And yesterday it was facing a chilly grey afternoon with a wind

And yesterday it was facing a chilly, grey afternoon with a wind that blew into your eyes and made them weep. We’re all going to live in warehouse conversions and eat in riverside cafes, aren’t we? So it’s goodbye Magnolia Avenue and hello City Lofts.That’s the suburb for you – a place to be taken for granted, mocked and finally abandoned. It’s extraordinary how many people you meet at work and university who seem to hail from either Sloane Square or Broadwater Farm – depending on what identity they choose to mask their suburban roots – but who in fact turn out to have come from Purley.At some point in recent years most powerful commentators, from Richard Rogers to Elle Decoration, seemed to agree that the day of the suburb was over. How bizarre, then, to be told suddenly that suburbs are an endangered species – and to hear the suggestion that they would be worth preserving. The ideal for the city now is laid out by Rogers in Cities for a Small Planet, in which he dismisses the residential suburb as a “single- minded space”, as opposed to trendy, open-minded spaces such as city squares and pavement restaurants.

As soon as we get out of the suburb we start the business of reinventing ourselves, calling Pinner “north London”, or reclaiming our families’ long-lost roots in Cumbria or Bethnal Green. Anything, in fact, rather than that weirdly silent limbo, cut only by the rumble of the passing trains and the chorus of lawnmowers starting up every Sunday morning. Everything that writers from George Orwell to Nick Hornby say about the suburbs makes sense when the nearest you get to urban life is the carpeted pub filled with couples in leisurewear, and the nearest you get to country life is the choked stream that runs tidily through the local park before disappearing under the road.Disaffected young suburbanites are hardly alone. As a child, Nick Hornby would pretend at Arsenal matches that he hailed from the dangerous city, when in fact he lived in Maidenhead. “Ever since I have been old enough to understand what it is to be suburban I have wanted to come from somewhere else,” he wrote in Fever Pitch, and thousands of readers have echoed his heartfelt cry.Having spent long adolescent years in one of those generic suburban roads, lined with semi-detached pebble-dashed houses, which I would walk up and down, up and down, to get to the Tube station for the interminable journey into central London, I know how it feels to long for a home that sits in a real place – in the city, full of energy and noise, or in the country, full of smells and thorns. They can be lampooned in sitcoms, but they don’t own any drama. More than 60 years later, why should we think anything has changed?Suburbs are the places where authenticity goes missing, and suburban people aren’t meant to have anything like real character, just – at most – genteel eccentricities.

For many British writers, the suburbs have been more than risible, they have been the epitome of everything despicable in the British spirit. George Orwell takes the hero of his 1936 novel, Coming up for Air, back to the scenes of his authentically rural working-class boyhood, only to find that “the countryside had been buried by a kind of volcanic eruption from the suburbs… it was all houses, houses, little red cubes of houses all alike.” His suburbs are terrifyingly invincible. “So what’s so good about the suburbs?” Laughter took over.Why is it hard to believe that the suburbs need any attention? Well, how can we believe that peril is lurking in the suburbs when their very essence is the absence of danger? How can we possibly say that suburbs are on the edge, when they absolutely define the safe centre of England?The suburbs are not tottering on the brink of decay, because the suburbs are, necessarily, the place where the three-piece suite is constantly re-covered, the car is constantly washed, and new and more lurid varieties of clematis are spied every few yards. Michael Gwilliam, director of the Civic Trust, said: “Most attention in the debate about urban renewal has been focused on inner cities But the lack of debate about suburban areas is disturbing. A friend who works at one of the largest grant-giving organisations in Britain once described a meeting at which they heard an impassioned plea for more aid to relieve the desolation of urban poverty.