Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Edith Sitwell, aristo-poet and dreary snob, whose 17th-century ancestral home came with vast gardens and staff to tend them, once described working-class novelist DH Lawrence as looking like “a plaster gnome on a stone toadstool in some suburban garden”. Then, as now, “suburban” is reserved for special horticultural disdain in Britain.Sitwell’s insult sets the scene for the journalist Michael Gilson’s new history of suburban gardening, a book that urges us to examine what lies behind reflexive arrogance towards the efforts of ordinary people.Gilson’s principal suburban hero is Richard Sudell (1892-1968), a working-class, largely uneducated, Kew-trained horticulturist, journalist, Quaker and conscientious objector. Behind the Privet Hedge is a loose biography of Sudell, whose career traces upheavals in social and horticultural history. Some chapters deal mostly with the machinations of social and housing policy; others delve into its effects on lives. A key figure in the Garden City movement — the idea of a planned residential community away from urban centres as an answer to the Victorian problem of slums and overcrowding — Sudell spent a lifetime evangelising that gardens be at the forefront of rebuilding Britain after both wars.Far from dull and conformist, much of the early 20th-century horticultural scene among people living on the edges of towns and cities turns out to be radical, even revolutionary. Gilson’s book is about forgotten heroes with sincere convictions building a new, egalitarian society. In an era characterised by inequality and loneliness, these stories are both deeply anachronistic and oddly progressive.Sudell’s charming term ‘beautification’ is echoed in contemporary lingo: ‘greening’, ‘gentle density’ and the vogue for ‘biophilic’ designGilson starts with Sudell’s imprisonment for conscientious objection in his early twenties during the first world war, and his associations with socialist Christians and other radicals.After Sudell’s release, some of his work involved promoting gardens as social glue: instructing on basic gardening techniques, offering access to seeds and equipment through community sharing schemes, writing newsletters and so on. The rest was political. Sudell was a near-compulsive setter-upper and runner of organisations, from the Roehampton Estate Garden Society serving the London estate where he briefly lived, to the leftwing Institute of Landscape Architects in 1929, a form of which still exists.In the UK capital, from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th, the London County Council built Arts and Crafts-style housing across vast new estates, which contributed to population flow from inner-city slums to semi-rural outer areas.House building accelerated after the 1919 Addison Act, which offered government subsidies for working-class housing. Later acts in the 1920s and ’30s provided for slum clearance and more new housing as a social benefit. By 1939, more than 700,000 new homes had been built.Downham in Lewisham (1924-30) and Becontree in Dagenham (1921-35) were among the biggest examples in London. The need for scale meant that estates could be monotonous (Becontree housed 120,000 people, according to Gilson). But visit these estates today and they seem extraordinarily generous by modern standards of social housing. Every house has a front and back garden.Gardens may have been modest, but they were an entirely new pleasure for ordinary people, offering space and privacy available previously only to a few. Tenants needed support and guidance, but once they had it, they were unstoppable. By the mid-20th century, gardening had become a national craze. One chapter deals with the aesthetics of suburban gardens, even putting up a spirited defence of the garden gnome. Some of Gilson’s assertions are questionable. He sets up Sudell in conflict with modernists in thrall to Bauhaus principles. That seems unfair. Fresh air and planned exterior spaces were key to Bauhaus ideas on good housing.In an early chapter, Gilson visits the modernist 1950s Alton estate built by LCC and perhaps the closest London came to Le Corbusier’s unrealised ideal of Ville Radieuse, and near to the Roehampton cottage-garden estate of 1926 where Sudell briefly lived. Gilson looks around and dismisses Alton as having “the unmistakable feel of desolation”, without asking its residents how they feel about their homes (there are plenty of people to ask: 13,000 live here). He confirms his impressions instead with a little light googling for crime stories in the local press.Later, Gilson revisits the theme, taking to task Geoffrey Boumphrey, architectural critic and ally of Metroland’s greatest sceptic, the poet John Betjeman, for suggesting in 1935 that suburban sprawl should be halted in favour of high-rise garden cities, an idea that horrifies Gilson. But the concept has merit. Modern “garden skyscrapers” — Eindhoven’s Trudo Vertical Forest social housing project, for example — are largely successful.The strength of Behind the Privet Hedge is its determination to place working-class people at the centre of horticultural history. Gilson has a great eye for the counterargument. To modern readers, Sudell could seem like a pious, paternalistic do-gooder, or a green activist avant la lettre. Gilson anticipates modern sensibilities and reframes them with context and sympathy.Much of Sudell’s organising work was dismantled in the latter half of the 20th century, as Gilson sets out. But perhaps his legacy lies less in the modern horticultural establishment and more in self-reliant urban groups such as the guerrilla gardening movement. Sudell’s charming term “beautification” is echoed in contemporary lingo: “greening”, “gentle density” and the vogue for “biophilic” design.Yet English suburban gardens are still disdained and probably always will be, despite their roots in leftwing activism, working-class creativity and, as Gilson describes it, “the aspirations of people to create their own homes, their own space and make a mark that says: this is mine. The rest is a matter of taste.”Behind the Privet Hedge: Richard Sudell, the Suburban Garden and the Beautification of Britain by Michael Gilson Reaktion Books £16.95, 328 pages Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen
