"Suburbs are not so bad I think": Stevie Smith's Problem of Place in 1930s and '40s London

Abstract

London and its outskirts became Greater London in the inter-war period" (Bowdler 103). With this simple declaration, geographer Roger Bowdler identifies the physi cal transformation of English landscape that underlies my analysis of Stevie Smith's literary fantasies about the suburbs. Described at the time as the "outskirts" and "fringes" o f the capital, London's suburbs achieved their regional identity as inter mediate or in-between spaces-between town and country, commerce and agricul ture, bricks and birds, crowds and calm. Semi-detached houses, arterial roads, new underground stations, building societies, mortgages, vanishing woods, disappear ing hedgerows, consumed villages, diverted streams-all of these geographical signs of tremendous social change accompanied the post-World War I mandate to build "Homes fit for Heroes." Suburbs had existed as identifiable regions in landscape and the public imagi nary long before the 1919 Housing or Addison Act led to the first interwar develop ment boom. Yet never had suburbs so troubled people's ideas of what it meant to be a Londoner or to be English. Smith merits special consideration in studies of this suburban trouble because, in contrast to the vast majority of 1930s and '40s writers, she does not naively celebrate or thoughtlessly excoriate the suburb in her writings. Instead, she uses her position as suburban insider to describe and ana lyze more acutely than others the ambivalent role of the suburb in English life. To

Making Sense of Suburbia through Popular Culture

“…Stevie Smith quoted at the top of this chapter was another portrayer of suburban satire in novels and drawings but her best-known work was poetry. Both academic and non-academic commentary on her life and work always remarks on how after being born in Hull she lived in the North London suburb Palmers Green (Bluemel 2003;Light 2004) until her death as a spinster, having been a one-time secretary at the BBC en route. These experiences shaped her lifeworld: the poem quoted at the start of this chapter satirizes the long-running anti-suburban prejudice among British intellectuals practiced among others by poets W. H. Auden, E. M. Waugh and novelist Graham Greene (Carey 1992;Gardiner 2010) who chronicled the tastelessness of 'stockbrokers' Tudor' and the commuter hell of the 'Little man' respectively.…”