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.
That wholesome dream, shared by many does not obscure the fact that suburbia has been associated with a darker politics of place, however: in the UK, the drawing out of the affluent from city centres into garden suburbs driving greater residential segregation; in the US, with racist covenants that prevented homeowners from selling their homes to African and Asian Americans, and the straitjacketing of women into Stepford housewifery.
Now research published last month suggests that living in the suburbs might not make us particularly happy. It is well established that living in urban areas is associated with higher rates of depression than rural areas. But in a new study, researchers from Yale University looked at the risk of depression in different types of Danish neighbourhoods and found the risks of depression were highest not in dense inner-city areas – in fact, they were lowest for people living in multistorey buildings with open space separating them – but in “sprawling suburbs”.
There are some health warnings in interpreting these findings. The academics are explicit that this is a case of correlation, not causation: it may be that people at higher risk of depression are more likely to move to the suburbs, rather than suburban life acting as a driver of poorer mental health. Denmark is a more equal society, with an altogether better reputation for urban planning than the UK, so the analysis may not read across.
Despite these limitations, this study is just the latest to pose important questions about how our living environments relate to our wellbeing. The average Brit spends 90% of their time indoors. Before the pandemic, most of my waking hours were in other places: my workplace, restaurants, cinemas and theatres, friends’ houses; I saw my flat as not much more than the place to stop and start my day. Lockdown changed that; I started to put a bit more energy into making it more homely. It wasn’t just me; home improvement proved a popular lockdown project.
Our physical built environment matters for our mental health. But think of the UK’s new-build housing and the first words that come to mind are ugly and flimsy. In the capital, high-rise oblong eyesores that look like they might not be there in 50, let alone 100, years obscure the landscape. It’s not just a city problem: in Cheshire, where my sister lives, development after development of unattractive cookie-cutter houses are crammed into plots so close you can see into your neighbour’s windows.
A 2021 government commission on “living with beauty” concluded that “we have been turning our country into an unsightly nowhere” and that beauty, perhaps never a very British value, has become confined to enclaves affordable only for the wealthy. Ugliness is the product of the power dynamics of Britain’s housebuilding sector, dominated by a few big players incentivised to build and sell quick, and an elite approach to architectural design that means professional preferences for beauty are often out of step with those of the people actually living in the homes they design. It’s not just our home, but where it is: traditional and organic town planning that organised lives around the market square or the high street gave way to modern urban design that produced dense centres surrounded by scattered suburbs and out-of-town shopping and leisure centres.
That’s why the attractive concept of the 15-minute city, the idea that everything you need is within a 15-minute walk or cycle of where you live, is seen as so powerful by many local politicians. Paris and Barcelona have been experimenting with variations on this theme, and city councils in the UK, including Oxford and Birmingham, have shown interest.
“Where” also matters in relation to our geographical social connections. How many friends and loved ones do we have within a short distance that means we can spontaneously meet up or pop round for a cup of tea without having to trek 45 minutes to the other side of a city or to the next town? For many of us, urbanisation has expanded horizons and social circles but life in a big conglomeration can feel very atomised.
A Substack post captured imaginations earlier this year in which the author explained how – through a combination of regularly hosting friends, subletting rooms short term and actively matching housemates within her social circle – she encouraged a cluster of about 20 friends to move close to her and her husband in their Brooklyn neighbourhood. It reminded me of a friend who’s just bought her first flat in north London’s Crouch End and regularly sends a group of us property listings in an attempt to get us to move closer.
Britain’s housing market is so dysfunctional that a rallying cry of “beauty for all” might seem hopelessly out of reach for owners and renters alike. There are some chinks of light: in Norwich in 2019, a social housing development won the Stirling architectural prize for the first time.
In a rental sector where a quarter of homes don’t even meet basic decency standards, perhaps it seems utopian to think we should be prioritising beauty and connection in the way we build. That is itself a sign of just how much people’s expectations have been compressed by a system that works for landowners and builders over the human need for a home.
• Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist
