Poking fun at suburbia and its residents has long been a staple of popular culture. From the self-importance of Holloway-residing Charles Pooter in George and Weedon Grossmith’s 1892 The Diary of a Nobody, to Tom and Barbara’s zeal for self-sufficiency in Surbiton in the 1970s sitcom The Good Life, gentle digs at suburban living are a time-honoured British comic tradition.
There’s often a hint of snobbishness about it, too, that jars slightly with me as a child of suburbia. Monotonous houses, nosy curtain-twitchers, tedious commutes: the suburbs have a bad rep. Yet for my parents, everything they represented – a detached home, a garden, a garage – was firmly aspirational when they first moved to the UK as teenagers in the 1960s, and it was a huge source of pride when they eventually made it there with their two young daughters.
