Suburban 'Hedgerows': how suburban centres foster diversity over time

Ecological research proposes that hedgerows tend to have a much greater diversity of plants and animals and to be thicker, taller and more continuous as they increase in age (Hooper 1970). This paper proposes that there is an interesting consideration of diversity and age to be made in relation to suburban high streets conceived as 'hedgerows'. Beyond the rather neat association between leafy suburbs and green hedges, such a conception implies the emergence of distinctive, complex and stubbornly persistent material cultures over time. This paper presents the findings of ongoing interdisciplinary research at UCL into the spatial cultures of four London suburban centres, drawing on historical morphological analysis, the exegesis of historical business directories and ethnographic fieldwork to explore the extent to which the diversity of suburban town centres is associated with their historical pattern of land use and habitation. Previous research done on the Adaptable Suburbs project at UCL found that a focus on suburban centres as retail hubs marginalises the role such spaces play in structuring everyday life and the creating ‘knowable communities’ (Williams, 1969). Further research into the historical growth of London's suburbs (Griffiths, Jones, Vaughan and Haklay 2009) supports the contention that the historically emergent character of local centres has to do with the relative diversity of contemporary land uses they are able to sustain. This study goes further in suggesting how a variety of building types, sizes and street morphologies are more likely to propagate patterns of co-presence over time - providing the minimal but essential everyday 'noise' without which generalised sustainability and liveability agendas are likely to flounder when faced with questions of implementation in particular places. This morphological diversity, it is argued, enables the development of niche markets in smaller centres which can support new forms of socio-economic activity. In contrast with the planning literature in which advocating mixed-use development has become a commonplace, this paper argues that that notions of diversity cannot be separated from the phenomenological properties of urban and suburban built environments. In this it is consistent with claims made by Penn et al (2009) and Seamon (2007) that the fundamental intelligibility of the built environment is an essential condition of bringing people together in public space and affording them encounter. This research therefore, highlights the emergent architectural-social morphology of suburban centres, an approach that belies the apparently conventional nature of these sites and implies a critique of the all too predictable discourse of 'decline' that characterises their media profile. It also finds parallels in ecological systems theory in which the richness and evenness of species in a community (i.e. the number of different types of species and the number of each species in the same area), contributes to the overall resilience of the ecosystem.