London: The Biography

Just as areas such as Hammersmith and Camberwell could no longer be described as either town or country, but were now something partaking of both, so their inhabitants were mixed and ambivalent. Defoe had already noticed the emergence of “the Middle sort of Mankind, grown Wealthy by Trade, and who still taste of London; some live both in the City, and the Country at the same time.” Hybrid forms of architecture, too, began to emerge in these mingled landscapes. In the 1750s and 1760s, for example, villas emerged as standard suburban dwellings. They were soon visible in Islington and Muswell Hill, Ealing and Clapham, Walthamstow and South Kensington. It has been said that their example directly affected the appearance of a later and more extensive suburbia, with what John Summerson described as “the flood of Victorian house-building, that torrent of ‘villadom.’” This description may itself be said to partake of the somewhat dismissive attitude still adopted towards the suburbs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, yet the villas of the mid-eighteenth century anticipated the atmosphere and texture of later suburban life in more than an architectural sense. They embodied, for example, that privacy which was instinctive to the London character but which the city could no longer provide. One of the motives behind the movement towards the suburbs, both in its early and late forms, was to escape the sheer proximity of other people and other voices; the quietness of a modern suburban street may not equal the silence of villa grounds in Roehampton or Richmond, but the principle of exclusion remains the same. The villas were originally designed as dwellings for one family, of course, surrounded and protected from the depredations of the city. The notion of one unit as one family is indeed central to the later development of suburban life, where the yearning for safety and the relative anonymity of isolation have been equally powerful. The villas were “detached.” Cheaper versions for the more populous areas were in turn established upon semi-detachment.

There are social, and aesthetic, consequences attendant upon what some might see as retreat or regression. The original villas were a highly visible token of respectability-“of cheerfulness, elegance and refinement,” to quote a brochure of the period-and this vision of respectability sustained the suburbs for the next two centuries. The phrase “keeping up appearances” might have been coined for suburban living. But the original villas themselves introduced a form of artifice; they were not “villas” in any classical sense (certainly nothing like the Roman variant which would once have been seen all over southern England), and the illusion of country living was sustained only with a great amount of determination and ingenuity. The nineteenth-and twentieth-century suburbs were also involved in an elaborate game of make-believe, with the implicit assumption that they were not part of the city at all. In reality they were as much an aspect of London as Newgate or the Tottenham Court Road, but their principal attraction was still based on the assumption that they were free of the city’s noxious and contaminating influences.