Park and Ride: Adventures in Suburbia - Softcover

Sawyer, Miranda

3.16

56 ratings by Goodreads

9780349113197: Park and Ride: Adventures in Suburbia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 034911319X ISBN 13: 9780349113197

Publisher: Abacus, 2001

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Miranda Sawyer drives from Croydon to Swindon, via Stevenage, Harrogate and Cadbury World in Birmingham, on a nice day out around suburban Britain. This is the Britain of motorways and heritage centres, of campaigning housewives and executive housing estates, of boy racers and Essex girls, of Cheshire wives and Scottish golfers. Put on your co-ordinating smart/casual wear (no trainers please) and join her for an evening at a prestigious hotel nightclub, a day in Britain's most average town, a trip round Romford's bourgeois drug addicts, a date with The Lighthouse Family, a few hours with Staffordshire's jet-set. Plus: a hen night, a car cruise, a swingers' special evening, and a lovely Sunday drive to see the new B&Q on the bypass. Forget the Britain that is green and pleasant, urban and dangerous, historic and scenic: this is the rest of it, the vast swathes of inbetweeny land, the multiplexed, motorwayed, mind your manners Great British Experience. And it may well be where you live.

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Review:

Suburbia has long been a source of fascination for journalists and scholars alike. Award-winning journalist Miranda Sawyer offers her take on the subject in Park and Ride: Adventures in Suburbia. "The car is the key to life in the suburbs", Sawyer announces. "There's not much you can do without it." With that insight in mind, Sawyer takes her readers for a ride from Wilmslow where she grew up ("Wilmslow was a pink jumper, white stilettos kind of a town") to Preston (the most average town in Britain), from York (where she goes in search of Britland) to Romford (Essex's youth and drugs mecca).

Sawyer has fun in the suburbs. She explores all kinds of suburban clich�s--keeping up appearances and kinky sex, DIY and the passion for property. Suburbia is a place Sawyer knows, and the story of her childhood and adolescence there frames this loose commentary on everyday life in Blair's Britain.

Sawyer defines suburbia as Middle England. Her travelogue doesn't dwell on the difference between the comforts of semi-detachment and the dreary vision of the suburban council estate. Nor is there much cultural criticism: Park and Ride bears little resemblance to the travels of George Orwell in On the Road to Wigan Pier or to Roger Silverstone's more sober Visions of Suburbia. Nevertheless, this heady mix of suburban confession and eulogy ("the suburbs are stronger than they ever have been," Sawyer concludes) tells its story well. --Vicky Lebeau

Review:

A great success...Such annihilation has been performed before. John Osborne did it. Sid Vicious was there. But this is prime stuff (INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY)

A marketing triumph. These are the people next door, and it's hugely satisfying to have their eccentricities highlighted, their foibles gently exposed and have a good laugh at them - and ourselves (SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY)

Like Victoria Wood she has a talent for illuminating the absurdities of how ordinary people live their ordinary lives (OBSERVER)

'Miranda Sawyer's suburban memoir PARK AND RIDE was as excellent as we expect from this most talented young person (Julie Burchill, GUARDIAN, Books of the Year)

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