"Suburbs are not so bad I think": Stevie Smith's Problem of Place in 1930s and '40s London

Abstract

London and its outskirts became Greater London in the inter-war period" (Bowdler 103). With this simple declaration, geographer Roger Bowdler identifies the physi cal transformation of English landscape that underlies my analysis of Stevie Smith's literary fantasies about the suburbs. Described at the time as the "outskirts" and "fringes" o f the capital, London's suburbs achieved their regional identity as inter mediate or in-between spaces-between town and country, commerce and agricul ture, bricks and birds, crowds and calm. Semi-detached houses, arterial roads, new underground stations, building societies, mortgages, vanishing woods, disappear ing hedgerows, consumed villages, diverted streams-all of these geographical signs of tremendous social change accompanied the post-World War I mandate to build "Homes fit for Heroes."