurrect Sudell’s contribution to the ‘beautification’ of Britain.