‘Your Environment Makes as Little Sense as your Life’: Post-War Suburbia 1945–1980

Abstract

Suburbia in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, as can be seen by the most casual observation of any British city today, consisted of a bewildering range of built spaces. Mark Clapson attempts to identify four key post-war suburban developments: ‘suburban peripheral projects’, ‘new towns’, ‘expanded towns’ and ‘central redevelopment areas’ (Clapson, 1). Concurrent with this multiplication of suburban building types and landscapes, there was also a complex movement of people; both out towards the periphery, but also reverse flows back to the inner suburbs and the urban centre. Many of these flows would be migrants from the former Empire, or from Ireland, drawn in the fifties to decaying inner suburbs such as Brixton and Camberwell, Kilburn, Notting Hill and Tower Hamlets. These twin concerns, of complex types of built landscapes and accompanying social migrations, are a key image used in much planned discussion of the reconstruction of London and its suburbs in the post-war years.