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| The Freedoms of Suburbia by Paul Barker We love to hate the suburbs but for Paul Barker they are places of humanity where individuality flourishes, says Rachel CookeI grew up on the west side of Sheffield, close to Broomhill, a place which, in 1961, John Betjeman celebrated as "the prettiest suburb in England". Is it pretty? Handsome would be a better word, though I only think so now. At the time, I neither loved it nor hated it; those streets, wide and quiet, were simply a backdrop for my interminable teenage psychodramas. Besides, it was the 1980s. The city centre was unimaginably bleak. Hardly anyone lived there and, in my opinion, no one in their right mind would want to if they could help it. The city was where you went to buy cheap shoes and Thorntons toffee. Then you went home again, on the bus, for the miraculous price of 2p. When I was 18, however, I met a boy called Crispin, who was going to the same university as me. Crispin was different to everyone I knew and not only because of his neon sign of a middle-class name. I remember the evening he told me that his parents – they were academics – had bought a terraced house in town, close to Sheffield United's football ground. Wasn't that cool? Inwardly, I felt nothing but astonishment. What? Outwardly, I bluffed. Yeah, really cool, I said. I mean, who wants a house with a... drive?Thus, in one fell swoop, I became an unsuspecting modernist. So far as suburbia was concerned, I now had a position. Years later, when a girlfriend told me how little she cared for bay windows, I managed not to say: "But they allow such a lovely feeling of space and light!" I nodded gravely and thought of a certain redbrick house in Bramall Lane. That was flat-fronted, too. The Freedoms of Suburbia pushes gently at this kind of learned snobbery, though its author, Paul Barker, admits that he, too, was once prey to it; when he bought a flat-fronted house in London's Kentish Town – "the kind that modernists approved of" – his first act was to uproot the privet hedge in the front garden, his second to chip its enamelled name, "Bowerhayes", from the fanlight above the door. He also bricked up any remaining fireplaces, which gives you an idea of how long ago this must have been, though he does not provide a date.These days, Barker is a little more open-minded. Partly, this is down to age. We all get there in the end. I grow old... I grow old.... and I want, if not to wear my trouser bottoms rolled, certainly to have a pocket-sized garden and the illusion that my neighbours are more than three feet away from me. But it is also that the suburbs have endured like almost nothing else in British life. Some 84% of us now live in some form of suburbia, the vast majority in houses inspired, even if only distantly, by the arts and crafts architects CFA Voysey and MH Baillie Scott.London is now, thanks to its suburbs, a 100-mile city. Such victories do not mean that we must all learn to love pebbledash. But perhaps – Lord Rogers excepted – we can finally accept that a semi with bay windows and a hall wide enough to hold what used to be called a console table is a fine thing indeed and a good deal more humane than anything that ever leapt off Berthold Lubetkin's drawing board. Barker's book is a ramble rather than a polemic, but it meanders through this hoary old argument nevertheless: naturally, the Smithsons, architects of the brutalist Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar, east London, are here in all their unsmiling, totalitarian glory, standing proxy, as usual, for everything that went wrong in postwar planning. But he is careful to remind us that the modernists did not invent suburbophobia. It was in 1829 that George Cruikshank published his cartoon "On the march of bricks and mortar", in which he fretted about the houses then being thrown up in Camden Town and Islington.In 1928, Clough Williams-Ellis, the architect of Portmeirion, and his wife, Amabel, published England and the Octopus. The octopus was suburbia. Nine years later, they published Britain and the Beast. The beast was the bungalow (which first became popular in the 1860s). This is useful information if, like me, you are the kind of person whose blood pressure rises terrifyingly on catching site of a scarlet-bright Wimpey development, though there is, I suppose, a tipping point and perhaps the south of England has already reached it. What Barker mostly relishes about suburbs – the irony! – is their quirky individuality. Far from being bland, boring and uniform, they are, he thinks, bricks-and-mortar proof that an Englishman's home is his castle – literally, in some cases. Among many fine photographs in the book is one of Highfort Court flats, in Kingsbury, north London, designed in 1936 by the architect Ernest Trobridge to demonstrate his Swedenborgian belief in symbolism (the building's chimneys are turrets, its entrance a drawbridge).It is Barker's contention that, whatever the architects tell us, the semis of Kenton and Bromley are far more important to us collectively than the Barbican and Trellick Tower, and he is surely right about this, though I cannot share his enthusiasm for shopping malls. But for me, the real effect of his essay was appropriately small scale and site-specific. Flipping through the book again, I found myself staring hungrily at a particularly fine piece of topiary in Waltham Abbey, Essex. I'd like a bit of that action in my garden, I thought. Dear me. How times change.ArchitectureRachel Cookeguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
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Katie Price's life? It's a price worth paying One of Jordan's biographers defends the public's right to know all in this celebrity-obsessed ageGlum faces all round at Waterstone's. The celebrity biography, they say, is on the way out, hitting sales and forcing the departure of its managing director. There was similar gloom a week earlier from the Bookseller on the death of the celebrity memoir.Except that some of us are seeing a very different picture. I have been writing celebrity biographies for the best part of 10 years under the name of Emily Herbert and on the same day that Waterstone's management was weeping into its beer, I discovered that my latest book, on the travails of Katie Price and her estranged spouse, had just reached the number one slot in the paperback non-fiction bestseller list. Celebrity biography dead? I don't think so.Nor do the figures bear this out. Yes, book sales in December overall were down by 1.2%, partly because of less interest in celebrity names; Ant and Dec, who wrote the biggest celebrity memoir of the year, sold "only" 309,083 copies, as opposed to Paul O'Grady's 2008 total of 664,000. But last year, seven of the top 10 hardback non-fiction bestsellers were celebrity-linked and, on the paperback front, eight out of the top 10 came from the people who dominate television screens.Claims that the cult of celebrity remains strong is not going to be greeted with unalloyed joy by everyone. The celebrity biography gets a bad press from some quarters, with complaints that no one is interested, or shouldn't be, in the thoughts of some jumped-up, two-bit contestant on a reality television show.But that is what a substantial portion of the population wants to read. We all know it's everyone's aim to be famous these days and it is inevitable that popular reading matter will reflect that.There is huge interest in women like Katie Price, the late Jade Goody and, to a lesser extent, Kerry Katona, perhaps because, unlike the distantly beautiful Angelina Jolie, they are one of us made good. Also, people have always loved gossip. As social life becomes virtual rather than based around the village hall, people don't exchange confidences about their neighbours any more, because they don't know them. So they become obsessively interested in people they see on television.There's still a fair bit of mileage in the celebrity memoir/biography/autobiography – it's just that the rules have changed. For a start, there's no point in flogging a dead horse, and second, you have to find the right celeb. One of the major disappointments of last year was Peter Kay's Saturday Night Peter, which sold 249,534 copies, less than a third of the sales of his first memoir, The Sound of Laughter, in 2006.But that is two autobiographies in three years, which most – but not all – celebrities do not merit. It was also a very short book that cost £20. People aren't mugs; for that kind of money, they want 400 pages and at least one juicy revelation, not a "hilarious journey" through the nation's pubs.Then there's the choice of celeb. Sean Connery, whose memoir appeared in paperback last year, must have seemed a dream candidate for an autobiography, but in his book, Being a Scot, did he tackle the oft-made allegation, which he denies, that he was violent to his first wife, Diane Cilento? No, he did not. Rather, he devoted page after page to what he thought about, er, being a Scot… We have a limited time on this planet. Who, with the possible exception of Alex Salmond, is going to devote one second of their lives to reading that?But get it right and you have quite a different story. John Blake, the acknowledged master of the genre, is an ex-editor of the People and the instigator of the Bizarre column in the Sun, which practically created celebrity culture as we know it today. His background is in journalism, not publishing, and he has a far greater understanding of what people actually want to read. It was he who published Being Jordan in 2004, the first of many volumes devoted to the subject of Katie Price (this one not written by me). Just about every other publisher in the country had turned it down, so he bought it for £10,000 and it turned into a massive bestseller, to date selling more than one million copies.And then there's the money. John Blake paid £10,000 for that manuscript, not £5m, which is what Wayne Rooney got for a five-book deal. Other authors wail that publishers are diverting funds to celebrities that could be used on cultivating literary fiction; where sums like that are concerned, they're right. Many publishers have simply been laying out far too much and not getting a return on their investment and it's patently obvious you can't run a business like that.But get it right and the public's appetite for celebrity gossip is as strong as it's ever been. Apart from my own offering, Katie Price has written (or rather, her ghostwriter has written) about four autobiographies (one loses track) and countless novels and children's pony books. And guess what? They all sell. In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes – and when they are, they're going to get signed up by some canny publisher. So to those who hate it, I can only say: tough luck, there's life in the celebrity memoir yet.Virginia Blackburn's Katie v Peter: The Inside Story of Their Divorce (John Blake £7.99) is published under the name Emily Herbert Publishingguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |