‘Same old boring Sunday morning, old men out, washing their cars.’ So begins the punk anthem ‘The Sound of the Suburbs’ by the Members. There are plenty of cars being washed (and waxed) on my road on any Sunday morning and the strimmers are buzzing, despite this being peak breeding season for insects. But here’s the thing. We live in deepest north Norfolk, not the achingly suburban Surrey town of Camberley that so provoked punk angst.
When we bolted from south London after the lockdowns, our checklist included no streetlights, motorways (the nearest is 98 miles away), new-builds or nearby neighbours. To secure the rambling farmhouse we wanted, we had to compromise on the last of these. But we were moving to the English equivalent of la France profonde. We’d never encounter the sort of busybodies from Lambeth council who threatened to report my five- and six-year-old sons to the police for ‘carrying’ in Brockwell Park (they were playing with toy swords) – would we?
Au contraire. Not long after we’d arrived and acquired the accoutrements of country life – chickens, an unreliable Aga, a morbidly obese miniature Shetland pony – a friend forwarded me a message from a local Whats-App group. ‘Why can’t horseback [sic] riders pick up after themselves?’
I thought it was a joke until I realised that our daughter’s pony had crapped outside the house of the man who’d already had a go at me for sticking the nose of my car in his drive to turn round (‘It’s disrespectful!’) and leaving my trailer hitched up in the lay-by outside our place. He’d also made a passive-aggressive comment about the state of my car. For the record, it’s a superannuated Land Rover Discovery, the wing mirror held on with duct tape, and gets its annual power-hosing once the sugar beet lorries have stopped running.
We’ve also been asked when we’re going to strim our verge, while the young couple who’ve taken over the tenant farm next door are constantly fielding complaints about cows mooing and mud on the road. ‘They’re still lifting beet and it’s not even ours,’ sighs the farmer’s girlfriend – yet he still has to break off from what he’s doing and go to get the road sweeper.
‘They’re shooting again,’ says another new resident querulously as I pass her walking her cockapoo. Frankly, moving to a county that is, in effect, one massive shoot and complaining about the shooting is as absurd as going to Amsterdam for the weekend and claiming to be offended by the smell of weed and the sight of sex workers in windows.
Multiple bathrooms are incredibly suburban, as are en suites, paved gardens and leaf blowers
How can it be that such suburban attitudes are colonising the countryside? One friend, who sadly left the county last year because ‘It’s no longer the bohemian Norfolk of my childhood’, thinks it’s to do with high number of people who retire here from the East Midlands, switching their semi-detacheds for the country cottage dream but bringing the ’burbs with them. She runs through her pet hates: ‘Security lighting, yellow lines on roads in villages, signs on brand-new ugly benches commemorating someone who loved it there.’ I would add outdoor kitchens and pizza ovens.
Labour wants to build 1.5 million new homes in England over five years. With new housing estates mushrooming on the fringes of both our local market towns, the suburbanisation of the countryside is only going to get worse. It’s heartbreaking to go back to the village where I grew up in Suffolk, East Bergholt, birthplace of John Constable; 100 new houses and a supermarket are being built. These houses, reports one long-term resident, will have no gardens to speak of but three bathrooms. Multiple bathrooms are incredibly suburban, as are en suites, paved gardens, fluffy designer dogs, coloured wellies and leaf blowers.
So we can expect more complaints about poo, which always seems problematic for suburban incomers. Friends in the next village had guests at their (dog-friendly) B&B leave ‘in disgust’ on spotting a dog poo in the courtyard that had been deposited since the morning pick-up. Another had a couple abandon her Airbnb two days early because they could see horse muck and sheep poo in a field from their bedroom window.
When I ask friends for other examples of suburban attitudes, I am inundated with examples from the Cotswolds and Oxfordshire, which some time between the opening of Soho Farmhouse and the arrival of the Beckhams became a sanitised theme park. One respondent mutters about ‘the couple in my village who are always saying how nice it is to find a Gail’s in Witney. Honestly, I think, just bog off back to Barnes’.
It’s all a long way from the Cotswolds of Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love in which ‘the cruel woods crept up to the house’, Fanny is woken by ‘the screams of a rabbit running in horrified circles round a stoat’ and pheasants and owls ‘filled every night with wild primeval noise’.
We thought we’d gone sufficiently far to find that wilderness. In bed on our first night in Norfolk, we congratulated ourselves on hearing the owl hooting instead of the police helicopter over Brixton. As I write, rutting muntjacs are barking their horrible call. The countryside is primeval, gritty and real – that’s why we moved here, not to the gated naffness of Virginia Water.
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