From twitching curtains to Ring doorbells: The history of surveillance in the suburbs

Gossip, Neighbourhood Watch, Ring doorbells: suburbia has always been in love with surveillance. Growing up in the suburbs it was almost impossible to go off grid, because unlike the city there was no sense of anonymity there. Someone always knew who I was, knew my parents, or someone who went to my school. 

It’s not easy to be yourself in a place that observes you all the time: where everyone seems to know more about you than you do yourself. As a child of Croydon, I’ve always been obsessed with suburbia, so much so I’ve written a book about it. Tales of the Suburbs: LGBTQ+ Lives Behind Net Curtains combines interviews and archive research to show the ways in which the 20th-century suburb shaped and policed us. Often it’s through being watched. 

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Going back to the start of the 20th century, people tell of being the subject of gossip in the post office and local police station as much as by their neighbours. By the ’70s, interviewees recalled the joys of vanishing into back streets and alleyways, teenagers evading their parents as soon as they left the house. But so often their behaviour, be it hanging around with ‘undesirables’, wearing nail varnish or even reading a book in public, would be reported back by nosy neighbours. 

Yet for every person in suburbia cowed into conformity, there’s another who sees it as a stage on which to show off: with statement doors, excessive gardens and outrageously camp décor. They bring life to our cul-de-sacs and crescents. Not necessarily through the appropriateness of their design choices, but by giving permission for the rest of us to gawk, gossip and judge. 

Neighbourhood Watch put nosiness on an official footing. Police officers brought the idea from the US in 1982. Five years later 42,000 schemes had sprung up across the country. Margaret Thatcher told her local group in Finchley she admired how they’d shifted the emphasis from costly nanny state to freelanced nanny public. Go, suburban Stasi!

Read more:

• Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation is an eerie prediction of our surveillance age
• The age of surveillance: Are we already living in a Big Brother dystopia?
• DWP recruiting ‘covert surveillance officers’ to snoop on benefit claimants: ‘I fear for the future’

One interviewee for Tales of the Suburbs recalled being caught out when a neighbourhood watcher reported him and his boyfriend for having a fumbled quickie in their car. But watching wasn’t for everyone. Another recalled that when Neighbourhood Watch came to his street, his parents’ main anxiety was about having anything to do with their neighbours at all. 

Around the same time pilot schemes for CCTV kicked off in the mean streets of Bournemouth and King’s Lynn. The government encouraged private companies and individuals to set up their own cameras. The idea was that if wrongdoers realised they were being watched they’d scarper. But what if you’re not committing a crime, and just don’t want to be observed? ‘If you’ve done nothing wrong then you have nothing to be afraid of,’ is an authoritarian’s version of a suburban gossip’s ‘There’s no smoke without fire’. 

Nowadays all of that rubbernecking and neighbourhood watching has been outsourced to tech and security companies. Between 2007 and 2022 it was estimated that the number of security cameras in Britain leaped from seven million to 21 million, a jump attributed to smart tech observing people in their own homes and companies monitoring workers. Alexa, play Terminator 2. 

In suburbia you get the creepy feeling you’re being watched all the time. And that’s because you are. By doorbells. Ring’s smart device was created in 2014, and in an era of mass online shopping deliveries, they offer panicked householders the chance to have an existential crisis if alerted to footage of a courier dropping off a cardigan from Vinted while they’re out. 

With so much of the suburban scene captured, reported and dissected on Facebook groups and neighbourhood WhatsApps, it leaves little space for going off grid. Fitbits trace the path of our begrudging 10,000 steps, and fragments of conversations are captured on the Merlin bird app while trying to identify a dunnock.

A glance at the books in a local Asda will confirm how much we’re in love with suburban noir: people disappearing, being murdered or invading your home in novels called things like A Neighbour’s Guide to Murder and Watch Me Watch You. Modern takes on Hitchcock’s Rear Window, they imagine the very worst of what your neighbours might be up to, because for all of this surveillance, we still don’t really know, do we? And for the most part, is it any of our business? 

It’s also worth remembering that for all of its stereotyped conformity, the suburbs have long been a crucible for new subcultures, whether punk, goth or rave. All under the watchful and often disapproving eye of our neighbours.

The age-old control mechanisms of gossip and innuendo are still enough to make the most semi-detached of neighbour’s curtains twitch. The suburbs are still watching. So why not give them something to talk about?

Tales of the Suburbs: LGBTQ+ Lives Behind Net Curtains by John Grindrod is out now (Faber, £18.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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