Little boxes, all the same

This book purports to be a history not of London but of its suburbs. In the end this amounts to much the same thing, because the author is referring not to the present suburbs but to all the suburbs of London that have ever been, from Southwark onwards.  After Boadicea sacked their original wooden settlement, the Romans rebuilt it using stone, putting up walls that lasted for almost 2,000 years. Within these walls was the city, and ‘without’ were the suburbs. This book, then, is a history of London minus the Square Mile (in other words of the 599 other square miles).

The epithet ‘suburban’ has tended in latter years to be used snootily by those who regard themselves as fully-detached cosmopolitans. Margaret Thatcher and Finchley come to mind — though of course Thatcher actually lived in Chelsea, not far from the Arts Club. The truth is that, with few exceptions, people travel to work. They commute. They are suburban. Crouch End, for example, is full of journalists and actors and musicians: the last thing they would describe themselves as being is suburban, but that is what they are. In fact almost 70 per cent of London’s population is suburban. To be urban you have either to be very well-off or the opposite.

The story of London is broadly familiar. The royals and government went west and industry and commerce went east. Playwrights and pimps went south. North of the Euston Road were fields and the odd village before the coming of trains.

Starting with the Romans, Nick Barratt runs us through Alfred, Edward the Confessor, 1066, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the Black Death, the Great Fire and the Gordon Riots until we get to the railways, when suburbia proper begins to flourish.