Michael Gilson, Behind the Privet Hedge: Richard Sudell, the Suburban Garden and the Beautification of Britain (Reaktion Books, 2024)

I once got told off by a Conservative member of the Greater London Assembly for disrespecting the suburbs. I was making a specific point about the unsuitability of suburban-style housing in the inner city but I’d been glib and I felt duly chastened. In fact, that minor exchange might stand for quite a lot of left-leaning discourse regarding the suburbs. Michael Gilson quotes the architect Bill Howell describing his mission ‘to turn the tide back from the suburban dream … we don’t want to rush out and live in horrible little suburbs and semi-detached houses’.

In this respect, Gilson’s new book Behind the Privet Hedge – a biography of the significant, but neglected and sometimes derided, twentieth-century landscape architect Richard Sudell – provides an important corrective. His book not only rescues Sudell himself from the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’ but encourages us to think again about the politics of suburbia and its overlooked virtues.  Around 5 million homes were built in the interwar period (including some 1.1 million council homes), most of them in new suburbs. Gilson cites figures suggesting that by 1939 two thirds of houses in England and Wales had gardens and around 80 percent of households took part in some form of gardening. This, then, is a significant part of our social history, worthy of serious study.

A snobbish attitude towards the suburbs was reflected in disdain for suburban gardens, often caricatured (not altogether unfairly) for their ‘blowsy blooms’ and such other offences against superior taste as crazy paving and garden gnomes. Sudell, who reached a huge readership as author of the popular Town Gardening Handbook in 1927 and many later manuals and as gardening correspondent for Ideal Home and the Daily Herald, rejected such criticism. Indeed, he was frequently held by critics to be responsible for the very horticultural vulgarity they decried.

Sudell defended the small and unfashionable suburban garden for both practical and broadly political reasons. Practically, the English country garden style favoured by some commentators was too time-consuming and labour intensive for those whose gardening activity necessarily took place after work or at weekends. (Gilson points out that Gertrude Jekyll employed 11 full-time gardeners to maintain her much-admired garden in Surrey.) Politically, Sudell was adamant that ordinary people deserved the beauty and seclusion that a small garden could offer. ‘If there is one crying demand on most housing estates,’ he stated, ‘it is the need for trees and shrubs that will give the necessary degree of exclusion from the world’.

His advocacy of the modest suburban garden was then, as Gilson writes, a ‘deliberate choice not a failure of imagination’. And Gilson points out that while Modernists, for good reason, might reject the past, there were others – often those most directly involved in the recent turmoils of war – who very understandably ‘sought comfort in a return to a time of peace, comfort and progress: a withdrawal … to behind the privet hedge, if you like’.

Richard Sudell in later life, courtesy Sudell Family Archive

Having read this far, it might seem fair to conclude that Sudell was a decent but essentially conservative man. In fact, Sudell’s biography tells us something far more interesting. He was born, in 1892, to a lower middle-class family and left school at 14, his horticultural knowledge gained through apprenticeship and many years of hands-on experience. During the First World War, Sudell was a Conscientious Objector jailed three times for refusing even a non-combatant role.

The Footpath, Dover House Estate, 2017 © John Boughton

After the war, Sudell came to live on the Dover House Estate, the London County Council’s flagship scheme in the brief ‘Homes for Heroes’ era where he took a central role in the Roehampton Garden Society. Gilson writes well on the complex politics of this very ‘respectable’ estate and offers interesting insights into the surprisingly fraught question of working-class gardening in this era, promoted as rational recreation by many but criticised as domestication, even embourgeoisement (the adoption of middle-class life styles and values) by some on the left.

The winners of Nottingham City Council’s gardens competition, 1939

By this time, Sudell was mixing in radical and progressive circles, with close connections, for example to Clifford and Marjory Allen of the No-Conscription Fellowship, the future Labour MP Lucy Buxton, and Alfred and Ada Salter, Christian socialists and Labour politicians whose mission to beautify Bermondsey he supported. It’s notable that the three women in particular would play a continuing and significant role in organisations and campaigns to improve the environment and recreational opportunities of the country’s poorest citizens.

Sudell also planned a book, sadly never completed, entitled Towards a New Britain as the bombs rained down during the Second World War: ‘With cities going done like ninepins … it is our job to see that the new Britain arises on better terms than the old’ he said and advocated a National Planning Board to promote that outcome.

This reflected the almost feverish drive to plan a better, more socially just Britain that infused wartime and early post-war politics. For Sudell, it reflected too a longer-term ambition to establish landscape architecture as a key discipline in environmental planning and design, marked most strongly by his central role in the founding of the Institute of Landscape Architects in 1929. Sudell, however, was almost immediately sidelined in the Institute by more establishment figures such as Geoffrey Jellicoe and Thomas Mawson, an indication of the condescension felt by some to his more popular approach to gardening.

Sudell’s aspirations for post-war design were to be largely disappointed and landscape architecture as a discipline played a secondary role in post-war planning if that. Gilson notes some significant exceptions, notably Sylvia Crowe, most well known for her work in Harlow New Town, and Mary Mitchell who worked for Stevenage Development Corporation and then Birmingham City Council.

Dolphin Square, 2018 © Michael Gilson

Sudell’s private practice received some small post-war commissions from local councils and private companies such as de Havilland in Hatfield. Much of his work has been lost; his major landscaping scheme at Dolphin Square mansion block complex in Westminster, completed in the late 1930s and recently Grade II-listed, survives under threat. The book provides fuller detail on all this and much more.

Gilson concludes:

Sudell’s words and, as importantly, his actions, show he was a key figure. In advocating the democratization of the land, the beautification of Britain for the majority, the right of all to enjoy open spaces and find refuge in them from the strains of everyday life, he offers a fleeting glimpse of what might have been possible.

I think his book does justice to that argument.

There are naturally also questions it raises. By the 1930s, many commentators were criticising suburban sprawl and in the post-war period Green Belt policies were enacted to preserve the countryside. Multi-storey housing was a response to the ‘land trap’ that ensued and remains, at a time of climate crisis, a more sustainable and environmentally friendly solution. Even a conservative organisation such as Create Streets typically recommends higher-density housing solutions. In this context, my one gripe with the book is that Gilson, whilst plausibly defending the suburbs, relies on negative stereotypes of Modernist housing schemes – the Alton Estate is the subject of his particular ire – that are almost as lazy and superficial as those of Modernist critics towards the suburbs.

Despite that challenge, this is a book that is readable, thoroughly informative and one that offers a significant contribution to a neglected history.

We can leave the last word with Richard Sudell and perhaps agree on this:

We all desire a more beautiful world, a world which will inspire us to do better and nobler things.

Publication and purchase details for the book can be found on the Reaktion Books website.