Although maybe I’m slipping right into a stereotype – of a Surbiton household as a staid, gray Metropolis chap married to a church floral arranger and WI member. The fact is saucier, darker and sexier, someplace between JG Ballard and Margo Leadbetter. In her bra-less, wafting lengthy clothes and flush-cheeked make-up, Margo was by a way the extra fascinating feminine character in The Good Life. Barbara was the protected one, the veg to Margo’s meat. The TV sequence was shot in Northwood, a kind of Surbiton on the Harrow aspect of London – however that’s not the purpose. Surbiton was a key ingredient within the script.
What greets the customer as soon as they stroll away from the railway temple?
Victoria Highway is a merely passable excessive road with a few listed Nineteenth-century buildings. It’s not posh – it has a Poundland, a McDonalds, a Greggs. Brighton Highway and Maple Highway are a step up, with a German kitchen store, the stunning Lamb pub – which does British cheeses to go together with its ales and wines – and a tax accountant. Flemish-style gables are dotted right here and there, together with on the previous put up workplace and on a non-public members’ membership. There’s a Waitrose, naturally. Every part else in Surbiton, virtually, is residential. This township is about dwelling, not procuring or being entertained. Of the three Conservation Areas, St Andrew’s Sq. is the nicest, like slightly patch of Bloomsbury – although Virginia Woolf baulked at Richmond and would have been harrowed by the thought of a quiet life in Surbiton. Then there are giant condominium blocks and a few good-looking Georgian homes on the “river roads” that join Maple Highway to the correct financial institution of the Thames.
Which is the place Surbiton comes into its personal. Right here floweth the serene river, parting briefly for the island of Raven’s Ait. Locals wander, tranquil because the water; Surbiton is off the radar of the Inside London daytripper. Over on the opposite aspect is Dwelling Park, the again backyard of Hampton Court docket. It’s nothing like as trafficked as the opposite Royal Parks, however a bucolic magnificence, with purple and fallow deer snorting steam beneath the previous timber – although fences hold them away from Methuselah’s Oak, which was right here lengthy earlier than Henry VIII.
Writing that has made me unhappy. I lived in Surbiton from round 2003 until 2012, on a kind of river roads, and marvel, nonetheless, why I left. I bear in mind the wry appears to be like and sarcastic asides I needed to undergo from buddies and acquaintances. I used to be born right into a working-class household however virtually all of my buddies and work colleagues have been middle-class they usually expressed their disdain for provincial mediocrity – or, should you like, self-loathing – by denigrating Surbiton as sq. and stifling. How mistaken they have been. However maybe their sneering put-downs seeped in.
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