Elephants

Elephants weren’t the only thing to pass by the bungalow Louisa Preece

This Major Study is presented to the Department of Architecture, Oxford Brookes University in part fulfilment of the regulations for Diploma of Architecture.

Statement of Originality This Major Study is an original piece of work which is made available for copying with permission of the Head of School of Architecture.

Signed _________________________________

“for time was not passing ... it was turning in a circle�

Garcia Marquez 1967

‘Elephants weren’t the only thing to pass by the bungalow’ 1 How do history and dreams inform the use of space in the suburban? How could history and dreams engage residents in developing and maintaining culture, and unite local community in a suburban landscape that is slowing becoming de-territorialised?

Louisa Preece // 13092824

1: Quote from Amor, 2011, p. 32

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Introduction, The Silo

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Placeless Past, The Oxford Zoo

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Imagination, The Sterling Cinema

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Culture, The Bungalow

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Territory, The Airport

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Findings, The New Rail-Station

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Bibliography

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Appendices

Once there was a grain Silo, positioned next to a rail line, later two intersecting roads and a car park joined its remote position. It remained there, well used, watching the housing encroaching and the farmland receding; until it was no longer required.

‘Today, whilst I wait for the bus that takes me from Kidlington into The City, I watch a local landmark pulled, shredded, torn apart. Decorated with tags, proclaiming its local identity and how it’s embedded into the minds of those who live here, it is slowly falling before my eyes.

Getting onto the bus I mention what is happening just outside the windows. The bus driver seems almost relieved.

He must be aware of its presence every day; he says it’s the local eye-sore. But it would have been nice if they had done something with it.

The man behind me hasn’t even noticed, he hasn’t heard the noise or seen the luminous claws. When I point it out he mutters what a shame it is. He seems more concerned that I am sat in the “priority seats” of the bus.

For me it’s always been imbued with intrigue, this looming structure that lacked windows across its vast height; how dark it must be inside. It stood guard to the “village”, watching all who entered from the city...’

The Silo Silo A. a system, process, department, etc. that operates in isola on from others.

B. tall tower or pit on a farm used to store grain.

(Oxford Dictionaries,n.d.)

29/10/2013 12:35pm The demoli on of the Grain Silo is complete.

On Radio 4 in November the topics landscape, community and the cycle of time were discussed.

‘It’s Britain’s changing landscape we want to explore today. What we lose and what we gain. As buildings and communities come and go, in cycles of regeneration and decay.’ (Kendall, B. et al., 2013) On the panel was an architect, a poet and a Priest. Their conversation begged the question: As the past is erased, what remains? History is a part of human culture and as places of history are resigned to the past and recorded on dysphoric newsfeeds that fade away into oblivion; a landscape is created that appears anonymous and unrelenting. New forms of communication allow for invisible dreams that can create an internalised environment and a generic street scape. Public spaces in cities have long been a part of the architect’s role in the urban fabric; but what of suburbia?

Suburbia is a pertinent topic as the government push for councils to hit housing quotas and as a condition that is prevalent in over 75 countries (Huq, 2013).The last century has seen a change in the landscape of the urban fabric with the move of massresidential areas to the periphery of cities and towns, alongside the demise of large scale manufacturing. Creating a residential landscape – not quite urban, not quite rural – the suburban, where ‘theatres of flight’(Bauman, 2002) and placeless places of consumption and swathes of identical ‘new’ estates, replaces the dead points of industry. The cultural perception of suburbia is one of repetitive banality, and therefore boredom and ‘dullsville’ (Huq, 2013b), and consequently, an area largely ignored and marginalised by architects. The architect Paul Barker goes as far to remark that ‘Architects despise suburbs’. (Barker, 1999).

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These issues have been discussed in depth by the sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre and more recently by Alan Mace, an urbanist and planner who specialises in suburban studies. Mace explains there is ‘a need to acknowledge a suburb’s history while not assuming its determining role in the present’ (2013, p. 162).

Such is the importance of history in the shaping of suburbia.

Thus this exploration aims to develop a poetic and critical analysis of suburbia through a case study which allows both ‘mobility as well as fixity’ to be empirically observed, which Savage et al explain as being vital for ‘elaborating the nature of social change’ (2005, p. 1). The research focus is on the suburban Village of Kidlington: its history, its relationship to the city of Oxford, and its nature, as part of the transient urban fabric.

In the twentieth century Kidlington changed from ‘an essentially rural village into a large dormitory suburb for Oxford’ (Offord, n.d., p. 12). The fieldwork will observe this continuing change and how residents engage with the suburban space through the exploration of the space that surrounds; questioning its uses based on what it was, what it is, and what it could be. The recent past will be examined alongside the present, which will aid the understanding of the relationship between private and public space in the suburban. As one of the largest villages in England, Kidlington has experienced significant suburban development and is braced to face further change with the introduction of a new rail link to London. It is both the proverbial suburb and the suburb in transience.

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In the 20th century the main employers for Kidlington were the car manufacturers and glove makers. Before this Kidlington was mostly orchards and used to supply apples to London; there are s ll many apple trees do ed about in gardens that, come late summer, are laden with fruit.

Current businesses based in Kidlington include the headquarters of the Oxfordshire Fire and Rescue Service, Thames Valley Police and the St. John Ambulance.

The A34 passes to the east of Kidlington and is bridged by the A4165 towards Oxford. The bridge also spans the exis ng rail line.

Focusing primarily on the suburban landscape, Mace looks at how residents build and sustain a sense of belonging and their relationship to the city. In this way he views the suburb in a similar approach to Henri Lefebvre, whose interest is also on the urban-suburban relationship and the continuing centrality of the city (Lefebvre, 1996 & 2003). Mace explains the significance of historical legacy and that it ‘becomes all the more important when combined with the practice of suburbia, including how suburban residents engage, or do not engage, with the city’ (2013, p. 165). History becomes a thread in his line of thought and he explores this through the habits of the every day. On the matter of history, Lefebvre has a difference of opinion. The social and cultural historian Joe Moran explains that, ‘[f]or Lefebvre, time and history have come to an end in the new town, and an unnameable, interminable boredom has taken their place’ (Moran, 2005, p.117). This statement stems from Lefebvre’s writing in the 1960s when the new town was just beginning and was essentially a dormitory suburb.

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Oxford Motor Park is also situated to the north-west alongside the industrial park.

The industrial park houses manufacturing plants that produce electronics, materials and consumable for ‘high-tech industries’, Biosensers, Helicopter parts.

London Oxford Airport is just to the north-west of the village and provides short-haul flights and a pilot training school.

Kidlington High Street Kidlington ‘is the second largest village in England with a popula on of over 17000’ ‘Was originally called Cudelinga tun, derived from the tun (AngloSaxon word meaning se lement) of the Kidlings or sons of Cydelhence.’

Available at: hƩp://www. kidlington-pc.gov.uk/ Accessed on: 15.12.13

Although Mace tends to turn to Lefebvre on aspects of the city relationship, when it comes to the relevance of history and its use in today’s society, Lefebvre perceives history as a banal and a repeated spectacle, much like Augé in that global colour has replaced local colour (Augé, 2012). For Mace history is local and differs in each suburb he encounters, where the past uniquely shapes the present day. In this way there can be seen to be two types of history: one which is materialised as built form and serves as a memorial to the past; and one which influences built form and serves to provide a platform for the future. The study will therefore explore the ideas of Lefebvre, Mace and Augé through the ethnographical research expressed and critiqued via the methodology of film. Their research has been ethnographical but has either been analytical or poetic; therefore the methodology will tie both history and dreams together and explore the suburb through this visual observation.

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Ribbon development along the Oxford Road.

The shops and houses were built between 1930 and the Second World War.

Patrick Keiller, an architect/artist who documents changing society through film, explains ‘[w]e now live in a future, not as it was imagined in the 1960s, but as it was actually constructed during the 1970s’ (2013, p.144). In 1970 the population of the village of Kidlington was 10,816, a rise of over two thousand people from 1961 [8,514] a rise that continued with today’s count of 17,300.

It was in 1969 that a family of three moved to Kidlington from Hounslow and their early story is captured in a collection of cine films, two of which record their activities of pleasure and are analysed within the methodology of film. They are dated 1970 and 1971, and reveal the leisure and recreation pursuits at the time, as well as the ease with which the landscape was taken in from the suburb.

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A box of cine film was discovered in a Kidlington attic that documented from 1965-1980. These captured the early life of 1970’s suburbia. The opposite image shows the projection of the images on the hallway of the same bungalow the images were originally captured.

The methodology of film was chosen as a research method alongside the text, as it collates and edits together the present with the past in an ethnographical way that can then be used anthropologically. It uses current footage, edited with the cine film to develop the critique. The cine films’ layers of time, chopped into one another, inform the direction of the editing of the film. It is gathered into segments that explore various spaces of the suburb through different times. Another influence on the direction of the film methodology is Patrick Keiller’s ‘Robinson in Space’. In this film Keiller weaves together a critical narrative with illustrative thematic shots. He explains his methodology thus: This visual material deliberately depicts places that are nearly or altogether devoid of human presence and activity, but which because of this absence are suggestive of what could happen, or what might happen. They are places in which events might take place, and the events are seen rather as possible contemporary myths. But the myths have a history - maybe they are history - and this history can be constructed as a narrative - a reconstruction of a past daydream or the construction of a new one - which links still images or provides a setting or the film, in the same way as the locations provide a setting for the action in other films. The aim is to depict the place as some sort of historical palimpsest, and/or the corollary of this, an exposition of a state of mind. (Keiller, 2013, p. 11)

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The garage is a typical sight to see along the suburban roadsalthough many have recently been converted into extra rooms as the front gardens become paved over.

Film can reveal spaces for further investigation, find locations, and investigate history, in way that opens up future opportunities. Keiller’s ‘Robinson in Space’ is set around an exploration of ‘new space’; ‘the subject was new space, and generally new space is found outside or on the edge of cities’ (Keiller, 1998, p.228).

Here Keiller suggests that people are trying to ‘reconstruct their culture’ so they look for things to enable them to frame their identity. History is the tool with which the character, Robinson, tries to connect: ‘so he will look for things which will enable him or other people to do the same’ (Keiller, 1998, p.229). In a similar approach, the methodology of film within this body of research explores the new space against the old, within the suburban encompass. The film engages with the marginalised spaces within the suburb-scape. Drawing on the ideas of non-place and underlying histories, the film delves into the perceived banal and explores the imaginary, where a new narrative is created through the visual exploration of Lefebvre, Augé and Mace.

Over-leaf Taking out the bins, a weekly ritual that marks the boundaries of the property.

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The Oxford Zoo The Audi garage used to be The Orchard Tea Gardens Restaurant.

Kidlington Silver Band played on Sunday evening. It opened out toward the High Street, with tennis courts behind that could be rented to villagers.

(Amor, 1996)

A trip to the countryside - 1970 cine film.

Long drawn-out shots of typical suburban semi-detached homes play out, cars speed past and illustrate the transience of the everyday. A pan of a garage forecourt next to a busy road in the village centre merges into the cine film moment of a quiet road in the country, taking in the landscape. Here the relationship between the car and the accessibility to the countryside is juxtaposed with the idea of the suburb being a blend of urban and country. Before selling cars the corner used to house tea rooms and tennis courts. Patrick Keiller explains that ‘[i]n films, one can explore the spaces of the past, in order to better anticipate the spaces of the future’ (2013, p. 145). The spaces of current society, affected by economic globalisation, have been described by scholars as placeless and non-places (Aiello et al., 2010, p. 187). Marc Augé, a prominent anthropologist, labels the current age ‘super-modernity’, where the old is made into a specific spectacle that society consumes through non-places that are proliferating in the urban fabric; creating a contractual and generic scape (Augé, 2008).

The labelling of spaces as placeless necessitates the examination of the ‘non-places’ in Kidlington. As Moran discusses of Augé’s non-place theories, it is the underexplored histories of these non-places that complicate them as ‘products’. Joe Moran uses the theories of Michel de Certeau to explain how history can act against ‘super-modernity’: Unearthing these historical traces subverts what Certeau calls ‘the modern mutation of time into a quantifiable and relatable space’, revealing ‘a sort of anti-museum’ that is ‘not localisable’ (Moran, 2005, p.26)

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Oxford road, previously Banbury road, connects Oxford with Banbury.

Now a well used commuter route.

The central photograph was taken in 1932.

Fig. 1

It is these everyday histories which began in the recent past as sites that offered ‘leisure, consumption and tourism’ but are now perceived as ‘boringly routine’ (Moran, 2005). In the last century there has been Oxford Zoological Gardens, now a housing estate and the Thames Valley Police Headquarters; the Sterling Cinema now a generic supermarket; and the local market, which has now been turned into housing. These histories have been swept aside, and are not physically manifested, yet they have influenced the perception of the regeneration which has taken their place.

As the past is erased, with no trace left but the thematic naming of the new streets, such as “Maple Avenue” and “The Moors”, history becomes marginalised: it becomes an aesthetic memorial.

The excavation of history reveals a culture that challenges the transient nature of the non-place. The names of some streets were based on the surnames of the initial residents who occupied the first dwellings. Local names for places, such as ‘co-op corner’, also refer back to the recent past (Amor, 1996). Mace explains that ‘belonging to the present is dependent on both the ghosts of the past and on dreams of times both gone and still to come’ (2013b, p.96). In this way the recent history of Kidlington will be journeyed through, by lifting the layers and exploring their relevance and relationship with space and place.

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The ribbon development along the Oxford Road gives way the gateway supermarket, that sits prominently off the roundabout entrance to Kidlington.

Sainsbury’s was built in 1990, before this a large garage and filling station existed.

(Amor, 2008)

To gain an understanding of Augé’s ideas of non-place, the case-study of Kidlington helps illustrate where these spaces can be found. For example, placeless-places in Kidlington would be described as the large, gateway super market, the fast flowing road that slices the village in half, the central car parks, the generic shops, the mirrored houses, the non-existent public space; the continual private realm of dwelling by dwelling. Augé describes the non-place as a space that lacks history and identity, where contractual obligations are carried out and physical communication is limited. It is the spectacle of media that plays the dream over and over until that is all that is required; the repetition of work, shop, home, and of identikit house, car, and lifestyle. Vacuous faces stare at vacuous screens whilst time rushes past. There are political perspectives that create a negative attitude toward the suburb, one of which is the anxiety ‘about the increasing commercialisation of public space’ and also ‘the development of an Americanised landscape of shopping malls’(Moran, 2005, p.118).

Yet each home is subtly different, with each dwelling treating space in a different way. The suburb is never empty, it remains occupied: net curtains twitch, cars speed past, and lawns are raked. Cars for sale sit prominently on the grass verge before the low wall boundary. Here too, wreaths and boxes of apples are available; the impromptu market space. The private-public realm line is being obscured behind the layers of place and non-place. They become places of consumption, of exchange, but in an informal and less contractual way. The non-place has created opportunity for small-scale business. They are fragments of urban space that utilise the territory of the public and private realms. Augé describes these places as contractual with little human interaction yet these spaces are giving rise to possibilities.

Here the residents are taking control of their space and engaging with the de-territorialising of both the public and private realm.

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One flaw of the non-places is their perceived ahistorical sterility, in suburban developments like Kidlington, residents have built up memories from the every day and layered these atop the fresh tarmac. AugÊ’s views can be seen as outdated in relation to these suburban places, as this layer of history has since been formed and does not always acknowledge: how the blankness of non-places - which is as much mythic reputation as actual experience - obscures both their histories and the necessarily political questions about how they are organised and inhabited (Moran, 2005, p.128).

This brings to light the importance of a non-place’s use and inhabitancy, and that by assuming there is no affiliation with the place, and that it is just a mundane, repetitive space, it is easier to describe it as a non-place and thus it gains the perception of a place of boredom. The film reveals a world of speed, one shot of a street looks much like another, yet taking a closer look at the occupation of space, such as in the front gardens, reveals more about the individual nature of the residents and their will to engage with the world around them. The manicured lawn with decorative, well-tended planting; the paved parking domain where the resident meticulously sprays weed killer to prevent the onslaught of nature, in contrast to the over-grown, wild, garden.

Suddenly the row of identikit houses becomes a unique expression of the individual; each front garden has a different quality, no two are the same and each interacts with their boundary in a different fashion.

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Dwellings along Oxford road. Each front garden has been tended to differently. Some are grassed, some paved, some planted. All have space for a car or a drive way.

Alan Mace highlights the importance of the suburbs history in relation to the here and now, explaining that ‘[l]ess often do we see studies that look at how a suburb’s history plays through into change and/or into the present day’ (2013, p.21). Although suburbia is culturally viewed as a dull and ahistorical place, there is a greater depth to places that remain forgotten. The origins of Kidlington hark back to the middle-ages, but its suburban past is similar to most other dormitory suburbs in England. The village became a suburb in the twentieth century, beginning with smallscale local development by those who had been born there, such as John Amor who remembers his first home in Kidlington: After my parents married, they had a bungalow built in the Banbury Road […] the bungalow was the first of many that lined the road that become notorious as an example of ribbon development (2011, p. 29).

This led to large scale ‘out-of-town’ developments, such as the Oxford Garden City. Started in 1937/8 it was briefly postponed due to the war and, although labelled Oxford Garden City, it has since become a part of the Kidlington suburb. The following quote from the brochure explains the original intentions for the new ‘city’: At last I have found the Home I’ve been looking for; you will say when you visit Oxford’s Latest and Finest Estate.

Oxford Garden City is delightfully situated adjoining Oxford’s Green Belt on the main Oxford Banbury Road (Amor, 1996, p. 23).

Connectivity was crucial for the development of the Garden City ideal, as was the case in all the Garden City proposals. The city relationship becomes an economic one where the future of the suburbs is determined by the commute, a faster commute equals more housing. However the stop and start, piecemeal approach to developing the modern housing had an effect on the village, in that uniting a disjointed complex made forming a solid community difficult (Offord, n.d.).

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Street lamps are a common sight along the main roads and in the town centres. Along quieter roads secondary light from dwellings must be relied upon.

This extract from Sir John Betjemens Poems sums it up rather well: When all our roads are lighted By concrete monsters sited Like gallows overhead, Bathed in the yellow vomit Each monster belches from it, We’ll know that we are dead.

(Betjemen, 1966)

The Stirling Cinema is now a Tesco Metro.

The space for the local market is now flats and ‘generic’ shops.

In this vein the ‘village-centre’ has been redeveloped a few times, with an attempt at a shopping mall, albeit small scale, and regeneration of the public space; providing a one-man band-stand and a few benches. The local market space was sold and flats were built, creating a rather closed streetscape.

The remainders of the market are set along the High Street on a Saturday in a haphazard fashion and bored teenagers can be found here on clear days peering over their mobiles. The past has created a disparate community through the organisation of space. As the suburb continues to change the past ought to be acknowledged to create a foundation for future possibilities, rather than being marginalized or turned into a spectacle.

Around the conception of Oxford Garden City was the closure of Oxford Zoo, located just opposite. From his parent’s newly completed bungalow, John Amor was party to the view of foreign animals, remembering that: ‘Elephants weren’t the only thing to pass by the bungalow. Once several Highlanders passed by playing their bagpipes’ (Amor, 2011, p. 32). This rather playful imaginary scape was in fact the everyday of the village. What is most intriguing is that seeing an elephant was an accepted part of the routine, it was the bagpipe players that stood out in his mind. In this sense it is possible for even the most unusual to become accepted. In order to refrain from banality, it appears that continual change is required.

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A parrot takes a brief respite from constant petting, as recorded on the 1971 cine film.

Zoos have always been popular. The cine film documents the visit to the Burford Wildlife Park in 1971, a zoo about thirty miles from Kidlington, and shots of flamingos, penguins, parrots are collated together. Forty years previously the Oxford Zoological Gardens had opened to the public, and ‘more than two thousand people flocked to the Zoo’ the first weekend of its opening (Amor, 2008). It sat at the ‘gateway to Oxford’ and was intended to offer an interesting point upon arrival to the north of Oxford. Within the Zoo were lions, leopards, and polar bears, as well as wolves, baboons, hyenas, parrots and the infamous elephant; Rosie. The elephant died whilst at the zoo and her bones still reside beneath Thames Valley Police Station car park.

The Zoological gardens were officially part of Oxford, but the site today firmly resides within the boundary of Kidlington.

The gateway between Kidlington and Oxford is now a large supermarket and roundabout – typical suburban markers found on the peripheries of urbanised areas. Soon the new rail station will signal the arrival into Oxford, where the territory of the city will have become meaningless, as the city swallows the suburb.

The gateway won’t signal departure from the rural to the urban, it will be a way of distinguishing one urban centrality from another. These are also the thoughts of Lefebvre who sees the need to distinguish between city and urban, as urban ‘represents the unbounded city’, for the city is no longer a defined place or territory (Mace, 2013, p.13).

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This makes Mace’s point ever more pertinent, ‘[h]istory provides a framework within which people engage with place’ (2013, p. 160). In order to maintain a sense of identity and unite the disparate local community, this past gateway landmark offers some idea of possible urban space. Overlaid onto the present landscape the zoo forms an interesting relationship with the space around. The footprint lands on the Police Station and the adjacent housing estate - what would happen if the zoo was rematerialised, excavated from the past and inserted into the suburban? This is explored through the film methodology, where views of the suburb are set against imagery from the cine film of the family excursion in 1971 and some old photographs of the Oxford Zoo residents. It critiques the empty spaces within the suburb; the unused boules court during winter; the roads devoid of people; car parks; and alley ways, and suggests future possibilities of how these spaces could be inhabited, such as polar bear enclosures, landscaped ponds, and pop-up parrot petting areas.

Pelicans and Parrots on Green road. Cine film layers of the typical suburban view.

The film brings together past and present, drawing from history new ideas about the future. Augé suggests that architects are accustomed to searching for the beauty in the non-place to reveal the enigmatic nature of the space. In this Augé appears to suggest that there is something to find: There is a history and it is the architect’s role to reveal this, to disrupt the non-place.

Bringing this recent past and inserting it back into a suburban landscape, into both the private and public space which blurs the individual territory but creates a larger suburban boundary through its network of urban space.

Over-leaf First day at school walking down Brasenose Drive in 1970. Cine film.

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The Stirling Cinema In a lecture from 2012, Augé furthers his critique of modernity, arguing that the aesthetic and socio-political dimensions in the global world contradict one another. The aesthetic ‘is constantly celebrating commemoration and shedding lights on scenes past’, whereas in social and political reality ‘many people feel they are both torn from the past and deprived of the future’ (Augé, 2012). This could be read in the tendency to maintain buildings from the past for their aesthetic value, even though the function is entirely different; the cinema is now the supermarket. The built form becomes an empty shell, preserving a past that in no way relates to the future. In order to reconcile this concern, history needs to become more than an aesthetic monument to the past or to the future. Current cultures’ cycle of ‘regeneration and decay’ is considered by the anthropologist journalist Paul Salopek, and the importance of the sense of history in the suburban is reinforced: Humanity remakes the world in an accelerating cycle of change that strips away our stories as well as the topsoil. Our era’s breath-taking changes flatten collective memory, blur precedence, sever lines of responsibility.

(What disconcerts us about suburbia? Not just its sameness, but its absence of time. We crave a past in our landscapes). (Salopek, 2013, p.45) Paul Salopek is an American and therefore likely to be describing the American suburban condition, however this statement can relate to both the American and Anglo suburban type built upon fields that provide no previous histories to relate to. This serves to escalate the view of suburbia as place-less, culture-less (Huq, 2013; Augé, 2008; Moran, 2005) where the past lies forgotten, or just waiting to be forgotten. Suburbia does in fact have a past, for example Kidlington is built on the old apple orchards, on ancient battlegrounds or, to refer to the recent past, time that is still held in the memories of some; on zoological gardens.

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Evans Lane, photograph inset taken in 1989 Fig. 2. Since then vegetation has grown and fences sprung up, closing off the street-scape.

Birthday party in 1970, cine film, overlaid on to a front garden market by bins and a forlorn looking child’s ladder.

This front garden realm is becoming more orientated for rubbish, cars and markers of territory. Play is relegated tot he rear.

As also explored by Mace, each suburb is affected individually by the past, be it thematic naming of streets or the sale of field by field, creating a disparate suburban scape. So, visually, there is a connection to the past, but this does not necessarily manifest itself physically. If it does become physical this is a personal history, achieved through the manipulation of space on each individual plot. Large gardens originally meant for allotments and the keeping of animals are now dominated by driveways and extensions. The past in this sense is produced by the user’s ability to influence their landscape in the private realm. In this way the residents would feel ‘torn from the past’ and ‘deprived of the future’ as space outside their private realm becomes further privatised – an issue that is also prevalent in the city (Augé, 2012). It seems self-evident therefore that intervention that includes the residents in decision making processes and manifests a physical representation of the past, is required in order to maintain the connection of the past and future for the user.

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The Christmas decorations along the High Street went up late October.

The Sterling Cinema opened in October 1938 and proved very popular, even hosting wedding receptions. In 1977 falling attendance figures meant the cinema closed. It has since been converted to a Tesco. The Sterling was remembered ‘with great affection. It was the place where you met with your friends... many romantic attachments and future marriages began life in the back row of its stalls’ (Amor, 2011, p. 23). During a brief informal interview John Amore, a life-long Kidlington resident, remembers the Sterling Cinema; …queues from the front door of the cinema, right round the back […]From Woodstock, people would come […]

People came in coaches from the Whichwoods ...very, very popular. It was killed by television. People would rather stay at home, television was new… And the numbers went down and down and down until it just wasn’t worth while doing. (Amor, Appendix)

The Saturday morning market hawks its plastic wares to a non-existent public. Other stalls include flower and fruit and vegetables.

This isolating new form of communication changed the use of public space and further fragmented the suburb. This occurred during the 1970s, a time of great change, and an issue that has not since been reconciled but has been given over more and more to the non-place. Rail travel is returning to the suburb, increasing connectivity to more cities – creating more theatres of flight that duplicate themselves around the urban fabric. Neither in the present nor the past do these places remain fixed to the future. This infers that the present and the past are overlooked but, as discussed, this local history is important to the creation of identity. History doesn’t necessarily mean historical roots, but that there is a connection to the past that ties people to the place they live in (Savage et al., 2005).

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Built for the village that was growing into a suburb, the cinema was a piece of urban space that brought the community together; the cinematic dreams united people, the excitement and pleasure of the cinematic event. A photograph of the cinema on the Kidlington Facebook page, the online notice board, has brought memories flooding back. These are a selection of the many, and growing, comments of nostalgia and memory, of the future beginning: Happy memories with dad working there. Used to spend ages in the bar looking at the ceiling.

I remember going there in late 60’s early 70’s watching cassey jones and flash gorden before the main film. Mrs bull who lived next door in the bungalow was the cleaner jack skinner was the usher and mr hawkins was the manager happy days [sic] Joanne. Me and Julie used to go there in the early 60s to the saturday matinee. It was a shilling each if I remember right. We lived in Hazel Crescent back then and would make our way there through all the alley ways into Sterling road. Happy memories. [sic]

Sterling Cinema Fig. 3 Rachel Weaver Scott ‘my mum and dad used to work there - I went to the last film showing on the day it closed down in 1977’ 17 March 2012 at 14:43 Ann-Marie Schall ‘My dad worked there and it’s where he met my mum some 43 years ago’ 10 October 2013 at 16:14 Mark Eustace ‘Joanne. Me and Julie used to go there in the early 60,s to the saturday matinee. It was a shilling each if I remember right. We lived in Hazel Crescent back then and would make our way there through all the alley ways into Sterling road. Happy memories.’

10 October 2013 at 16:54 Michelle Jones ‘Happy memories with dad working there. Used to spend ages in the bar looking at the ceiling.’

10 October 2013 at 18:05

My mum and dad used to work there - I went to the last film showing on the day it closed down in 1977 [sic] Good memories there when small, also enjoyed the bar upstairs, yep pretty sure underage drinking, but hmm we all did that!!!!! [sic]

(Kidlington, 2013)

My dad worked there and it’s where he met my mum some 43 years ago [sic] Think I first met Andrea in the Saturday queue there and we’re still mates now! Perhaps we should do a Tesco shop there!!

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John Barron ‘I remember going there in late 60’s early 70’s watching cassey jones and flash gorden before the main film.

Mrs bull who lived next door in the bungalow was the cleaner jack skinner was the usher and mr hawkins was the manager happy days’ 10 October 2013 at 17:29 Geraldine Hayles ‘Think I first met Andrea in the Saturday queue there and we’re still mates now! Perhaps we should do a Tesco shop there!!’

11 October 2013 at 11:58

(Kidlington, 2013)

Although suburbia is seen as timeless it has layers of history and it is this past that can be exposed. Alongside the past, memories act to create a personalised landscape.

Think I first met Andrea in the Saturday queue there and we’re still mates now! Perhaps we should do a Tesco shop there!!

This quote from a resident of Kidlington sums up the perception of history as a continuum, this is where they met and so this place still has value – even if that value has been distorted. The comment is meant as a joke, its tone infers the ridiculousness of the idea of visiting a place which has since been swept clean of any original intent of the previous place. This comment aims to make something of nothing. What would be the scenario to recreate the emotion and the excitement of going to the cinema, to be drawn out of one reality into another, in a generic supermarket? Does the current space offer the same imaginary possibilities? Food shopping is part of the patterns of the everyday and generic supermarkets are labelled a non-place by Augé, a contractual space. Advertisements suggest an alternate ‘you’, offering possibilities for an easy lifestyle, quicker, faster, and tastier. Is this just another cinematic experience?

Lefebvre explains that the spectacle of the generic street and the advertisements of developers create an ideology where ‘daily life resembles a fairy-tale’ and ‘consumer society is expressed by orders...the order to be happy’ (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 84). Yet for the resident of Kidlington this doesn’t matter – the act of returning together transcends any other perceptions of the space – and in this sense creates an alternate reality within which they express themselves. These dreams of the past express a possible future use of the space, they wish to return to a place that brought them together and that enable an experience to be shared. This perception of memory suggests that these places of event anchor people to a place, creating nostalgia but also bringing people together. These hubs of activity can act to unite the residents.

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The philosopher Yi-Fu Tuan, a source of inspiration for Mace, ‘identified these aspects of time and place: first, place as pausing; second, time as a function of becoming attached to place; and third, place as time made visible where place serves as a memorial to times past’ (Mace, 2013b, p. 85). Time as a function of becoming attached to place and time made visible by memorial are the two areas of interest. Suburbia must act against timelessness in order for the resident to become ‘attached to place’. Time is important, it is the recent past for many and serves to provide the layering of memories, however time made visible by memorial/monument creates a defined view of what the past means for certain individuals. Lefebvre has contrasting opinions about the use of monument: on the one hand he sees it as ‘essentially repressive’, as it usually stands for an institution, and on the other he believes the monument brings people together, ‘they proclaim duty, power, knowledge, joy, hope’ (Lefebvre, 2003, p. 22). In this way non-places can act as memorials to times passed as explored in the previous quote of the Kidlington resident and act in bringing people together. However these nonplaces are not places of interaction but for passing through; they are not intended as memorials and remain a spectacle.

The High Street at dusk, illuminated by glowing plastic.

‘[B]oredom is pregnant with desires, frustrated frenzies, unrealised possibilities. A magnificent life is waiting just around the corner, and far, far away [...] Here man’s magnificent power over nature has left him alone with himself, powerless. It is the boredom of youth without a future.’ (Lefebvre 1995, Notes on a New Town, p.124)

Over-leaf The moon perches above a bungalow, accentuating the cultural view of ‘middle-england’.

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The Bungalow When I was growing up in Kidlington your Dad took the car out of the garage in the morning to go to work and returned it to the garage at the end of the day. The road and the pavements were all ours. We had large front lawns with no boundaries and our road went only to people’s homes. Visitors mostly came on foot or bicycle during the week and our Mums were always around. We knew the children on our road and the parents knew each other.

We behaved.

Kidlington was a large village even then but most of us went to the same local schools so you recognised a great number of faces.

Now it’s just a “dormer town” with traffic calming humps to slow the traffic down. Everyone drives if they can (to the park and ride if going into Oxford) or takes the bus. Many bus rides are simply from the outskirts into the shopping centre of Kidlington itself. I don’t live there anymore but my Mum does. My children have never played in the road in Kidlington - it’s simply too congested with parked cars and traffic.

(Memories from Lisa Hill - Appendix)

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Riding a pony along the suburban streets is not an activity one would consider nowadays as the roads have been given over to traffic.

Photograph taken in 1975.

Photograph taken in 1975.

History exists in the form of places, events and memories; in some ways nostalgia for a local past. These slow, village-esque memories sum up the cultural representation of ‘middleEngland’ and the reasons one moved to the suburb to begin with. Kidlington fits Thorns description of an ‘estate suburb’, a planned development of semi-detached houses which ‘gives rise to the popular image of the suburb and suburban man with its standardization of design and layout’ (Thorns, 1972, p. 77).

From this ‘standardization’ comes the perception of boredom.

Henri Lefebvre echoes this in his comment on the affairs of society in 1993: Streets and highways are becoming more necessary, but their incessant, unchanging, ever-repeated traffic is turning them into wastelands. Retail is becoming more important than production, exchange more important than activity, intermediaries more important than makers, means more important than ends. And everything is subsiding into boredom. (Lefebvre, 2007, p.151) Again the perception of boredom is prevalent in his opinion, a chronic condition not just of cities but also the suburban.

This stigma is has come to characterise the new towns, where ‘ahistorical sterility and boredom’ becomes part of their representation in current culture (Moran, 2005, p.117). To challenge this, the spaces of the past and the non-places are being explored to understand how fragments of urban space might be distributed across the suburban. The weight of boredom is a repressive space, where nothing but repetition occurs. Alan Mace explains how this is a misinterpretation of the reality of the suburb and the sociologist and journalist Rupa Huq passionately derives this comment also: ‘but far from being cultural deserts, suburbs have been a fertile breeding ground for artistic movements’ (2013b). In this respect, suburbs are culturally stigmatised as boring and banal and therefore almost an embarrassment. This could explain the lack of attention given to the suburb by councils, architects, and the ilk. The predominantly private realm and culture perception of these places has made them undesirable to many.

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A small window increases the feeling of privacy. This door was recently changed from fully glazed as the resident felt unsafe.

Robberies are common place in the suburbs, were properties are shielded from public view by high fences and vegetation.

Over-leaf Internal and External of the dwelling.

The practice Big Thom is a modern studio that is engaging with the issues of identity in suburbs. They discuss the issues prevalent in suburbia and look at overcoming these issues: So many social problems occur in suburbia because families are isolated. This isolation is very bad for building community values. I am a strong believer of having people living closer together, sharing more public space and more open space. (Arch Daily, 2013) Big Thom expresses the important role that public space plays in helping foster identity, and sees the future of the suburb as becoming more urban in that the densities become higher – more like the city. This idea is also proposed at the conclusion of the film “The End of Suburbia” which proposes that the cost of fuel in the future will cause people to live in higher densities, closer to work and home. In this sense the suburb would become more like the city, a grid of work, play, shop, and home. A viewing of the film was shown in Kidlington in October, after being advertised on telegraph poles across the suburb. The turnout was about 20 people, with most above 50 years of age. After the showing the film was discussed and the residents showed interest in the idea that the end of fossil fuels might create a denser and more localised community. When the question was asked: what changes do you think this would mean in your lifestyle? No-one answered, there was just nervous laughter. Although the ideas behind creating a community appealed to the residents the means in creating this did not. In this way fragments of urban space would need to break with the current place-time pattern that the residents have become accustomed to in order to progress. In order to develop a dream reality has to be challenged, as Lefebvre remarks, ‘the only genuine, profound human changes are those which cut into this substance and make their mark upon it’ (Lefebvre, 1991, p.228).

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The film research reveals the change in time and place, where an unpopulated photograph is suddenly overrun with bright lights, vehicles, and people. Places of historical memory, time, and place are lifted, removing the wedge of time that separated both moments and bringing them into the present. The Sterling Cinema, photographed with no people in the street, is now a rush of cars and advertising. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas when explaining Lefebvre, remark: History no longer holds the pre-eminence it had; it has tended to become no more than a representation whose obliteration has been pursued by states who nonchalantly use the products of the past and territorial resources as memories and folklore. (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 49) They go on to explain that ‘historical images are turned into political icons’ which, when certain iconic buildings are considered, rings true. However when the residential is considered this doesn’t seem to apply, the only historical stereotype they carry is ‘sameness’. Folk heritage on the other hand can have a positive influence as expressed by Helen Wickstead who explains that folk heritage ‘can shake people out of established rhythms’ and that this enables the transformation of the ‘patterns of space-time that constitute place’ (Wickstead, 2013, p. 205). To this end Wickstead elucidates that a new folktale that is not a return to the past but a ‘projection of a possible future past’ can engage the residents with space. This does not require archaeological activities in order to resuscitate a bygone era, as is the worry of Kofman and Lebas, but the excavation of a new form of the past with which to recreate the present. The recent past in this sense can be reinterpreted, perhaps not to the end of creating a folk heritage but creating a new pattern of space-time, and a platform for the future. It is the events, such as the Christmas Light Switch on, and Remembrance Day parades that pull people from their patterns and brings them together.

The spaces that these moments occupy are the streets and car parks, i.e. non-places. On such occasions, the suspension of daily life enables the occupation of these non-places as event space for the community.

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Past and present are laid over, even in the middle of the day, mid-week, traffic flows down an obscure road in the suburb.

Photograph taken in 1976.

Five boys play basketball on a windy day, an empty playground sits just out of shot to the right.

The flamingos make strange viewing against this grassed park space.

The photograph is of flamingos from the Oxford Zoological Gardens. Fig 4.

The film explores this, though the abstract layering of past and present – not always in the straight archaeological sense of one time before another, but also one time over another – cyclical time – thus a new time-space relationship is formed. By framing the flamingos on to the evening-sun shot of a cul-de-sac, the cul-de-sac is critiqued: can flamingos be present here? How, and why not? Although this is a rather abstract idea it raises questions about the recent past; only 60 years ago the site of the house was a farmer’s field and the presence of birds would not be uncommon. Also, not quite a century ago, flamingos would have been one of the least surprising animals to be found in the Kidlington locale due to the Zoo. Why, then, is it so unusual to presume that such exotic birds could not find a place in a quiet residential street?

The science of the urban phenomenon ‘constitutes itself slowly, making use of theoretical hypotheses and practical experience as well as established concepts. But it cannot exist without imagination, that is, without utopia’ (Lefebvre, 2003, p.144).

Imagination creates leisure time, such as cinematic experience, zoo excursions, a utopian place of pleasure and fun. Utopia in the sense of Lefebvre is not an unobtainable fantasy of the architect or philosopher, but the dream required to consider future possibilities. Utopia is accepted as unreal and becomes part of the process of conception. As Kofman and Lebas explain ‘Only the poet could really know the city; therefore, planning as poesis belonged to the artist, or only the artist could transform everyday life into a practical utopia’ (2000, p. 80). Therefore in order ‘smash the stereotypes of nondescript suburbia and […] celebrate those places on the edges of our cities’, as the sociologist Rupa Huq so passionately asks us to do, a degree of imagination and fantasy is required to see past the monotony.

Over-leaf Cine footage of a tennis match on the courts now occupied by the Audi Garage.

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The Airport A plane swoops over the road between Woodstock and Kidlington. The airport is looking to do international flights.

Close behind follows an old bus, still in service.

As one method of transport maintains the old links, new ones to far away places are also being created.

“To watch, close up, a transatlantic jet prepare to fly was a true taste of exotica. No wonder the pier-top viewing deck was full of families at weekends or school holidays. All you needed was a pair of binoculars and a notebook, and the world was yours for the afternoon.” (Farley & Roberts, 2012, p. 244) An aspect of the past that once held wonder and captured the imagination was flight. Now flying is part of the everyday, a banal excursion in itself. All transport has its moment; even the motorway was once rejoiced, with restaurants over the road to get a good view of those passing.

The cine film begins with the everyday patterns: the family getting into the car, cut with shots of planes overhead. Later in the series of cine film the everyday is abandoned in favour of holidays; trips to France, the local wildlife park, a walk in the valleys, the Roman ruins down the road – even selecting a new car in the local showroom has a short debut. One moment that is filed along with these trips away from the home, is a father and daughter visit to the local airfield. Here a shot of watching the planes take off is taken from inside the car and then cuts to the girl stood by the picket fence craning her neck to get a better view. What may seem an innocuous event is filled with a magic, it was worth recording on the short four minute loop that made each cassette. Now the territory of the sky is no longer a dream, but an everyday reality which too has become part of the banal suburban.

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The acceptance of travel and speed has worked its way into the suburban, where winding residential lanes are now decorated with speed humps. The grass edged roads in Kidlington are now paved over. This has been an on-going process for over half a century as can be seen from this extract of Sir John Betjemen’s poem ‘Inexpensive Progress’, from 1966: Let’s say goodbye to hedges And roads with grassy edges And winding country lanes; Let all things travel faster Where motor car is master Till only Speed remains.

(Betjemen, 1966) Tracking this change through film the poetic truth becomes immediately clear. Traffic in the centres and throughout the residential environment has clearly increased and has an effect on the feel of space. It has fragmented it. This can be explored through the change in occupancy in the dwelling. From building snowmen in the front garden, playing with children across the road in the street, dressing up and riding a pony to the local field; none of this appears to happen anymore. The dwelling has become internalised with high fences, thick vegetation, and private space. Even though the gardens out the front of the dwellings down Brasenose drive, in Kidlington, have a notice written into the contract for each house that no barriers may be erected, there are still tangible boundaries on each property. This could be the reason that little activity happens ‘out the front’. The speed of the cars and the closed up windows all restrict those from being in the front garden. The windows were originally full height, but most have been replaced with a smaller, meaner type and are dressed with blinds or net curtains, for extra ‘security’.

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A day trip to watch the planes take off. The picket fence has since been replaced with thick mesh and a deep gully.

The past refers to an age without boundaries, without speed, but now the dreams of the suburb have become internalised and relegated to back gardens and screens. The Christmas rituals however began to bring people out: the annual ‘Christmas Light Switch-on’ complete with tea-cup rides, candy floss, hot dogs, and a large, red, blow-up slide is built upon year by year as history and memory weaves the dreams and reality together. Kidlington Rotary Club even has a faux Santa complete with sleigh and MDF reindeers, pulled round every street in Kidlington in the run up to Christmas.

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Santa Clause makes his yearly rounds in Kidlington. The sound of Christmas songs bounce off brick walls as his ‘helpers’ in reflective jackets knock on all doors to see if any of the children would like to meet Santa.

Waiting for the bus is an exercise in patience, as these pacing feet demonstrate. When the suburbs growth spurt occurred in the 1970s, buses to Oxford were less than one an hour, now there is one every five minutes until one am in the morning.

As the urban fabric changes and patterns of communication alter, the past is being irrevocably lost or glossed over, such as the dissolution of the remaining signs of our agricultural heritage; the silo. History helps frame culture. Robinson, the main character in Robinson in Space, searches for something in all the new space with which to build upon in order to orient him. As the relationship with the city changes and spaces become further internalised and privatised, as has happened in the suburban as well as the city (Augé, 2012), then the urban fabric begins to transform and the loss of centrality begins. Although this theory of Lefebvre is not taken up by Mace in his ethnographic research in the London suburbs, it is perhaps because Mace is focusing on the present. Mace does however coin the phrase ‘post-suburban’, which points to a future of a suburb that no longer requires the city as it has become the city, a suburb that diffuses out across urban space, and a suburb ‘in decline’ (Mace, 2005, p.17).

Only recently did the residents of Kildington join together, when it was suggested that the ‘village’ be rebranded a town, and object to this new label. They also rejected the possibility of the Parish Council being absorbed by Oxford City Council.

Again the identity of the suburb was revealed when the silo was demolished in October, with many comments of regret or pleasure at its removal, and the worry of what the new railway station might signify. One such worry is the possibility is that the green belt, so deftly championed by the Oxford Garden City pioneers back in the late 30s, will be built on, thus removing any tangible boundary between city and suburb.

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Lights flicker up and down the main thoroughfare, mirroring the ones strung up to celebrate Christmas festivities.

The film illustrates the fragmented relationship between past and present and the change in perception of time. Pleasure and delight were savoured, now they are expected. The spectacle reminds the resident how they should exist at all times, through advertising, next-door’s pristine lawn, and the slogans in the supermarket. Society may have become transient and, with the loss of visual signs of production and an emphasis on consumption, the landscape has changed and keeps changing.

Savage et al who performed a similar study to Mace, but in the suburbs of Birmingham, comment on the effects of this development: In a world characterised by virtual communication, institutional deregulation, and the movement of capital, information, objects and people at great speed across large distances, social life cannot be seen as firmly located in particular places with clear boundaries. Identities are therefore diasporic, mobile and transient (Savage et el., 2005, p.1) This transience is drawn upon in architecture. Public space has little place in the residential scape, the land carved up from property to property with the road slicing between them. Before the advent of everyday car culture this was not necessarily the case; as has been illustrated within the film and confessional memories.

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The trees didn’t exist along the grass verge until recently - creating a divide between main road and dwelling.

Public space used to include pleasurable activities such as playing in the street. Originally meant as a cross between urban and country, the suburbs now offer direct and fast access into the urban centre. The centrality of the city has had an effect on how space is occupied. In the past the village offered everything people required. But current society has higher expectations, and what was on offer then is not available now. This is not nostalgia for the ‘old cinema’ or the ‘old zoo’ – they are not spectacles waiting to be resurrected. They are indicators of what enabled pleasure and delight. A fixed provider of these activities would not be effective today, current society does not demand change; it expects it. Lefebvre explains thus: People represent themselves to themselves by what they are lacking or believe to be lacking. In this relationship, the imaginary has more power (1996, p.80) Therefore, architecture should reflect this, the built environment should anticipate this. Lefebvre talks of new centralities, maybe society asks now for fluctuating centralities, transient centralities, tangible but mobile; where uncertainty is part of the everyday, disrupting the banal – or proving that the banal was just a façade. When discussing heritage it was clear that a new heritage, a different take on the past can help with the formation of culture in this transient scape. History offers the opportunity to address these spaces in a fun and playful yet functional way that helps realise that everyday life is ‘the real space in which we lead our actual lives’ (Moran, 2005, p. 169).

Over-leaf Alternate use for the unoccupied boules court, during the winter months.

Inset photograph of Polar Bears from Oxford Zoo. Fig. 5

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The New Rail-Station ‘The local landmark, the grain silo, was documented as being very well used throughout most of its life. Modern technology made it redundant and it’s being replaced by a train station. This will offer better connections to London; it will become a “theatre of flight”.

Instead of a static icon guarding the village they will soon have a facilitator of travel, inviting people to “come on in”.’

As the urban fabric becomes de-territorialised, as Lefebvre envisioned it would, and if the post-suburban landscape becomes reality, as Mace believes is happening, then the centrality of the city exerts a weaker pull. The residential scape of the suburban could be the future of the urban landscape as information culture requires less physical manifestation, creating a continuous de-territorialised scape. Monuments of the history of industry are being demolished to make way for this new information culture and the theatres of flight that are required for it. History shapes the present but in order not to lose sight of the culture that people share through public space then history needs to be allowed to continue to inform it.

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‘Le Pattiserie’ is the only remaining bakers in Kidlington, in 1970 there were three.

A street celebrates the festivities by lighting up all the houses and holding a small ‘switchon’ party.

Suburbia continues to function, and continues to be constructed on the periphery of cities, even though history has proved that this fluctuating way of building creates a fragmented community.

The methodology set out to research visually how to critically look at the use of space, both past, present, and future in order to understand how history and dreams could engage residents in developing and maintaining culture. The film revealed a recent past, that keeps people tied to certain places and that it is the continual layering of personal histories that help engender a sense of belonging. Various rituals continue and bring about a sense of solidarity; neighbourhoods decorate their roads with resplendent flashing bulbs looped around window-boxes and drainpipes to celebrate the Christmas festivities. The local Historical Society has published many books relating to the History of Kidlington, who lived here and why, all building up to ‘how lucky we are to live here’. But with the grain silo demolished in an efficient week and a half, the work on the new rail link Oxford Parkway has begun. In this respect the locale of Kidlington is becoming more transient in the sense of the introduction of a physical rail-way connection, but will more growth create further fragmentation of the community?

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The village centre is a mass of lights at night, from shops, car headlamps, street lamps and decorations.

How do architects respond to this ‘chaos’ of suburbs, urban fabric and surviving cores? Lefebvre sees them as trying to engage with the ‘human scale’ but failing to realise the change that has occurred, the village is now a city and has been transformed beyond measure. Either the solution becomes ‘formalism’ or ‘aestheticism’, fodder for the consumers. This is a nod towards monumentality that attempts to encase a sense of culture, however as this paper explores this can be mere ‘aestheticism’. The intervention, or act, that engages the resident needs to consider their needs and allow expression for them.

In this sense can the limits in suburbia be extended through fragments of urban space, which respond to both the past to enable a cultural hook and engage in the present with the residents? As suburbia becomes de-territorialised a network of public space may be the means with which to engage across a disparate landscape. Architects need to look to the non-place and disrupt the spectacle in a way that illuminates the possibilities of space and acts against isolation. Events can help realise this; parades and celebrations already engage with this space, even on a momentary basis.

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Memory and dreams can anchor people to places, past sites of event could be re-materialised but in a different way in order to engage with the past in a form that is both interactive with time and space. For timelessness is a cultural stigma that is applied to the suburban, in order to break with this perception the fragments of urban space would need to be distributed in a way that both disrupts the time-space illusion and unifies residents.

As borders become pronounced on properties and new forms of communication internalise space, these urban fragments would need to expose the internal and make more transparent consumption and communication, playing with boundaries of public and private space.

A lion from Oxford Zoo fig. 6 strolls across a suburban street.

These ideas go some way to answering the question, but a degree of the imaginary is needed to enable these ideas, for they cannot be small unobtrusive elements, and they must be able to interact with the residents in a mobile or transient way in order to remain engaging. History offers this opportunity as it reveals past uses of space and perceptions of place, these can be used to create a new pattern of time-space, as has been explored by Wickstead using new folk-tales.

Over-leaf A camel fig. 7 munches on grass inside the airport compound, as a fervent plane watches gazes at the skies.

A mother and daughter look at the ruins [cine film] along a suburban road.

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The village centre greets you via a set of traffic lights, a mock tower and a garage forecourt.

In creating a new history for suburbia the perception of a timeless scape can be discarded and the true qualities of the suburban displayed. Rather than ‘breaking free of the dream in which we live’, we should work with the dream (Mace, 2013). For to wake up to our true hopes and aspirations, first we need to excavate from the dream what it is we want to hold on to.

Over-leaf Co-op was burnt down the summer and opened mid-winter to much acclaim. One local resident, who lives in Marlborough Avenue is quoted as saying “It has been awful without it”.

Bearing in mind there is a Tesco’s, Iceland, Polish Delicatessen and a small vegetable market (Saturday afternoons) in the High Street.

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Not only has the silo been swept away by the changing tides of society, but also ‘a system, process, department, etc. that operates in isolation from others’ (Oxford Dictionaries, n.d.).

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Illustrations Fig. 1 Oxford Road 1932: Image taken from Old Kidlington Facebook page: Available at: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=339342039436047&set =a.339341569436094.68510.104067209630199&type=3&theater

Fig. 2 Row of houses 1989: Image taken from Old Kidlington Facebook page: Available at: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=339342389436012&set =a.339341569436094.68510.104067209630199&type=3&theater[accesed 24/10/13]

Fig. 3 Cinema: Image taken from Old Kidlington Facebook page: Available at: https://www.facebook. com/photo.php?fbid=339341882769396&set =a.339341569436094.68510.104067209630199&type=3&theater [accesed 24/10/13]

Fig. 4 Flamingos: Amor, J. (2008) Gosford Hill and Oxford Zoo. Kidlington: Kidlington & District Historical Society Fig. 5 Polar Bears: Amor, J. (2008) Gosford Hill and Oxford Zoo. Kidlington: Kidlington & District Historical Society Fig. 6 Lion: Image available at: www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/community/ memorylane/4878661.Lion_was_pride_of_short_lived_Oxford_ Zoo/ [accessed 12/10/13]

Fig. 7 Camel: Amor, J. (2008) Gosford Hill and Oxford Zoo. Kidlington: Kidlington & District Historical Society All other images are the copyright of the author.

Appendix - Transcripts - John Amor Transcript from an informal interview with Mr John Amor - a life long Kidlington resident and author and editor of many Kidlington publications - during the Historical Society on Tuesday, 29 October 2013.

Discussing the Cinema that closed in 1977….[when Garden City estate was being built, but had to be stopped due to the war….] “…it was saved by, you’ve lost all the people who were going to be in the Garden City...but you gain all the airmen who came to the RAF Kidlington, because the little private aerodrome had been taken over 1939. And I can remember queues from the front door of the cinema, right round the back, long queues of these airmen. People used to come. Err.. From Woodstock, people would come in the train called ‘Fair Rosemond’. Which went from Kidlington to Woodstock, now that lines gone.

Beeching cuts. So they used to come from there. People came in coaches from the Whichwoods and all those sort of...very, very popular. It was killed by television. People would rather stay at home, television was new, they had to watch television. And the numbers went down and down and down until it just wasn’t worth while doing.

Was it affected at all by Oxford..?

Why? Because Oxford had quite a few cinemas, did people start going to Oxford?

Well...I suppose they might have done… yeh… but I think it was mainly people, didn’t want to go out when they could sit in their rooms, and see that.

You said about the open land. Kidlington was called Kidlington on the Green. Like Weston on the Green. For many, many years.

And...in 1810...I think it was 14 people. You had to own property to be able to vote on this. And I think 14 people, who didn’t all live in Kidlington, even, decided they would go to parliament,

and get an act of parliament to enclose the green, if you like, or common land. It stretched from the here, we are in fact on the green and it stretched in that direction, all the way to Stratfield Brake, where the present sport field is there. It stretched westward as far as the canal...although the canal wasn’t there. But there was a stream, a brook. And this way it stretched more or less to school road, and….houses in high street were only on the other side of the road, in fact the green went across high-street in to what is no the gardens of the houses. The enclosure act came, people were told that they could have the land for front gardens as long as they enclose it with stone walls. And I can remember as a kid there were stone walls all around there. Houses in Crown road, all the old houses, if you look, on that side of the road, because they looked onto the green. There were no houses on this side, no houses here looking that way as there are now.

Ah what else…?

I just wandered about the zoo - wasn’t it only in Kidlington for 20 years…?

No… Five years!

Is that it..? They had Lions and an elephant. There was a lot there…

A person came to live in Shipton on Charwell, called Frank Grey. And he was a real eccentric, and became a member of Parliament, a very good member of parliament. Apparently he raced back to Oxford Town Hall every Friday, and people could go an ask him questions. But he lost his seat because his agent... some money matters...anyway he was going from Shipton into Oxford one day, and the person with him was the editor of the Oxford Mail. And he said to this Oxford Mail chap - Oxford deserves something better on this approach to Oxford...I am going to build a zoological garden. And as...well it opened in 1932. They procured / were given, animals from all over the place, zoos and other places. And the elephant, Rosie, came form Wombles Circus. And it was very popular, very, very popular.

But in 1936 plans were made to open a zoo at Dudley. Dudleys got a much bigger population, and it was going to grow and grow and grow. So in 1937 Kidlington Zoo - no Oxford Zoo it was -Oxford Zoological gardens was closed down, but a lot of the people who worked there moved to Dudley. Some of the member of the sort of board that ran it, they went as well. So it was very short lived. It had been a farm before….37 - I am not quite... quite sure what happened in 38-39. But in 39 war came.

And a grammar school was evacuated to Kidlington…well they shared the Kidlington school, Gosford Hill…

And then they acquired a big house down the moors called Thornbury house which is now called Homewell House, and a lot of the girls would live there. When the girls came to Kidlington they queued up in London, were marched in crocodile, put on a train. They didn’t know where they were going they arrived in Bicester.

You can read all this as I published books on…

Well they got to Bicester, put on buses, got to Kidlington and Mrs Curtis, wife of Mr Curtis who was a famous person living in Kidlington. He was the..what do call it...she took all these girls and they were marched around the village. And you had, if you’ve got the room, you had to take children, evacuee, the government….

Most of the girls were happy to be here..I mean they came from East Ham..that was a pretty awful place then. And it was bombed heavily too. Ahh, they really enjoyed themselves…. *laughs* one day they were helping the teachers decorate the buildings at the farm...and one of the girls said “Please miss can we keep that notice” and the notice said - Do Not Feed the Animals.

Is it true that the Elephant is buried Yes

Underneath...where..?

I don’t know...somewhere beneath Gosford Hill is an elephant... very said story which wasn’t publicised much. It had rats attacking its feel at night. What they tried to do, they got a boot maker from the Covered Market in Oxford to make little booties for this elephant. But it didn’t work apparently. And it was put down. Which was very sad as it was the most popular….

The local school, this next term, are going to be studying the zoo. And its crazy really as the zoo was there five years and Kidlington’s been here… hundreds and hundreds, very long history.

If you want… oh… Shes gone… the lady who sells the books.

Appendix - Transcripts - Lisa Hill Lisa Hill, my mother, grew up in the house I am currently living in, in Kidlington [my grandmothers house]. She has expressed her disregard for the village and can’t understant why anyone would choose to live here anymore. The following is her reflections on her childhood.

When I was growing up in Kidlington your Dad took the car out of the garage in the morning to go to work and returned it to the garage at the end of the day. The road and the pavements were all ours. We had large front lawns with no boundaries (part of the planning states they must remain this way), and our road went only to peoples homes. Visitors mostly came on foot or bicycle during the week and our Mums were always around. We knew the children on our road and the parents knew each other. We behaved. Kidlington was a large village even then but most of us went to the same local schools so you recognised a great number of faces. There were Girl Guide parades which lots and lots of people turned out for. One of the local parks had a small paddling pool and the schools all had outdoor swimming pools of one sort or another. There was an old school sports hall which was used by clubs and a very popular rugby club on the outskirts. Going into Oxford on the bus was a major event, I think I was 14 by the time I was allowed to go with just a friend. Kidlington had a watch menders and an old cobblers, dry cleaners and two excellent bakeries. These I remember. And a favorite memory was being taken to the local cinema (aged 5) with my Nana Dee to watch Dumbo. The cinema became a Tesco, the first supermarket in Kidlington. Now its just a “dormer town” with traffic calming humps to slow the traffic down. Everyone drives if they can (to the park and ride if going into Oxford) or takes the bus. Many bus rides are simply from the outskirts into the shopping centre of Kidlington itself. I don’t live there any more but my Mum does. My children have never played in the road in Kidlington - its simply too congested with parked cars and traffic.

Appendix - Transcripts - Cine Film In my Grandmothers attic I discovered a box of cine film dating from 1965-1980 and a battered but still functioning projector.

Looking at their suburban life through the stuttering projections on the wall I suddenly wanted to understand why people live here and why my mother really hated it!

The following is the two cine films that were used in the making of the research film, listed in order of what was recorded.

1970 First day of school - walking down the road Views of the countryside - car parked on the road Birthday party in the back garden Stood by the picket fence next to the airfield watching the planes Playing Tennis Feeding the ponies Getting in the car Watching the planes take-off Giggling Car show room 1971 Burford Wildlife Park, shots of; sea;s, pelican, penguin, waterfoul, flamingos, otters, birds, parrot being petted, rabbits, parrot, toucan Walk in the countryside - flowers, cows, fields Roman villa ruins

Appendix - Diary Whilst living in Kidlington I have met some people who have shaped my view on the suburban landscape, and over-heard conversations about suburbia. Here are some ‘diary entries’: 29/10/2013 12:35pm The demolition of the Grain Silo is complete.

19:50pm Monthly Historical Society Meeting.

Meet with John Amor. He regales some history which is recorded.

24/10/2013 Today the bus arrived on time. Thanks to Teresa. She said not to worry, that the bus would be here soon. As it rounded the corner she pointed it out - you should do a dance of celebration - she joked. Both dancing, the bus was waved down.

She remarked on how lovely the sunshine was - pointed out that moment of waiting ought to be enjoyed.

29/10/2013 Lady from Fairford Met a lady who has just returned from living in South Africa for 7 years. She is thinking about buying a house in Kidlington due to its good local schools and commutable distance [by bike] to Oxford. She remarked that her initial impression was one of banal, on the main approach Kidlington doesn’t look like it has a lot to offer. She is renting a house in the older part of Kidlington but can see advantages of ‘local living’. She is also won over by the proximity of the countryside.

Walter Moved here in 1956. His house had been built 20 years earlier, he was it second owner. He and his wife were both Latin teachers in Oxford, they have three children. He only visited the Cinema about three times, even though it was opposite this house. He

attributes this to not being able to afford it. He doesn’t think his children ever went. He still lives in the same house.

30/10/2013 06:15 Film screening of The End of Suburbia Shown at the local Baptist Church 19 person turn out.

10/11/2013 Two Men leaving the train station in Oxford Man #1: How was London..?

Man #2: Oh, eugh, it was okay. But it was full of people from Swindon. And you know what that means…Suburbia! And suburbia means common! #1: Ah, I though suburbia meant full of debauchery, and underground fun…? #2: ….oh no, they were all sooo vanilla!

21/11/2013 Co-op [which was burnt down earlier in the year] reopens to much local acclaim. One local resident, who lives in Marlborough Avenue is quoted as saying “It has been awful without it”.

Bearing in mind there is a Tesco’s, Iceland, Polish Delicatessen and a small vegetable market (Saturday afternoons) in the High Street.

26/11/2013 Turning on of the Christmas Lights

Acknowledgements This book incorporates a film that was edited alongside the text. This included cine film footage of my grandparents and my mother. I would like to thank them for le ng me use it.

Also thank you to all the lovely souls in Kidlington who I bumped into and helped me see their lives in a dierent way.

And thank you to those that helped and kept my enthusiasm up, it was worth it.

L.P. January 2014