It was an early and unwritten rule in “new” Labour’s cultural policy that nothing was to be called a “museum” any more. The word was too fusty and reminiscent of cobwebs. In Tony Blair’s “new” Britain, such things became an “experience”. Remember the Millennium Dome and its “Euan test”? In other words, Blair’s son would have to love it. Exhibits had to be interactive, with buttons for kids in order to uncover information in a process that educationalists term “situated cognition”.
However, now that the “Cool Britannia” effect has worn long off and given that we are still, despite encouraging signs that things may be improving, officially in the grip of recession, how do these establishments continue to ply their trade?
The answer, in the case of the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden, is to stage an exhibition on something to all intents and purposes pretty mundane and quotidian – Suburbia: from homes to gnomes, how public transport shaped the suburbs – and then supplement it with stuff such as an over-16s only evening with guided tours, live experimental music, DJs and, flouting the usual Transport for London regulations and Boris Johnson’s alcohol ban on public transport, a licensed bar. I went along last week to investigate this celebration of something that the commentariat has long reviled as embarrassingly naff, which runs until March 31 next year.
Exhibition posters from the inter-war years depict the lure of Hounslow and Edgware, with their promise of a healthier lifestyle away from cramped city conditions. Fast-forward to today and the adjective “suburban”, ostensibly a factually distance-based geographical description, has taken on the trappings of a particular lifestyle or mindset that is all too often seen as narrow-minded and boringly bourgeois.
For David Bownes, the London Transport Museum’s senior curator, it wasn’t really a risk to take on such a subject. “English Heritage reckon that eight out of 10 people in England live in the suburbs and there is just something so appealing about that entire lifestyle.”
The ethnicisation of suburbia is something largely absent from the exhibition, which instead concentrates on the growth of the suburbs of the older Victorian variety to the ribbon development – building houses along the roads radiating from a town – of the 1930s.
“You don’t want to be tokenistic with an exhibition to the public” is Bownes’ explanation. “You don’t want to say: ‘This is a Jewish area’ or whatever and yet suburbia seems to be a style that has appeal beyond the group of people it was initially intended for.
“The architecture was designed for a white, lower-middle-class group. It was designed to say: ‘This is what you want. You don’t want to live in, say, Camden – an inner area. You want to live in this, because it looks like olde England. And yet that architectural value has now a much broader appeal. There are certain middle-class suburbs that have become very associated with certain groups – Golders Green is a very good example [it’s associated with Jewish settlement]. I think Wembley [a site of Indian migration] is another. It’s semi-detached, on a manageable scale. It’s affordable, but it’s reassuring in some way.”
For anyone wondering what class has to do with this the answer is a great deal. “Initially, everywhere was an estate, because they were trying to claim an aristocratic heritage. Then, in the 1920s, ‘estate’ became associated with social housing and was quickly dropped. From about 1925 onwards, everything was either a park or a garden city”, Bownes states.
Of course, there are many manifestations of suburbia. Becontree in the borough of Barking and Dagenham and both Wythenshaw and Burnage in Manchester are examples of corporation suburbia. These are the sites of the “homes fit for heroes” which, since the introduction of the right to buy and whatever we thought about that at the time, have probably extended the property-owning suburban dream further than its initially envisaged reach – for those who got lucky.
The London Transport Museum’s Suburbia evening event attracted a largely young and trendy crowd – not really the types to whom you might apply the terms “trainspotter” or even “suburban”.
But is suburbia almost being mocked through this kitschy form of celebration? Bownes seems horrified by such a suggestion. Certainly, the exhibition in general and the evening event, with the displays of quaintly-worded early examples of advertising and transport-themed quiz sessions, are rather more affectionate than some of the sneering comments that this much maligned part of the city has at times attracted. I learned a lot in an absorbing few hours.
As I left this novel and nocturnal event for my suburban tube line home, the underground sounds of the night were still ringing in my ears. For me, the thumping dubstep bass was felt through the gut as much as heard. That’s a result of living in the suburbs perhaps, although my diminishing tolerance of high decibel levels could also be a sign of getting old.
