England's Suburbs 1820-2020

England's Suburbs 1820-2020, Joanna Smith and Matthew Whitfield, Liverpool University Press on behalf of Historic England, 2025, 308 pages, fully illustrated, hardback.

Most people in England live in suburbs. The authors of this book note that it has been argued that England could be viewed as ‘the suburban nation’. But what is a suburb? You do not often hear developers or housebuilders boasting that their new scheme is ‘suburban’, and the first definition I find when looking up ‘suburban’ online is ‘contemptibly dull and ordinary’. So it seems that most people have ended up living somewhere that is not the sort of place they like. What is going on?

The answer is that creating suburbs is a common feature of urban change. Joanna Smith and Matthew Whitfield nail it with the three-part ‘broad definition’ that they use in this book. The features of a suburb are, they write, ‘a peripheral or satellite location at the time of creation; a degree of dependence on an urban centre; and a mainly, but not necessarily exclusively, residential character.’

Those three features are all subject to change. A development may have a peripheral or satellite location when it is built, but subsequent development may surround it. The suburb may have a degree of dependence on an urban centre at first, but in time it may develop facilities of its own that make it more independent. And although it may have a mainly residential character when it is built, later it may be swallowed by a town or city centre and undergo a significant change of character.

The new suburban development may itself swallow what was there before. In the 19th century, Smith and Whitfield write, ‘rubbish heaps, made up of a medley of refuse, including household waste, street sweepings and dead animals, were to be found in the suburban outskirts and in the poorer urban districts; in London these sometimes attained great size and notoriety.’ Rising land values might lead to those eyesores being removed.

Today, the outskirts of towns and cities may be home to ‘waste disposal sites, water reservoirs, industrial plant, power generation sites, pylons and transport infrastructure, including airports and motorway interchanges, supplemented by retail parks, leisure complexes, business parks and distribution depots.’ The advancing suburbs may incorporate those uses or replace them, depending on the economics of development. And suburbs may be seen as suitable for intensification, with a resulting increase in density and perhaps diversity of uses.

So suburbs are often changing, not static, however superficially similar many of them may appear. To plan, manage and protect them effectively we need to understand how they developed and what role they play today. That is why in 2012 English Heritage, now Historic England, initiated a national research project on suburban development that would put it in context, and why Historic England has drawn on that research in publishing this book.

England's Suburbs 1820-2020, meticulously researched, well written and superbly illustrated, will be of enormous value to anyone dealing with historic and not-so-historic buildings in what are or once were suburbs, or to anyone fascinated by urban history.

This article originally appeared as ‘Suburban nation’ in the Institute of Historic Building Conservation’s (IHBC’s) Context 186, published in December 2025. It was written by Rob Cowan, editor of Context.

--Institute of Historic Building Conservation