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Behind the Privet Hedge: Michael Gilson in conversation with Elise Sargent
October 12 @ 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm
- £10.00 at The Shoreham CentreBritain is a nation of gardeners; the suburban garden, with its roses and privet hedges, is widely admired and copied across the world. But it is little understood how millions across the nation developed an obsession with their colourful plots of land.
Michael Gilson’s new book, Behind the Privet Hedge, explores the history of this development and how, despite their stereotype as symbols of dull, middle-class conformity, these new open spaces were seen as a means to bring about social change in the early twentieth century. He restores to the story a remarkable but long-forgotten figure, Richard Sudell, who spent a lifetime ‘evangelizing’ that the garden be in the vanguard of progress towards a new egalitarian society with everyday beauty at its centre.
Michael Gilson is an award-winning editor, journalist and Associate Fellow at the University of Sussex. Elise Sargent is the Features Editor of Garden Answers, one of the UK’s best-selling gardening magazines.
Mike’s book will be available at the event from the Wordfest/City Books bookstall or Chapter 34 Shoreham
**** Daily Telegraph: “Ignore the snobs! Michael Gilson’s book Behind the Privet Hedge celebrates suburbs in bloom – and groundbreaking gardener Richard Sudell . . . this book is a vivid picture of landscape architecture as it developed in the middle years of the century.”
The Guardian: “A fascinating new study of Sudell and suburban gardens”
Gardens Illustrated: “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.”
Country Life: “[A] fascinating book . . . told through the story of a little-known garden writer and social activist Richard Sudell . . . [Gilson’s] book is truly revelatory.”
Presenter Laurie Taylor, BBC Radio 4 Thinking Allowed: “A fine new book.”
Municipal Dreams blog: “…readable, thoroughly informative and one that offers a significant contribution to a neglected history”
The New English Landscape blog: “Behind the Privet Hedge is a very good book”
The Spectator: “…combines biography and social history to resurrect Sudell’s contribution to the ‘beautification’ of Britain”
Financial Times: “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.”
“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
“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.”Brent Elliott, Honorary Historian of the Royal Horticultural Society and former editor of Garden History