The Big Smoke

Londoners have a strange relationship with suburbia. Most of us live there, even if we don’t like to admit it, preferring to believe that the boundary to the suburbs always starts about a mile further out from where we currently live. But arguably anywhere outside the Circle Line counts as suburbia, which means that most of us are living in the sticks, whether it’s Brixton or Kentish Town, Hayes or Ilford.

That means that the London Transport Museum’s breezy Suburbia exhibition has a vast potential audience. I got down there yesterday afternoon and spent an enjoyable hour mooching round the well-judged, neatly designed space, which looks at how London’s growth in the nineteenth-century was part created by London Transport, and how culturally important the suburbs have become to London and the way we live.

Basically, London grew wherever a transport link was created – many suburban stations such as Golders Green or Morden were built in fields, and the population only arrived after the stations appeared. Housing companies were integral to this process; some even paid for tube stations to be built in areas where they already owned land that was ripe for development. The tube station thus became the centre of the local community, much as a church or town square would have been a century previously.

In his new book ‘Shaping London’, Terry Farrell takes this further arguing that ‘without the bus the typical London suburban house and garden arrangement could not have emerged. The kind of streets we have, and the way we relate to corner shops, pubs and high streets is very much a bus-based system.’ The importance of transport to London's growth and identity cannot really be understated.

It is to the museum’s credit that ‘Suburbia’ manages to get much of this message over without ever losing its sense of fun and frivolity. The exhibition looks at architecture, culture, shopping and music – with each element underpinned by generous use of the museum’s outstanding poster collection, one of the world's great collections of public art, with images for just about any and every occasion. These posters show that the museum is not overclaiming when it boasts that nobody has done more to promote the idea of shopping in London than London Transport.

I knew I’d love this aspect of the exhibition, but was more pleasantly surprised by a film shown on loop and made by some teenagers in Redbridge about their relationship with the suburb. This sort of thing can often be the weakest point in any exhibition as it frequently looks all too much like an exercise in inclusiveness and box-ticking that serves little real purpose, but this short film was a real treat, with kids discussing, from the heart and with wit, their feelings about where they live. It was a pleasing coda to a fine exhibition.