Surburbia is much maligned in popular culture. Notably cutting of his London suburban home JG Ballard wrote,
“the suburbs dream of violence. Asleep in their drowsy villas, sheltered by benevolent shopping malls, they wait patiently for the nightmares that will wake them into a more passionate world.”
Arcade Fire have chipped in,
“In the suburbs/ I, I learned to drive/
And you told me/ I’d never survive/ Grab your mother’s keys, we’re leaving”
However a city is nothing without its suburbs and in Dublin they soon emerge when you leave the small compact city centre. I see them as a conduit to the city.
The youth of The Groves having spent their formative years hanging around with clipped hedges and pebble-dashed lanes, a landscape developing their imagination and informing their pent-up creativity and ambition when they migrate.
“Yet the suburb of Bromley on the South London/Kent border has been named as ‘the most significant suburb in British pop history’. Not only did it spawn David Bowie but in the punk era it was the base of the ‘Bromley contingent’ numbering Billy Idol and Siouxsie Sioux among members that fuelled the early roster of punk personnel.
The Banshees’ debut single Hong Kong Garden (1978) with its insistent nagging riff at first sounds like it is describing a perfect oriental scene but it was actually about a fight in a Chinese restaurant in deepest suburban Chiselhurst”
Making Sense of Suburbia through Popular Culture, Rupa Huq
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