Behind the propriety of its controlled parking there is hypocrisy among the hyacinths. A place like Surrey has one of the highest divorce rates in the country, and a reputation for kinky brothels. Not to mention situations to prompt News of the World headlines aplenty of the ilk: “He’s a church-going champion of the bowls club but, on the side, dirty Douglas runs a string of hookers.”Some critics are more subtle. For the architectural and food critic, Jonathan Meades, who is one of 14 South Bank Acacia Avenue lecturers, suburbia is a bogus place. Contradiction lies at the heart of its fantastical denial of modernity with its Victorian gothic towers and its Start-rite nostalgia for what Sir John Betjeman dubbed the Tudorbethan. “It rests upon a deep-seated English conviction that the rustic is superior to the urban,” says Meades.

“In France or Belgium, suburbs look in to the city, but in England, the aspiration of the suburbs is to pretend to be the country All its imagery is bucolic. It’s trying to pretend that one is living in a way one knows one isn’t.”But compromise rather than self-delusion is at the heart of the suburban ethic. It is most aptly symbolised by the process of commuting, that daily transference between home and work which represents a psychological oscillation: what another Acacia lecturer, the novelist Michael Bracewell, characterises as between the pastoral and the urban, between ability and ambition, between comfort and convenience, between innocence and experience. Indeed, compromise is part of its creativity, according to a third Acacia lecturer, the biographer Philip Hoare Suburbia was a democratising influence. “It was a place where if you had a dressing gown and a cigarette holder you could be Noel Coward. You might never get to St Tropez, but you could play it in the am-dram production of Private Lives.

It invented a new style and a new language.” Cocktail cabinets in suburban villas were kitsch downsized bites of sophistication (real cocktail drinkers didn’t have cabinets; they had someone to make them).The language was that of John Betjeman, the laureate of The Laurels, whose suburbia was well-born, genteel but proud of its modernities It was manifest in his love of brand names. The Ascot hot-water geyser sat happily amid his chintzy-chintzy cheeriness. Those who think that Ian Fleming was the inventor of product placement should look to Betjeman’s capitalised proper nouns: Weights cigarettes, Bourneville chocolate and Epps’s cocoa, the Ransom mower or the Meccano set, bought at Selfridges.His suburbia was a class as much as a place, peopled with doctors, chartered accountants, solicitors and their wives. It was a middle class which had crept into the space which once yawned between the aristocracy and their tradesmen and hirelings.Phone for the fish-knives, NormanAs Cook is a little unnerved;You kiddies have crumpled the serviettesAnd I must have things daintily served.Thus Betjeman wrote in How to get on in Society, packing in as many non- U terms into the sentence as he could.But he was satirising the Mitford conceit about U and non-U language as he was the vulgar aspirant who fell foul of it.

Jasper Morrison, also ex-Royal College, says that half his work is commissioned from Italy, and the other half from Germany. Matthew Hilton, though given his break by Sheridan Coakley, designs furniture for two Spanish companies, as well as Driade in Italy – a firm that was also prepared to invest in the talents of Platt and Young. “There’s no doubt that they have a talent, but I don’t think manufacturers are seeing their potential, so they’re forced to look overseas. “Yes, they’re in it for money, for profit, but they’re also in it to enjoy it.”Danny Lane, who came to Britain’s Central School of Art from the US in 1975, has his glass table designs produced by Italian company Fiam. Helen Yardley, a graduate of the Royal College of Art who set up her own rug- making business in 1982, was approached several years ago by French firm Toulemonde Bochart to contribute to its collection. He praises the enthusiasm and adventurousness of the Italians. And, they’re getting it, in quite large numbers – projects both large and small, from, in design terms, some of the major manufacturers in continental Europe.”Since leaving the Royal College of Art in 1983, Julian Brown has designed a huge range of products from recycling devices to sofas, mostly for foreign companies, and since 1990 has been working for an Italian company, Rexite.