Long looked down upon for their staid, middle-class associations, some now believe that the Covid-19 pandemic, the rise of home working and the search for a better life more closely connected to the local environment make suburbs test-beds for innovation in transportation, housing infrastructure and new models of urban living. In the 1820s, Summertown began as a small village, two miles away from neighbouring Oxford, a centuries-old medieval settlement of cloistered colleges. This edited collection traces how house-building and faster, cheaper travel gradually closed the spatial gap between the two, encouraging families to commute between their physically distanced home and work lives. Nonetheless, this has caused mounting traffic and gridlock congestion. Meanwhile, the fame of Oxford as a world-renowned university has escalated pressure for the conversion of residential housing into institutional space for university expansion and catalysed further outlying suburban housing development. From village to suburb, settlement transition is now squeezing existing suburban residential housing towards a reordered town and surrounding countryside.
The authors of this book are residents who trace the history of Summertown and its environs, documenting how existing ‘suburbanites’ are affected by current population densification and the intensifying prospects of a metropolitan future, incongruously shaped by the university’s feudalistic property domain.
This book will appeal to readers curious about the social history of Oxford and Summertown and those interested in the comparative study of global suburban processes of demographic, economic and environmental change.
ISBN: 978 1 0686789 3 6 (paperback)
RRP: £9.99