Tales From Outer Suburbia

These pictures are from a childrens' book 'Tales From Outer Suburbia' by Shaun Tan.  The stories and illustrations have that folk suburb Wyrd-on-Suburb feel: the vibrations of other forces - and the sense that anything is probable - that surround and weave in and out of the outer suburb where it meets the country; always undermining any attempts to keep it at bay, through building, covering over or ignoring it.

'tis appling time

Was out walking today and passed an unusual suburb site: a front garden apple tree, laden with red fruit & with many dropped into the remaining narrow strip of grass, the rest being monoblocked.
I have not seen an apple tree in the front garden.  The interwar suburb, in my memory, was thick with apple and other fruit trees: our house had an apple tree at the top and we would swap excess fruit with next door, who had a plum and a pear tree.
I imagine that these trees were planted by keen new householders, or even thrown in by the builders.  But much of the suburb was laid over farmland: and my grandparents' house was one of many built around a farmhouse, the farm having presumably sold off their land (the shrunken farm lingered on into the 1950s or 60s before being replaced by a primary school).  In these cases, fruit trees appeared oddly in gardens: a parcelled out orchard.
I tried to get a photo of today's tree, but the householder wanted to know what I was doing.

Castles in the suburb

Folk suburb loves the old speaking in the new, and this castle wall stands hidden in the May and Elder at the end of a road of semi-detacheds.  You can step out of the normal car-washing and pressure sprayers, in a Hill Of Dreams kind of way, and climb the footpath that is visible only in a slightly crushed note to the ramsons, and emerge, brushing through the bramble briar, in this hollow, where all is silent except for the start up of a lawnmower somewhere below.
I also like this graffiti, carved rather than sprayed: BUTCH 1982.  Suburb folk in itself.

Extension No.1

As promised.  For this first extension I have selected this 60s/70s garage-lounge combination, with sunken garage.  There is something 60s about the flat roof and below-street-level garage, aswell as the faux-rustic stonework, while it is culturally redolent of the 70s suburb, when these type of extensions had bedded in to their laburnum soaked pavements, with a faint musk of Invisible Man-era USA.  Or what we imagined the USA to be like.  In the background of these, though, would be a view of a distant stone farm house, huddled in a circle of beech trees and crows.

Added either side of the garage door have been pre-cast chess knights - maybe reflecting a hobby of the builder/commissioner.
There is something Elizabethan about the commissioning of this detail, even if it is bought out of the builders yard, to reflect a life: and live on it does: verily the Folk Suburb indeed.

Also, in this view, is the germ of a future series in the 'doorside lamp', and the scaly aiming-at-a-Spanish-feel renderwork round the door is a remembrance of holidays in Franco's blasted fishing villages (see also the more Godzilla-like application of this style in a previously covered extension).

Advance That Standard

Due to one thing after another I've not been able to put anything up here for a while.  However, the ol' Suburban Standard will be advanced once more next week with a new series on home extensions.  Can't wait eh?

Meanwhile, you might like to take a look at cabin'd cribb'd confin'd, where I have done something.

Imageless Images

Sadly, due to computing issues, we have no pictures this week.

As an anitdote to a rash of paved over drives and solar lamps, at the end of last summer, I planted a blackcurrant bush, picked up cheap at B&Q.  It is now beginning to burst its buds: green and yellow leaves unfurling from the pink buds like indoor fireworks, or the newspaper palms we had to make at this time of year, every year, for Palm Sunday.

1980: Already, the golden vegetable and fruit age of the suburb was dying, but I didn't see it.

I have started considering the world of Folk Suburban window sited ceramics, blasting & blessing as I go.  This week I wish very much to blast! a display of off-the-shelf vases I have seen in a window round the corner.  Alternating are Superdrug-pink and white vases, in strictly equal number.  I am imagining these have been bought, all at once, and for a 'look', with no real care whatsoever.  No piece or assembly is important, and will be gone again in a year when the colours 'go out'.  They stand opposite the remains of an ancient orchard, marked now only by a wall.
I beg leave to bless!, however, a nearby china robin on a ceramic mound of rubble, painted green on the top part and with Happy Christmas picked out in gold and white on the lower.  The robin's breast is too red, and its wings too brown, but this robin, sitting in a windowsill as it does all year round, I only presume was given with care, and is thus proudly displayed.

News reaches the Folk Suburb of the final landing of the space shuttle.  A metal model of this lives in our house somewhere.
I was drawn to remember the evening of the first landing - it was a summer's evening, I am sure, where the sun shone low, pale yellow gone to white through a slightly misty haze of tired heat; stuffed with gnats.  We were playing a game, I remember it well, of attempting to chip-land a football on the rows of haysweet cut grass in the park.  It was already turning grey, from lying there so late in the day.
The sky, I remember, was clear pure blue; maybe with a 'plane streak in it, I'm not sure.  I'm sure my mum, washing up in the shade of the kitchen, would have warned of chopped up dog shit being in the clippings.

Lateish - and people are disappearing inside to watch the shuttle come in to land. The light rushes silently out from the old lanes.  We stayed in the park, with the gnats, chipping the football.

Folk Suburb #5

In the moment you are tired, dog-tired, but near no bed; when one world oscillates with another, and another one can be magicked, accessed through the tired sight of one object, the smell of one some thing, the temperature of something, that is when the folk suburb reveals itself: in the right circumstances, like catching the fairy ring occupied.

They asked him to go a-hunting.  A bottle of Diet Sparkling Florida Orange is opened at the desk opposite.  I am dog-tired, coming in and out.  Suddenly, the deep orange colour, and the smell of synthetic oranges, sends, like Orwell's King Zog poster, back - to a particular glass bottle of Corona Orange.
There is parched grass.  Here is a park, deliberately laid out (unlike our 'playing fields'), and it is reached by a lane, this lane, joining our world to that - a steep lane, bordered by high hedges and brambles.  The hedges screen the sound of the suburb, on this hot afternoon: the scraped plates, the sawn wood, the snatch of conversation carried suddenly by the heat; and, in early autumn, they will be filled with fat blackberries.

But it is now.  We emerge, come out, opposite the park, more or less, in shorts probably.  There are Edwardian pictures that exist of boys in black shorts & high collars (it must be Sunday) prodding at paper boats with sticks in a pond (long gone), but it retains an aviary and a putting green.

We are heading there now, excited.  And these bold and wicked villains, took his life away.  None of them are there now - the birds, mostly budgies and canaries - are all dead, and the putting green is returned to grass.  Someone's job they left for, every morning in the summer, was to sit in the temporary hut handing out clubs and balls and scoring cards, printed on warm, blotting paper-like paper.  They are gone now.
There is one hole that resembles one of those Jamboree biscuits and the humps have dried out and are grassless, in the hot weather.  We lie out on them.
In the autumn, the metal flags will be packed away again, and the green willl be just a hedged off rectangle , bumped like an iron age fort; all but empty of all but its history.  We watch the flags being put away again.

But soon the orangeade is Diet Sparkling again - a bottle.  All those people are gone.  And in the ditch there is no water, only brush and briar grew.  They could not hide the blood of slaughter, so in the lane his body threw.

Folk Suburb #4

In the moment you are tired, dog-tired, but near no bed; when one world oscillates with another, and another one can be magicked, accessed through the tired sight of one object, the smell of one some thing, the temperature of something, that is when the folk suburb reveals itself: in the right circumstances, like catching the fairy ring occupied.

In the evening after dark, the blackleg miner creeps to work, with his moleskin trousers and dirty shirt, there goes the blackleg miner!  As I was walking home from work, wagtails were wandering the pavement, the striped hands of crocus leaves heading for the light of dusk, and the blackbird sang its song the same colour as the branches it was on.  When out of one house came a smell of meat and gravy - just like that; there was something about the gravy, or the meat, or the gravy and the meat, that was transportingly of Brain's faggots, and gravied chips, out of the chip shop, in a past similar end of dusk, when the very clouds smelt of drizzle.  Walking home from a school cross country.
Away across the school field where I had shivered in a yellow vest waiting to start the race, was this falling Camelot into disrepair.  I see it now, as I ignored them then, these many, these tucked away, small, condensation wet and drizzly forgotten things of small industry in small farmer's fields.
When young, we played around the bricks and stones as sure in our own minds that these were castles, not mines, like on the public information films before Grandstand; a cross in the country of magick and safety.
Don't go near that mine: across the way they've stretched a line to catch the blackleg miner. To catch the throat and break the spine, of that dirty blackleg miner.

Then, the walking has taken me away from the smell and drizzle, and the image is holdable no longer.

(In passing, I understand this particular mine engine house has been tidied up, and now stars in a bit of landscape in the development mentioned in Folk Suburb #3.)

8: Odd Corners

In an attempt to avoid the closing in of a dank Sunday, we took a walk in the suburb - and here are two odd corners we found.

The first is this wyrd almost circular hollow on the top of a hill -

which put me kind of in mind of an Arthur Machen story.  The hill is, reputedly, where Mary, Queen of Scots, stood to watch some battle en route to Fotheringay.  The circular hollow is not mentioned on the sign board and, in its middle, is this strange tree -

A suitable sized item pushed into the hole at the top comes out of the hole at the bottom. 

The second 'odd corner' is slightly more man made, but affecting nonetheless as the kind of place of which Suburb Folk Memory is made.  The quiet of this square of garages is what you notice, compared even with the none-too-noisiness of the suburban streets you step off to reach it.  It, too, is Machen-like.  Rabbits live in it.

Folk Suburb #3

In the moment you are tired, dog-tired, but near no bed; when one world oscillates with another, and another one can be magicked, accessed through the tired sight of one object, the smell of one some thing, the temperature of something, that is when the folk suburb reveals itself: in the right circumstances, like catching the fairy ring occupied.

Rather than a trigger from far away, this was brought by an actual revisit, though the air smelled much the same.  The stone stile, like two gravestones wrenched out from the nearby churchyard and put one on top the other, leads into a lane of about 1/4 mile, where it ends in another stile much the same.  At the other end was, and is, pretty much opposite, a 16th century farmhouse set facing a tussocky and brackeny common.  Listening recently to Alasdair Roberts' version of Long Lankin it was this house I saw.

At this end of the lane, though, there is no farmhouse; and what was once the end of the city, as I remember it, now has added on a small 'development' - a part of which I have glued, slightly out of its true place, but not much, to the side.  These are cream cubes, rather than Orwell's red. 
The lane itself, though, with its bare bramble stems, is still a passage out of all time, strangely silent on a wintery afternoon, leading to the manor and the false nurse.  Let the doors be all bolted and the windows all pinned, and leave not a hole for a mouse to creep in.  Oh, the doors were all bolted and the windows all pinned, save one little window where Long Lankin crept in. 

Folk Suburb #2

In the moment you are tired, dog-tired, but near no bed; when one world oscillates with another, and another one can be magicked, accessed through the tired sight of one object, the smell of one some thing, the temperature of something, that is when the folk suburb reveals itself: in the right circumstances, like catching the fairy ring occupied.

Beyond tired, I buy a packet of Tooti Frootis from the newsagents, to get change for something.  I bite a purple one and immediately I see a corner, clearly.  On my right side quiet, semi-detached houses, their small leaded panes reflecting unevenly the whitish light in the silence.  And a privet, in an unfelt breeze.  I know someone who lives in one.
But then opposite rises this giant suburb-megalith.  They came to the high castle where my lord he was sitting at meat.  "If you did but know what news I brought not one more mouthful would you eat,"  "What news have you brought?  Is my castle burning down?"  "Oh, no, your true love is very very ill and she'll die before ever you can come."  But then opposite rises this suburb-megalith, giant stone wall, grey, broken by a coach arch and a single doorway.  Like a castle wall.  Above this door, is a look out window, or a lantern window: its glass, in the aspect facing me, red; a red film or paint, peeling.
"Saddle me my milk-white horse, and bridle him so neat.  That I may kiss of her lily lips that are to me so sweet."
What callers found themselves watched from that window?  The place is occupied now by a mysterious Oz-like doctor, who, if he practises at all, practises a Victorian medicine, with Victorian instruments.  But the window is already now disused.  All kinds of spirits jostle.  Carts, and horses and bicycles pass; beneath it.  Before the suburb arrived, surrounding it with privets and ornamental cherries.  The last bone-shaking rider has passed, out of the village.
They saddled him his milk-white steed at twelve o'clock at night.  He rode, he rode till he met six young men with a corpse all dressed in white.  The roof is not visible, nor any building behind the wall.  A cloud passes another shadow across the wall and a woman in a pac-a-mac walks out of the arch.
Then the sweet is finished, and the wall; and with it passes the street, and the wall disintegrates
once more.

Postscript: I passed the original of this at the weekend and was astonished at its smallness - I remember it as high; featureless.  It is now hemmed by 90s houses.  It does retain the two X ceiling supports (I suppose they are) which I had forgotten in the earlier picture, but were definitely there. 

Folk Suburb #1

In the moment when you are tired, dog tired, but near no bed; when one world oscillates with another, and another one can be magicked, accessed through but the tired sight of one object, the smell of one some thing, the temperature of something: that is when the folk suburb reveals itself: in the right circumstances, like catching the fairy ring occupied.
I wish, I wish, but it's all in vain, I wish I were a maid again; but a maid again I never shall be till apples grow on an orange tree.  Swaying looking at a stand of trees so that the noise of the robin is as if they were on your shoulder, I saw, quite clearly, a broken asphalt path, broken by roots passing beneath it.
I wish my baby it was born, and smiling on its papa's knee, and I to be in yon churchyard, with long green grass growing over me.
It was blue coloured, in the shadow, the asphalt path, and rose into a stand of trees.  I don't recall the type of trees and cannot see them, but they were there.  And then, away to the right through the trees, a blue - it is definitely blue - blue wooden door in a high wall appears.  There is a flinty stone arch, like arrowheads, above the door.  Leaving the path in the stand of trees, opposite the door, I walk through the tussocky, ankle high grass where the park keeper's mower hardly ever goes, but twice a year, June and August, and enter by the blue door.

Suburb magick.  When my apron strings hung low, he followed me through frost and snow, but now my apron's to my chin, he passes by and says nothing.  Across a gravel border path a lawn, clipped and striped, and white metal tables laid for tea, outside the black 'french' windows spaces, hung with fluttery white curtains, of a 3 or 4 storey Regency house - actually a hotel but who would stay?
I myself took a dish of ice cream here once, when I was very small, one hot afternoon.
But already it is getting late, each flat in the Regency building has a light on against the bluing day, each tile fronted house hemming it in with TVs.  The grass is gone, car parked.
Oh grief, oh grief, I'll tell you why - that girl has more gold than I; more gold than I and beauty and fame, but she will come like me again.

7: Electricity Substation 14/3/1956

Site: Electricity Substation 14/3/1956
Amenities:  None
Parking: Street (some)
Public Transport: No
Access: Fine view from street

Notes:  rendered building with pagoda style slate roof, set in its own garden with cherry trees.  Remains in use and therefore well maintained.

Further Notes:  The curve of the roof put me in mind of Brunel's 'pagoda' waiting shelters on the GWR.  A lot of effort went in to the design of this, so as not to offend the neighbours in 1956.
Postscript:  Anyone who saw the first post on this blog (the crumbling decorative concrete block wall) may be interested to know that, this last weekend, the wall was demolished, apart from its 'gateposts', and a brick wall put in its place, finished in pebbledash that reminds me of those Heinz sandwich topper things.  If you imagine a pebbledash washing line, coloured like sandwich topper, you have the image.

6: Car Port for Mr D lark 19/10/1966

Site: Car Port for Mr D Clark 19/10/1966
Amenities: None
Parking: Street (good)
Public Transport: 750 yds
Access: View from street

Notes:  Pent roofed car port.  Original structure now subsumed.  Turned, at some point, into self-made garage with raising of roof and closing in of front with trapezoidal wooden panel and doors added.

Further Notes:  A bit like a 17th century house with wings added in the18th and 19th, or an example of outsider suburban folk art.  The breeze blocks and pressed-wood front panel have been fairly recently updated, showing that this is a work gloriously still in progress.

5: Homemade Weather Vane

Site:  Home made weather vane (wood & metal)
Amenities:  None
Parking: Street
Public Transport:  Yes (100 yds)

Notes:  Small homemade weather vane situated on apex of garage.  Sail in orange painted wood (offcut), metal otherwise.  Working.
Garage noteworthy in itself for trained clematis and original 4-paned window to side.

Further Notes:  A-top a rustic, clematis covered timber and asbestos roofed garage, I spotted this weather vane.  The garage and vane survive, but for now, in the garden of a house that has been rented out a few times; although that's maybe its safeguard; against the decking instinct of the suburb.

Long will the breeze turn its offcut-wooden sail; and point its crude, vice-pinched arrow!

I also note the elongated wooden diamond covering the join in the garage.  While a traditional shape, I find it a dismal shape of the British 50s.

4: Lane between X Avenue and Y Avenue

Site:  Lane between X Avenue and Y Avenue, 6 November 1953
Amenities:  None
Parking:  Street adequate
Public Transport:  Yes (250 yards)

Notes:  Asphalted lane still in use.  Built to provide access to garages at rear of houses (on right), and, later, a small electricity station.  Initial section runs between far older brick walls, now crumbling.  This, with fact that a wildish area, equivalent exactly to the width of the lane, extends beyond Y Avenue for a while, leads to supposition that the space was already in existence as a border, and was only later formalised into a lane for part of its length: the lane runs like a moat between the 'new' suburban area covered by these guides on the right, and a far older area of housing to the left.  The divide is starkly evident to the pilgrim.  Surface uneven and severely potholed in places.

Further Notes:  With a wintry sky above, this lane was quiet, bare of plant apart from pale yellow grass resting, and the tall leylandii hedge at the end.  The semi-wild spot was thick with longer grasses matted, and great tits and twists of bare purple-brown bramble stem.  The divide between the old housing and the not-so-new, passing into picturesque, was stark; though the scene was somehow bereft of magic.  The monkey puzzle tree dulled.
Appearing quietly midway down a street, cropping blinding squares of streets, it's entrance almost invisible and overhung with thick ivy and bramble, dark and elder-stench cool in summer, in memory the suburban lane is a wyrd place; of summer.  Wider or narrower, shortcuts in a board game: to library, park, clinic and grandparents.

3: Garage in brick and render

Site:  Garage for D.M. Grieve, 28 May 1964
Amenities:  None
Parking: Adequate street
Public Transport: No

Notes:  Garage still in existence.  Doors replaced - estimate 1990s - with white uPVC door. 
Garage no longer in use, (judging from bins kept in front of door and car parked in drive), but render in good condition.  High rendered brickwork area above door, screening lower flat roof, not stepped as some other local examples are, or finished with capstones.  Capstones often painted white.
Garage noticeably small, fitting only small car.

Further Notes:  This garage is hidden, largely in front of a high beech hedge, and is dull seeming in comparison with next door's shed and new brickwork screen.
At the time of my visit in the late afternoon, the winter's sky was just beginning to turn to purple and blue and yellow, behind the tall trees of woods long existing before the suburb.
The garage survives; crows laughed sounding, at what is quiet below - the purple and blue of televisions flickered.  And they prepared to roost in the high trees.  Silence.

Coming Next: Lane, joining X Avenue and Y Avenue, 6 November 1953

2: Garage In Asbestos & Timber

Site:  Garage in Asbestos and Timber for Mr N.J. Hamilton, 3 May 1966
Amenities:  None
Parking:  Street (very limited due to Nissan Qashqais)
Public Transport: Yes
Access:  No view from the street as new garage and extension completely screens garden.  Restricted view from rear (footpath is the access to a primary school and may not be used)

Notes:  Nothing remains of the garage, save possibly for two areas of old paint and cement on the dividing wall from the next door property.  One is sloped, possibly suggesting a roofline.
the boundary wall may be contemporary with the old garage, if judging by the type and age of render (of local type) and the existence of the possible-building 'shadows'.  Surviving examples of local timber garages indicate that these tend, on the whole, to be set back at the end of the drive, behind the house.  The new garage and extension has, here, entirely screened off the back of the property, obliterating the drive.

Further Notes:  On the late afternoon I visited, ice was prevalent on the pavements, and the branches of the birch tree pointed to a clear moon in a cold, clear sky and lamps were lit in the extension.  The only movement was that of a television.  There was a great stillness.
On the return, a group of six migrant redwings fed from the red berries of a holly, flying on my approach.  The possible ghost shadows of navy blue paint and old sky grey render, pointing to buildings past, made this visit worthwhile.  Mr Hamilton, and his ideas for his garage and life, live on in the dusk.

VG Suburban Guides: 1 Folk Suburb

Having been reading about the old Shell guides, 'Recording Britain' and John Piper's and J.M. Richards work recently, I though that we'd have a shot at a gazeteer in the spirit of these things - getting out and about in the neighbourhood like the neighbourhood oddball.

Built between 1953 and 1962 on one of the last of the dying landed-estates, I was interested to discover that the developers continued making ad-hoc additions to their ordinary suburb, largely in the form of small buildings (garages, sheds etc), well into the 1960s.  Records of many of these remain, and it is the search for and recording of what remains of them that will form the backbone of this guide.  I am expecting disappointment in most cases.

Hopefully, other sections will deal with hidden areas I come across on my searches where the past was not developed, and the old folk magick can survive; and also with examples of Suburban Folk Art.

I hope, all things being equal, to have the first entry up soon.

Important Warning
At virtually all sites, the visitor on foot is likely to be the only pedestrian.  Special care must be taken to avoid arousing suspicion.