Why I Moved Back to the Suburbs

Two years ago, sick of paying high rent for a poky little dump of an apartment, I moved out of inner London to a quiet, nondescript South Eastern suburb. Instead of the low rumble of traffic, a tiny, ugly kitchen and a teenage neighbor forever honking through the Black Eyed Peas’ greatest hits on her clarinet, I got high ceilings, space and a rent so reasonable I worry my landlord will sober up and double it. The move brought some disadvantages, of course. With nothing but trees outside the windows, the only colourful street life comes from the escaped parakeets that infest this part of London, while no impromptu visitors turn up except Jehovah’s witnesses, who come all the time.

Still, I don’t regret moving on from my old hip, up-and-coming inner London neighborhood one bit. I’m not glad to have moved on because I need space for my kids (I don’t have any) or because I need to save money (though I do). I’m pleased to be gone because, despite all the hype about their supposed edginess and creative ferment, I find fashionable inner city neighborhoods increasingly as banal, antisocial and plain dull as any suburb. For all their reputation as hives of individuality, neighborhoods like my own city’s Broadway Market offer almost identical businesses to those you’d find in currently hip city neighborhoods anywhere. While the base materials (streets and houses) may be different in, say, NYC’s Greenpoint, Berlin’s Neukölln, or Madrid’s Malasaña, the trappings of gentrification – expensive coffee and bike shops, junk sold at a premium as “vintage” and, soon after, bitterly resented chain outlets – make these places seem increasingly homogenous.