Review: Behind the Privet Hedge by Michael Gilson
A stirring defence of suburbia and its gardens – and the rescue of a progressive pioneer from condescending oblivion
Sometime around the turn of the 20th century, Grace Hannam, a Methodist missionary to the poor of London, moved from the West London Mission at St Pancras to the Bermondsey Settlement, another progressive, not to say idealistic, social outreach project south of the river. As her possessions were being carried into her new flat in Bermondsey, a crowd of curious children gathered. They were particularly taken by the sight of Hannam’s large wooden window boxes. ‘There’s five cawffins just gone up,’ one shouted in gleeful horror. ‘Five!’
It tells you a lot – perhaps everything you need to know – about the living conditions of working-class inner London in the 1890s that its children were more familiar with small wooden coffins than with window boxes. In parts of Bermondsey, infant mortality was nearly twice that elsewhere in London; five times as many children died of measles and three times as many people died of respiratory diseases.
For social reform campaigners, these slum areas – death traps and fever dens, as one described them – demanded a range of radical solutions to alleviate suffering: better sanitation and housing, most obviously, but also healthcare and education. But, as Michael Gilson reveals in Beyond The Privet Hedge, they had another weapon in their armoury too: beauty. Indeed, in 1920 Bermondsey Borough Council went so far as to establish a Beautification Committee, chaired by Ada Salter, a member of the more-socialist-than-thou Independent Labour Party.