With its picture windows looking out over the building site that is Hackney and Shoreditch, Rich Mix – a lottery-funded arts space – seemed as good a place as any to discuss London literature. A panel of Hari Kunzru, Iain Sinclair and Rachel Lichtenstein offered engaging readings of London-themed work, including the incomparable Gerald Kersh, Sam Selvon and a novel I'd not heard of before, Children of the Ghetto by Israel Zangwill. It was a fascinating evening; but one that left me thinking not of Hawksmoor, London Fields or Brick Lane, but of my wholly typical suburban hometown.
Kunzru, Sinclair and Lichtenstein talked passionately about London's continuing creative appeal: the constant motion, the crush of lives piled upon each other, of communities taking root, then migrating. As they spoke, I wondered whether I would be in the least bit interested if I had never left Congleton. Would these novels, these experiences, mean anything if I thought it was just something they did "in that London"?
The British book trade is often accused of a huge London bias, something which is impossible to deny. More books are bought in London than anywhere else, the vast majority of media outlets are based in the capital, and better public transport links mean that commuters have more time to read than their suburban counterparts. It's no wonder, then, that writers and publishers seem so happy setting their novels in the capital.
When English literary novels do venture outside the greater London confines, they do so to escape to either a place where lush descriptions can fill the page (The countryside! The sea!) or to other urban areas (Birmingham and Manchester, usually). Where they rarely seem to alight is at the well-tended hedges of suburbia; a situation I find both strange and surprising. Why are British novelists so reluctant to take it on?
Perhaps there's a sense that it's been done so well in the past. The Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith nailed the pretensions of English suburban life almost as soon as the concept was invented. In the 70s, this was reimagined by two very different writers, David Nobbs and JG Ballard, who took the Grossmiths' satire and, in their own very different ways, made it darker and more desperate. Still, mention literary suburbia now, and it's to these three writers, plus perhaps Hanif Kureishi, that you will probably return. Our conception of suburbia – unless you actually live there, of course – is governed by the notion that not much has changed there over the years.
Almost two decades on from Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia, novels seem to have abandoned the satellite town. Mark Haddon tried it with A Spot of Bother, as did Philip Hensher with The Northern Clemency, but neither really captured the dull monotony of a suburb. Of recent novelists, I can only think of two – Gwendoline Riley, whose spare prose perfectly captures the chalky despondence of Macclesfield, and Charles Chadwick, whose It's All Right Now is almost criminally neglected – who have come close to getting to grips with the suburban condition.
Cities are dazzling, diverting places, but that's not to say that just because they're louder there's more to listen to. This is something JG Ballard realised years ago. After his recent death, I hope there will be a crop of writers to rewrite and reclaim the suburbs for a new generation. Whether suburbia will put down its Daily Mail long enough to read them, however, remains another matter.
