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  A fine new book . . . it shows how the ubiquity of the surburban garden has had to be achieved in the face of planning opposition and how gardening managed to grow into an obsession for millions of people.

  '

  Laurie Taylor, BBC Radio 4 Thinking Allowed

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  In a fascinating new study of Sudell and suburban gardens, Behind the Privet Hedge, the author Michael Gilson dubs his subject "the patron saint of crazy paving". He was also a radical, a democrat and a visionary.

  '

  The Guardian

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  Ignore the snobs! Behind the Privet Hedge celebrates suburbs in bloom – and groundbreaking gardener Richard Sudell . . . If Behind the Privet Hedge were simply a life of a professional gardener, it would be interesting enough . . . but this book is also a vivid picture of landscape architecture as it developed in the middle years of the century.

  '

  The Daily Telegraph

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  Michael Gilson’s Behind the Privet Hedge combines biography and social history to resurrect Sudell’s contribution to the “beautification” of Britain.

  '

  The Spectator

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  Michael Gilson's fascinating Behind the Privet Hedge has spared me from spending too much time in suburbia.

  '

  New Statesman: Books of the Year

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  [A] fascinating book . . . told through the story of a little-known garden writer and social activist Richard Sudell . . . [Gilson’s] book is truly revelatory.

  '

  Country Life

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  Michael Gilson’s new history of suburban gardening, a book that urges us to examine what lies behind reflexive arrogance towards the efforts of ordinary people . . . The strength of Behind the Privet Hedge is its determination to place working-class people at the centre of horticultural history. Gilson has a great eye for the counterargument. To modern readers, Sudell could seem like a pious, paternalistic do-gooder, or a green activist avant la lettre. Gilson anticipates modern sensibilities and reframes them with context and sympathy.

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  Financial Times

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  In this ground-breaking biography, a forgotten figure in 20th-century gardens is remembered as a true activist and small garden advocate . . . This excellent book rehabilitates and revivifies [Sudell’s] reputation.

  '

  Gardens Illustrated

• '

  We may sneer at suburban gardens but Michael Gilson reminds us they had visionary, er, roots, courtesy of inter-war pioneers who promoted ‘the empowerment that some level of horticultural knowledge’ could give. And none more than Richard Sudell, whom the author has saved from obscurity.

  '

  The Oldie

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  In this remarkable book, Michael Gilson uncovers the almost entirely forgotten life and work of a key figure in garden and landscape design who, for the last fifty years, has been largely ignored by landscape historians . . . Gilson brings to life, in this carefully researched and beautifully illustrated book, a time when thousands of people left overcrowded city centres to find themselves responsible for converting sites full of building rubble into domestic gardens . . . This book is a very welcome and highly original addition to our knowledge of British garden history and design.

  '

  Landscape History

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  If Beyond the Privet Hedge is in part a biography of Sudell, then, it is also a defence of suburbia in general and suburban gardens in particular, spiced with occasional dashes of polemic against modernist architecture and the baleful influence of Le Corbusier on post-war Britain . . . it is a thoughtful and provocative defence of both Sudell’s work and the small private Edens of suburbia.

  '

  Engelsberg Ideas

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  The radical demand for the right to a garden as part of the post-war covenant is much less well-known. Thanks to Behind the Privet Hedge, Michael Gilson’s new history of the enthusiastic gardening movement that accompanied the public housing movement between the wars, that lack has now been remedied . . . a very good book.

  '

  The New English Landscape blog

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  Gilson’s new book Behind the Privet Hedge – a biography of the significant, but neglected and sometimes derided, twentieth-century landscape architect Richard Sudell – provides an important corrective . . . this is a book that is readable, thoroughly informative and one that offers a significant contribution to a neglected history.

  '

  Municipal Dreams blog

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  This fascinating biography tells the story of Richard Sudell (1892–1968), an almost forgotten founder of the British Institute of Landscape Architects (ILA) in 1929, and tireless advocate for the home garden, particularly in suburbia. Its account of the development of the gardening culture in Britain also sheds light on the politics of the years between the two world wars and the battle for a more egalitarian society.

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  Australian Garden History

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  Richard Sudell was one of the founders, and for many years the secretary, of the Institute of Landscape Architects, but he has been largely written out of the story of landscape design because he was identified strongly with the garden suburb, so long despised by planners, and his books were written for the inexpert gardener. This book restores him to his important position in the history of British gardening, and in the process offers a vigorous defence of the suburban garden. Everyone who is interested in twentieth-century garden history should read this book.

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  Brent Elliott, Honorary Historian of the Royal Horticultural Society and former editor of Garden History

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  Michael Gilson's book is a charming and unexpected glimpse into how gardening took root as an obsession for millions, full of suburban heroes and villains, revolutions and conformity.

  '

  John Grindrod, author of Iconicon: A Journey around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain

Contents

Introduction: On the train to Roehampton with Edith Sitwell and DH Lawrence

Chapter One: ‘A little Garden City’

Chapter Two: ‘An industrial slave? Never’

Chapter Three: Trouble at the Whit Monday Garden Show

Chapter Four: The Birth of beautification

Chapter Five: Sudell the flower evangelist

Chapter Six: ‘Taste is utterly debased’

Chapter Seven: ‘There were little bridges, gnomes and things’

Chapter Eight: An unrivalled influence on new nation of gardeners

Chapter Nine: ‘A new Britain must arise on better lines than the old’

Chapter Ten: The landscape architect struggles to make a mark

Chapter Eleven: ‘An important and influential figure’

Chapter Twelve: The importance of play

Chapter Thirteen: Sudell urges us to invite Betty Uprichard into our garden

Chapter Fourteen: ‘Sudell has been proved right’

References
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index

Michael Gilson is an award-winning editor and journalist, and Associate Fellow of the School of Media, Arts and Humanities, University of Sussex.