Park and Ride: Adventures in Suburbia Book

Suburbia has long been a source of fascination for journalists and scholars alike. Award-winning journalist Miranda Sawyer offers her take on the subject in Park and Ride: Adventures in Suburbia. "The car is the key to life in the suburbs", Sawyer announces. "There's not much you can do without it." With that insight in mind, Sawyer takes her readers for a ride from Wilmslow where she grew up ("Wilmslow was a pink jumper, white stilettos kind of a town") to Preston (the most average town in Britain), from York (where she goes in search of Britland) to Romford (Essex's youth and drugs mecca). Sawyer has fun in the suburbs. She explores all kinds of suburban clichés--keeping up appearances and kinky sex, DIY and the passion for property. Suburbia is a place Sawyer knows, and the story of her childhood and adolescence there frames this loose commentary on everyday life in Blair's Britain. Sawyer defines suburbia as Middle England. Her travelogue doesn't dwell on the difference between the comforts of semi-detachment and the dreary vision of the suburban council estate. Nor is there much cultural criticism: Park and Ride bears little resemblance to the travels of George Orwell in On the Road to Wigan Pier or to Roger Silverstone's more sober Visions of Suburbia. Nevertheless, this heady mix of suburban confession and eulogy ("the suburbs are stronger than they ever have been," Sawyer concludes) tells its story well. --Vicky LebeauRead More