The Suburbanist

The suburb has a long history but it was nineteenth century social reformers who gave it a distinct identity. These benignly intentioned thinkers and developers established garden cities, an attempt to combine the health of country living with urban amenities. How did these utopian beginnings lead to the dreary wastelands so despised by intellectuals and avant-gardists of varying hues.Geoff Nicholson give us the history and pre-history of suburban development. He has read the panegyrics of the reformers who sought to improve our home-lives and has watched the sit-coms that mock the results. This is both a cultural history and a personal one; Geoff transverses the suburbs he knows and has lived in, whilst examining the treatises, the diatribes and the entertaining send-ups. He has live in the UK suburbs, in perhaps the only city built entirely as a suburb - Los Angeles - and visited suburbs widely. He is know for his walking books and here, in the Suburbanist, het sets out once again to guide us through a landscape we may feel we know but have never seen so vividly.