Suburbia, Larkin, and the truth about bible sales
With Andy Miller, Patrick Galbraith, and Rowley Leigh
Last time I was back in Coventry, I visited a friend and decided to walk the half hour there instead of asking for a lift — I have not driven in some time. I had been working from my childhood home for three days at that point and with little to walk ‘to’ except a petrol station M&S, I was getting antsy. When I arrived, my friend kept apologising about the fact I had walked. I heard myself say that it was absolutely fine because ‘I try to walk everywhere in London’.
She laughed at me, and then — to my horror, I realised I had become one of those people. The ‘I can’t believe how cheap things are here!’, ‘honestly I don’t know how you cope with buses only coming every half an hour’, ‘sorry, did I mention I live in London now?’ people. You live long enough to see yourself become the villain, etc etc.
Andy Miller writes today about how literature, as a reflection of society, regularly sniffs at the suburbs. 'In Britain, the suburbs are always small-minded, bourgeois, suffocating,’ he says; Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, for example, ‘reprises the literary trope of defining suburbia as little more than “a leaving place”: it is London where things happen and people are truly alive.’
I’ll admit that this was the sentiment I had growing up — it’s why I’m in the Old Smoke now. And I love it here; but for some people, like my friend, the outskirts of the city have always been where they find contentment, comfort and fulfilment. I might fall into the camp of finding the enclosed familiarity suffocating, but Andy’s right — it is about time that the stories of the suburbs and the rich lives that are lived there were told without the sneering. Things are much cheaper there, after all.
Sadia Nowshin
Junior Editor
Millions unlike us: looking for suburbia in British fiction
Andy Miller on stories from the suburb that deserve to be told
I seem to have spent much of my life explaining Croydon, a task for which I have rarely received thanks; a Sisyphean one too. No matter how many times I stand up for the much-loathed borough someone will tell me to sit down. Usually I can shoulder the boulder as far as Upper Norwood but then it rolls all the way back to Purley and I have to start again. The name Croydon is thought to derive from the Anglo-Saxon croeas deanas, meaning ‘the valley of the crocuses’, like you give a shit.
When my book The Year of Reading Dangerously was, for reasons no one involved can now recall, published in America, my editor at Harper Perennial asked me to make a handful of transatlantic substitutions and clarifications – ‘dumpster’ for ‘skip’, ‘stroller’ for ‘pushchair’, ‘Hancock’, the 1961 BBC television sitcom starring Tony Hancock not to be confused with ‘Hancock’, the 2008 superhero action comedy-drama film starring Will Smith, and so on. In the book I described my childhood passion for reading and how, growing up in the area, Croydon’s bookshops and libraries were very important to me and set me on the path in life I have followed to this day; the publisher duly requested a new footnote interpreting Croydon for the benefit of American readers. Here’s what I wrote:
‘For U.S. readers, Croydon is a suburb of South London, synonymous with much that is perceived to be drab and depressing about British suburbia. In 1999, the rock star David Bowie said in an interview, ‘It represented everything I didn’t want in my life, everything I wanted to get away from. I think it’s the most derogatory thing I can say about something or someone: “God, it’s so fucking Croydon!”’. As will become apparent in this section, this is not a view I share with Mr ‘Stardust’ (sic), who grew up not on the planet Mars, as he would have you believe, but in the neighbouring suburb of Bromley.’
I’m sure this footnote claiming David Bowie was suffering from Croydon envy left many American readers none the wiser – which, in one respect at least, was editorially consistent with the rest of the book.
Suburbia is where most of us come from; it’s the place we return to every night after work or where our parents still live. In America, a succession of writers has chronicled the suburban existence: Richard Yates, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Celeste Ng and more. Yet when suburbia features in British fiction, if it features at all, it is usually as somewhere that isn’t the countryside and isn’t the city, a location which only exists to be escaped from. There are still surprisingly few novels content to dwell in the places many of us are content to dwell.
Andy Miller is the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously (Fourth Estate) and co-host of the Backlisted podcast. He lives an hour’s train ride from London in a semi-detached house with a little patch of garden
Finding my religion
Patrick Galbraith asks Lamorna Ash why young people are churchgoing again
Some say it all kicked off, in a quiet sort of way, during the pandemic — but I didn’t really notice until afterwards. The hypothesis goes that in our time of great global sickness and enforced relative isolation, young people found God.
It’s no doubt more complicated than that, but when the world got back up on its feet again, it was clear something had changed. Young friends of mine — younger than me anyway — were posting on Instagram about going to Mass, and an acquaintance who had previously been in a chic lesbian relationship married a priest. Then, with predictable inevitability, London publishing houses started to sniff around for books on the subject. Boundless has Elizabeth Briggs’ Dissenters in the offing, an exploration of protestant radicalism from Quakers (who are still going strong) to Familists (who aren’t). And there’s Lamorna Ash’s much-anticipated Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A new generation’s search for religion, which is out in May with Bloomsbury.
I’ve known Lamorna for quite some time and I hugely admired her debut work of narrative non-fiction, Dark, Salt, Clear (Bloomsbury 2020), which was a fresh and wide-eyed look at what remains of the fishing community in Cornwall. Her new book is an altogether more serious and more mature work, which promises to be one of the most talked-about non-fiction titles in 2025. When I sat down with Lamorna, she told me that when she started writing about the green shoots of a ‘new generation’s search for religion’ at the start of the pandemic, it felt like she was going it alone. But just a couple of years on, she seems to be bang on trend. A recent Government study suggests that as many as 16% of 16-25 year olds now go to church once a month, compared to just 4% in 2018. Lamorna doesn’t do reductive, but she thinks that in part it’s about young people finding ‘meaning in a world that feels increasingly meaningless.’
Lamorna’s book, Don't Forget We're Here Forever: A New Generation's Search for Religion, will be published in May 2025 by Bloomsbury
Patrick spoke to Lamorna about the rise in religion’s popularity amongst young people and her forthcoming book on the latest episode of the Boundless Podcast. Listen on Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Patrick’s currently reading John Healy’s The Glass Cage, which is available to pre-order now
Chocolate truffle cake, from Rowley Leigh’s A Long and Messy Business
Not a complicated recipe, but it is best not made in a hurry.
Serves at least ten.
4 eggs
120g (41⁄4oz) golden caster sugar
110g (4oz) plain flour, plus extra for dusting
30g (1oz) cocoa powder, plus extra for dusting
25g (1oz) melted butter, cooled, plus extra for greasing
50g (13⁄4oz) muscavado (or similar) sugar
25ml (1fl oz) Kahlua or rum, or other chocolate-friendly alcohol (optional)
400g (14oz) dark chocolate (at least 70% cocoa solids), broken into pieces
400ml (14fl oz) double cream
icing sugar, for dusting
Preheat the oven to 170°C (325°F, Gas Mark 3). Butter a 24cm (91⁄2in) springform tin and dust with flour.
Combine the eggs and caster sugar together in the bowl of an electric mixer. Place the bowl over a pan of boiling water and whisk by hand until the mixture begins to gain in volume and is quite warm. Remove from the heat and continue to whisk using the mixer until white and very thick. Keep whisking slowly until the mixture has cooled.
Sift the flour and cocoa powder together. Gently shake into the egg mixture, turning with a spatula to ensure it is thoroughly folded in. Pour in the cool melted butter and fold this in equally carefully.
Pour the batter into the prepared tin, evenly spreading it with a spatula, and bake for 25 minutes. The cake should rise a little in the middle and feel springy. Once cooked, remove from the oven and turn out onto a wire rack.
Melt the muscovado sugar in 50ml water in a small pan. Bring to the boil, then remove from the heat. Add the alcohol, if using.
With a long serrated knife, shave the top off the cooled cake to level it and allow greater penetration of the syrup. Cut the cake horizontally to produce two equal discs.
Brush these evenly with the muscovado syrup. Replace one disc in the tin in which it was baked.
Place the chocolate in a heatproof bowl set over a pan of boiling water. Stir occasionally so that it melts evenly, but do not allow it to get too hot. Whip the cream until it forms soft peaks but, very importantly, is not fully whipped.
Remove the chocolate from the heat and whisk in a little of the cream. Slowly fold in the rest to form a velvety ganache.
Pour half of the ganache onto the sponge in the tin, spreading it evenly, right to the sides. Cover with the other half of the sponge, press down lightly, then pour in the remainder of the ganache. Even out the surface with a palette knife and chill for at least 2 hours, preferably 4.
To serve, dust with icing sugar, then cocoa powder. Release the tin and place the cake on a plate. It is good with coffee custard, vanilla ice cream or nothing at all.
Rowley Leigh’s A Long and Messy Business was published by Unbound in 2018