The suburbs have long attracted criticism. In the 1852 novel Basil by Wilkie Collins it is said that anyone taking a trip to suburbia would most likely have taken leave of their senses because ‘its newness and desolateness of appearance revolted me.’ It is likely he was referring to what is now St John’s Wood. Yet suburbia today extends far beyond this with many features that would be unrecognisable to the Victorians.
The modern suburban landscape has experienced tumultuous events of late, sharply contradicting the idea of it as dreary and dull, and Jel McGill wrote recently about the relationship between suburbs and the city on these pages. There were ‘beds in sheds’ (dwellings in garden outbuildings) as a neo-Rachmanite private landlord response to housing supply issues. This summer saw ‘ads on vans’ in six suburban boroughs: Home Office-funded mobile hoardings urging illegal immigrants to ‘go home’, warning that there was nowhere to hide – recalling a 1970s National Front repatriation drive and Ealing comedy for its ooh, er missus depiction of handcuffs. ‘Carry on Being Illegal’ as former Ealing resident Sid James might have put it.
As a follow-on, suburban tube stations once built to ferry city commuters to and from their ‘dormitory town’ homes witnessed (potentially illegal) brutal spot-checks on anyone of the ‘wrong’ pigmentation ie the brown-skinned, with the government boasting via Twitterfeeds about arresting people, aiming to divide ‘them’ and ‘us’. So much for ‘we’re all in this together’ and the ‘big society’.
These isles have long been rightly recognised as having a harmonious record of race relations. Dark periods in our history have often led to action: the ostracisation of Enoch Powell from mainstream UK politics after his 1968 ‘rivers of blood’ outburst, the Macpherson report following the murder of Stephen Lawrence. In the week Doreen Lawrence was announced as a new Labour peer, it seemed we took two steps forward and three steps back with the revolting campaign with its blatant racial profiling. Forget overstaying Australians or Canadians, this applies if your face doesn’t fit. A year on from the Olympics when Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony and the medal haul from Brits of immigrant origins demonstrated the positive contribution of migration, this policy will only create distrust of all of darker hues. Nigel Farage was right when he declared that its main aim was to recapture the UKIP vote deserting the Tories in droves.
Yet the government is out of step. Be it in Wythenshawe, Solihull or Ealing – where I live – modern suburban life is not about a ‘wogs start at Calais’ mentality but instead is underscored by peaceful coexistence. The once semi-rural idyll of suburbia might have strained under the weight of hollowed-out high streets and the once distinctly urban characteristic of ethnic mix, but suburbia is a resilient place and is all the better for its modern diversity. The British National party has been sent packing from Burnley to Barking. With a shrinking, ageing deskilling population, immigration is needed – indeed, Boris Johnson campaigned in 2008 on a platform for regularising illegals.
In the pilot borough of Redbridge the Tory council leader decried ads on vans. Where the system is not working border controls surely need tightening. Fear and intimidation are not the answer. Following riots in 2011 in our cities and suburbs ‘unity’ was the watchword to guard against further repeats. Now it seems divisiveness rules OK – senior Liberal Democrats including Sarah Teather and Nick Clegg (as well as Farage) decried this Home Office initiative, highlighting the fragility of the coalition. If this harassment of ethnic populations continues, add in the heatwave and angry and bored youth, who knows what might lie round the corner? We might be able to say that the suburbs are revolting without implying twitching net curtains in any way whatsoever.
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Rupa Huq is senior lecturer in sociology at Kingston University. She tweets @RupaHuq
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