Spring, with its crocuses, daffodils and cherry blossom, no longer comes to every street in suburban Britain. Visiting a relative in Hainault, east London, recently, I was dismayed to find that what for many years had been a pretty garden suburb had been turned into streets of anonymous boarding houses with parking forecourts. Many front gardens had been paved over to form car-ports, where the latest car registration plates were the focus of display. What future for Britain in bloom, now that Acacia Avenue has turned into Daewoo Drive?
While London's domestic gardens take up only a fifth of the capital's surface area, they contain nearly 70 per cent of the city's 5.5m trees and provide more habitat for wildlife than public recreation grounds and parks. The loss of trees in private gardens not only affects birdlife, but impairs air quality too. Chopping down trees reduces shade, which in turn impacts on micro-climates. The difference in temperature between standing on a street and sitting in a park or garden can be as much as ten degrees. Trees also act as a highly efficient means of circulating rainwater, while the run-off from hard-surfaced gardens seriously increases the risk of flooding.
The baleful effects of this enthusiasm for DIY car parks are not just environmental. The ornamental front garden was one of the great achievements of Victorian and 20th-century British townscape, producing a poetics of suburban life which can still be felt in some streets on a balmy summer evening. While back gardens were used for everything from growing herbs and vegetables, planting fruit trees, hanging out washing, building sheds, repairing bikes and sunbathing, front gardens represented the public face of the household within. There was often a competitive edge to the endless planting, weeding, mowing and trimming of front gardens, which in recent years has been supplanted by the equally competitive display of Christmas illuminations.
Suburban gardens also acted as a stage set for the flora and topographies of empire. The passion for monkey-trees in the early Victorian era later gave way to a devotion to magnolias, then rose gardens. The wave of interest in alpinism produced thousands of rock gardens, some of which were created out of slag collected from the local gasworks, or the rubble from broken-up bomb shelters, as I remember from my Leytonstone childhood.
The removal of front gardens signals a rejection of the public domain and the gift relationship embodied in display gardening. If suburban life was thought by some to be dull and conformist, this could not be said of the immense skill and creativity which people expressed in their gardens, even if some did rather overdo the windmills and garden gnomes. Front gardens acted as a transitional space between the front door and the public world, where there were proprieties to the conversations to be had with neighbours and passers-by, as people weeded or negotiated tree heights and overhangs across the garden wall. Bringing the road to the front door means never having to speak to anybody in the neighbourhood again.
In some areas of London, this trend is a direct result of the introduction of controlled parking zones. Street parking is now licensed, and parking rights have to be paid for by residents and visitors alike. Initially this was done for environmental reasons, to deter outsiders from driving into London and parking in residential streets close to underground stations and shopping districts. But paradoxically, the environmental impact has been disastrous—another example of the unintended consequences of badly thought-out public policy. Rather than pay to park on the street outside their own homes, many householders and private landlords have simply rooted up lawns, pampas grass and herbaceous borders to create paved forecourts. Some London boroughs receive hundreds of applications to convert front gardens into parking lots each year. Local authorities across the country face tens of thousands of such requests.
The London assembly's environment committee is now so concerned that in February it announced plans to carry out a study: "The loss of and changes to London's front gardens." Cities such as Cardiff and Edinburgh are also drafting new bylaws to deal with the issue. But estate agents are not helping: one Birmingham property adviser recently claimed that turning a front garden into a parking lot could add over 5 per cent to the value of a house.
In the 20th century, the car changed everything to do with the way streets, towns and cities were managed and planned. The car became king. Not content with exercising a stranglehold on transport policy, car-owners now threaten to determine how residential streets, neighbourhoods and districts look, and how much ecological and horticultural diversity and splendour they will retain. The need to find somewhere to put Britain's 32m cars is turning us from a nation of gardeners into a nation of garagistes.
