People are sniffy about suburbs – but their gardens are works of art
Rehabilitating the suburban garden of the 1920s and 1930s is not an easy task. As Michael Gilson admits in Behind the Privet Hedge, the semi-detached Dunroamins of the interwar years, with their crazy paving, their circular rose beds plonked down in the middle of pocket-handkerchief lawns and their artfully placed and brightly painted gnomes, conjure up unhappy and deeply snobbish associations with “conformist Metro-land suburbia, or worse… the tasteless and garish plots of the working-class council estates”.
Behind the Privet Hedge sets out to counter such snobberies, and to remind us that the suburban garden has its roots in the vision of reformers and pioneers who, in the first 30 years or so of the 20th century, were passionate in their promotion of “the life-giving, beautifying nature of the new landscapes and the empowerment that some level of horticultural knowledge gave” to working people. The hero of the book, and an all-but-forgotten figure in this movement, is the socialist, horticulturalist and champion of the suburban garden Richard Sudell.
Born into a family of Quakers in 1892, Sudell worked for various garden-contractors in his native Lancashire and had a short spell at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, before being jailed as a conscientious objector in 1916. After the war he and his first wife moved to the cottage estate of Roehampton, where he helped to found the Roehampton Estate Garden Society, the first of a parade of horticultural and landscaping organizations with which he was involved over the next 40 years. Gilson paints a delicious picture of shenanigans at the 1923 Whitsun fete, after which the REGS’s chair and treasurer were deposed in a stormy meeting in the crypt of the local parish church. Sudell denounced them for taking advantage of the cut-price booze in the hospitality tent and, he hinted darkly, pocketing the proceeds from the Aunt Sally stall.
It was while he was at Roehampton that Sudell emerged as the champion of the suburban garden. He mixed with other non-conformist socialists who had driven the pre-war garden city movement and, an indefatigable organiser, he began to promote the small-scale private garden through a series of competitions with cash prizes for the best front garden, the best back garden, the best window-box and so on. The fashion for horticultural competitions grew spectacularly until in 1926 the London Garden Championship attracted 10,000 entrants, with the Superintendent of the Royal Parks and the President of the RHS judging the best. Points were scored for evidence of thriving flowers, fruit and vegetables (20 points), absence of weeds and pests (five points), “design, arrangement and difficulties overcome” (10 points) and special features like statuary, which presumably included gnomes (five points).
Sudell’s practice grew, and he also launched into journalism to spread the word that small gardens could be both useful and beautiful. He wrote a gardening column for Ideal Home, was gardening editor of the left-leaning Herald, and even wrote the text for a series of Wills’ cigarette cards on the subject of flowers. A full set can still be purchased on eBay for around £5, says Gilson helpfully.
If Behind the Privet Hedge were simply a life of a fairly obscure professional gardener, it would be interesting enough, although it leaves us with plenty of questions. Records from Sudell’s landscaping practice, which lasted until his death in 1968, haven’t survived, so that we only know about a handful of his high-status projects, of which Pimplico’s Dolphin Square is perhaps the most famous, and his work with Michael Dixey on the fabulously modernist Merton College sports pavilion is the best.
But the book is much more than a biography. It is a vivid picture of the practice of landscape architecture as it developed in the middle years of the century, when in an extension of the Edwardian battles for control fought between plantsmen and architects, figures like Geoffrey Jellicoe, Brenda Colvin and, yes, Richard Sudell, struggled to win respect from the architectural profession as they embraced a brave new post-war world. They landscaped new towns, provided communal settings for forests of tower blocks, designed cemeteries and playing fields. Just how far Sudell had travelled from the annual fete of the Roehampton Estate Garden Society can be judged by a remark he made in 1956: “I am sure there is a need for consultant landscape architects in connection with the new atomic plants that are now being planned in various parts of the country.” You won’t find many of those behind a privet hedge.
Adrian Tinniswood is the author of Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the Post-War Country House. Behind the Privet Hedge is published by Reaktion at £16.95. To order your copy for £14.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
