HE worst of it is that it is so dreadfully
suburban." How many times has not that criticism been passed by a visitor coming from one of the residential neighbour- hoods that lie in a ring an34here within twenty miles of a great city like London ? And what, precisely, is the adjec- Lye "suburban " intended to convey ? Used as it is often enough, with more than a nuance of dislike and contempt, for what does the description " suburban " stand P For some- thing, perhaps, which is neither fish, flesh, nor fowl ; is it even moderately good red-herring ? "I can understand anybody
liking to live in the depths of the country, or in the centre of everything in town," so the comment runs, addressed to those who have not had the discrimination, in choosing their resi- dence, to select a house in Berkeley Square, or a country estate ten niiles from a railway station. " But what I cannot understand is anybody liking to live in what is neither town nor country." Against that prejudice, which is understood to be possessed chiefly by those to whom an extra motor-car or so added to their establishment is a minor consideration, no argument prevails ; not even the plea that the railway service in and out of town is extremely fast and convenient. " I can't think how you can stand the suburbs," is the invariable and final comment.
It must be owned that so far as aesthetic pleasure derived from the contemplation of fine buildings and beautiful scenery is concerned there is a considerable amount to be said against most of the more or less thickly populated districts that border London. The builder or contractor who has purchased "valuable building , land" in the neighbour- hood of the great railway lines that run into the Metropolis has not been over-careful to see either that the beauties of the natural scenery should be so far as possible preserved, or that the houses which he dumps down in what were meadows yellow' with buttercups or woodland glades alive with fritillaries are anything more than so many hollow heaps of brick and mortar. The suburban builder has certain fixed and resolute notions. To begin with, he greatly dislikes a tree. A well-grown tree is too large for him ; so long as it is left standing it makes it impossible for him to utilise every square inch of the ground he has acquired on which to build houses. His first step, therefore, in dealing with the large pieces of ground which come into the market from time to time in a growing neighbourhood, and which originally formed the park or woods of what was once a single country estate, is to cut down the trees. The older and grander trees perhaps cannot be removed merely with an axe and a spade ; these he just blasts out of the ground. Next, everything must be like everything else. All the roads must be of the same width, and run in uniform directions; each house must resemble its neighbour so far as possible, except that there is a certain latitude allowed in the pattern picked out in yellow bricks on the background of red ; or there may be several different styles in white wooden balconies. Each garden, again, must measure so much by so much ; there must be so many feet in front of the house and so many behind; and after the garden is measured out, it has to be enclosed with a wooden fence, of which the black kind is the worst. Next, there must be winding gravel paths trailed in a serpentine manner round the garden near the fence; and last of all, you get your shrubbery, usually euonymus bushes with . a sprinkling of American currant trees and an occasional pink almond or syringa. With a small araucaria neatly situated in the front garden, the house and grounds are complete. One by one the square black hoardings announcing that "this eligible residence is to be let or sold " disappear as the newly married city clerk and his bride come into occupation ; scarcely a year has gone by since the first brick-load was driven into the corner of the hayfield, and another hideous addition has been made to the London suburbs.
All that does not happen everywhere, of course, and some of the suburbs contain many charming old houses and delightful gardens. Even the newest houses and gardens,. in other localities, are capable of being made pleasant to live in and pretty to look at, and their owners or occupiers are perfectly justified in claiming that it is possible for a suburban residence, even when it is one of a row of villas, to approximate, if only slightly, to the ideal country house which no doubt they would prefer to own or to live in. Still, it does happen year after year that more and more ugly little houses are being built in ugly surroundings; and if there is one meaning which the adjective " suburban " carries, when it is used in a depreciatory sense, it is a meaning which is reminiscent of small, fenced-in gardens, and cheap villas of no architectural value. And the reason is not far to seek. The fact that most newly built suburbs are ugly, and that the work of building new houses is invariably preceded by the destruction of whatever was beautiful in the surrounding scenery, is directly due to the arrangement by which what shall be built and what shall be destroyed is left to the individual, and is not controlled by a governing authority. If a contractor succeeds in purchasing a large park within a distance of, say, half-a-mile from a railway station half-an- hour or so out of London by train, he is allowed to proceed with his work of spoliation unhindered. It is nobody's business to forbid him, in the interests of the community which is eventually going to live in the houses he intends to build, to cut down a fins clump of beech trees, or to drain a bird-haunted lake, or to shut out a splendid view. The inhabitants of the neighbouring houses, watching the destruction of the last piece of " real country " near them, may rail bitterly against the invader, who possibly looks with a coarse eye on such amenities as trees and flowers. But they are powerless to fight against his hod and trowel, even though the pulling down of the park fence lowers the value of their own adjoining property.
It is gratifying to find this point enlarged upon in a valuable paper which appeared in Tuesday's Times, in refer- ence to Mrs. Barnett's scheme for creating a Garden Suburb at Hampstead, on the ground which has been offered by Eton College to the Garden Suburb Trustees. As the writer of the Times article points out, the suburb of St. John's Wood, which was originally an estate of some three hundred acres, is perhaps the only quarter of London which has been treated, so far as building is concerned, with any kind of design. It is the only quarter in which houses of varying sizes stand in the midst of gardens within a short drive of Charing Cross. Yet might not even St. John's Wood be improved upon, con- sidered as a residential neighbourhood P The problem before the Garden Suburb Trustees is, after all, if not a simple problem in itself, capable of being very simply stated. It is, shortly, this : given a stretch of woodlands and fields, inter- sected with water, shaded by fine trees on the one hand, and the necessity on the other hand of providing house accommodation for a certain number of rich and poor persons, how to build the houses without spoiling the scenery. That could only be effected by the right kind of house, rightly built in the right places. One object the Trustees keep steadily before them, and that is to avoid uniformity. The houses ought to be of different sizes. It ought to be possible for the labourer, or clerk of small means, to find a cottage in such a suburb which should have the advantage of the neighbourhood of a large house with a few acres of land. There would be no monstrous rows of cheap, dull houses; further, the suburb would have a kind of centre, or at least a prominent site, on which would stand the church and chapel, the public library, picture gallery, and so on,—all these of fine design, good building against a good background. But above and beyond all value which would belong to houses built in a neighbour- hood laid out on a definite, well-thought-out plan, there would also remain, blowing between house and house, over the uncut flowers of the hayfield and the unbroken boughs of tall trees, the unsullied breath of country air. There is no reason, except that the nineteenth century built carelessly, or, rather, allowed people to build carelessly, greedily, and badly, why there should be a ring of mockery in the name Camberwell Beauty, given to one of the finest of British butterflies years ago when pollarded willows lined the brooks of what is now an arid maze of alleys. Nor is there any reason to-day, if the Trustees of the Hampstead Garden Suburb achieve their end, why it should not be possible, just as in the days when the great City merchants first built their " country " houses within a few miles of Mincing Lane, for the City worker to take his choice of place of residence between the crowded, monotonous rows of villas in the newest of existing suburbs, and the equally conveniently situated " ideal " suburbs of the future. In the "ideal" suburb it will not be a matter for writing to the papers if the nightingales answer one another across the
valley, or the cuckoo calls all the June morning; and the word "suburban " will take on a new meaning.
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