The Freedoms of Suburbia
By Paul Barker
Frances Lincoln, £25
FT Bookshop price: £20
Paul Barker, social commentator, essayist and former editor of New Society magazine, grasps the privet in his latest book on the way Britain lives with his apologia for decentralism, The Freedoms of Suburbia.
From the mock Tudor semi-detached house to the (im)mobile home, Barker shows that this is how most of Britain prefers to live – as opposed to the current UK government’s prescriptivist blue-print for shoe-horning everyone into tiny two-bedroomed city flats or the creation of so-called eco-towns of up to 15,000 houses without educational, health or community services. “There is nothing ecological about the amount of petrol it would require to live in them and commute for every known need”.
Mixing acute and often amusing social observation with historical perspective, Barker harnesses to his argument the authority of sociologists and authors Deborah Cohen, Stewart Brand, Jane Jacobs, and JM Richards, whose Castles on the Ground is now sadly out of print.
Built on George Bernard Shaw’s maxim, “Do not do unto others as you wish they should do to you, their tastes may not be the same”, Barker’s argument for what works in practice versus Whitehall’s witless directives makes this book required reading before the next election.
