2017
In many respects, the bleakest places in England are those which are too close to London to have their own identity, and too far from it to be reached by night buses and tubes. Unlike the cities of the north or the south-west, they never developed a culture of civic pride – never had their era of great public endeavours, pomposity and grandeur, never bigged themselves up. Unlike even the more distant suburbs of London, you can’t use them as a place to propel yourself into the excitement of the capital – you can’t make your way back home from pubs or clubs, you can’t say with a straight face that you live in ‘London’, even though you don’t live somewhere that is fully ‘not London’. These are the places that begin as soon as the green belt that was fixed around London in the ’30s ends. The new towns – Harlow, Stevenage, Hatfield, Basildon, Crawley, Bracknell; the industrial towns – Luton, Slough, Dartford, the Medway; the garden cities – Welwyn, Letchworth; the weird, affluent silicon Thames Valley boomtowns – High Wycombe, Basingstoke, Reading. You could even extend it further into a wider arc of places that are within an hour and a half’s commute of the capital – Bournemouth, Southampton, Portsmouth, Dover, Milton Keynes, Northampton, until eventually the incependent force of Birmingham or Bristol makes itself apparent and you know you’re somewhere else. It’s not quite the same as the ‘Home Counties’, which generally denotes a stockbroker belt of suburban or quasi-rural settlements, conservative-looking and conservative-voting – the small towns of Sussex, Surrey, Kent, Essex, Herts, stretching out into Hants, Northants, Berks. Instead, this is somewhere urban, but not urban as in ‘urban cool’. It’s an arc of workaday towns, largely devoid of anything notably sexy or subcultural, with only Brighton sticking out within it as an enclave of London’s noted virtues of bohemianism, Georgian architecture and excessive self-esteem. This is the territory that James Smith’s photographs covers, and despite it’s extreme familiarity, his project is to make people actually look at it – something that doesn’t happen so often.
This area doesn’t have a name as such, and if it does, it’s probably the surely almost deliberately unlovely term ‘OVERSPILL’. The reason for this is the aforementioned Green Belt. Though it was probably a good thing in a sense, for providing some easy weekend escapes for Londoners and in stopping the capital from becoming some vast, rainy mid-Atlantic version of Los Angeles, what the Green Belt mainly did was mean that London stopped suddenly – very suddenly indeed, as you can see when tube stations run into countryside at Oakwood, or when the industrial sprawl of Erith is suddenly interrupted by a strip of scrubland and horses before resuming a few yards later at Dartford – and then it equally suddenly carries on, going inexorably further and further outwards. Rather than being organically linked to London as such, via the tube or continuous contiguous development, etc, Overspill was planned as a series of discrete towns, or additions to older towns. This idea came originally from the peculiar late Victorian utopian pragmatist Ebenezer Howard, and his book Tomorrow, later republished as Garden Cities of Tomorrow, by which time the title denoted the central idea. Rather than ‘town’ or ‘country’ you could have something that combined both. Unlike suburbs, Garden Cities would have their own town centres, their own industry, their own identities. They also, at first, promised a certain amount of democratic ownership over the garden city, especially in the first to be built, Letchworth, which was basically paid for and owned by its future residents. These ideas were taken up after the war – minus the crankish, voluntaristic aspect – in the form of New Towns, and they also became influential worldwide, for good or ill. But here is where they were tried first and foremost, with seventy years of urban experiment, from Letchworth in the 1900s to Milton Keynes in the 1970s.