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This month, I visited the London Transport Museum and saw a great little show called Suburbia that gave me pause for thought. The Brits are good at suburbia – heck, we invented it. The architect John Nash (who designed Regent Street and Brighton’s Royal Pavilion) is regarded as one of the first to create a suburban model when he built the Park Village East villas in north-west London in 1829. They were designed to merge the best of town and countryside – arranged along winding ‘country’ roads, they had a rural feel, away from metropolitan bustle and grime, yet with easy access to it. The model caught on, and four out of five of us now live in suburbia.

The exhibition showed how suburbia was marketed. Fabulous posters called you to leave behind your cramped, decrepit home to buy a little piece of Arcadia – white-washed, romantic-looking detached homes set in lush gardens. We were sold the dream of individualism, everyone owning their own patch of land. And better transport links made this possible.

In his recent book The Freedoms of Suburbia (Frances Lincoln, £25) Paul Barker claims that, ‘For most people, most of the time, suburbia is as good as it gets’. So why did the chattering classes come to deride it? In the film The Hours, recently re-run on TV, Virginia Woolf stands on Richmond station and proclaims, ‘I’m dying in this town... I choose not the suffocating anaesthetic of the suburbs but the violent jolt of the capital’. Have we lost something in this move from high-density to low-density living? In his recent Channel 4 programme Slumming It, Kevin McCloud visited the world’s biggest slum, Dharavi, in Mumbai, India, where he found the same urban horrors that plagued nineteenth-century Britain. But the one thing it did have was that ‘violent jolt’ Virginia Woolf lusted after; people, bustle, a sense of belonging – community. That existed in spades. So while suburbia has given us what we think we want – space, light, and air – has its low density, together with our ability to travel via improved transport, actually eroded our sense of community?

In this month's issue...

• granD master At home with designer Ally Capellino, whose simple, timeless fashion style is evident in her stylish east-London terraced house
• BUYING A DESIGN CLASSIC The must-have style pieces for your home that could turn out to be great investments
• ESSENTIALS White, wood, coloured, glossy – take your pick from our collection of stylish sideboards
• small spaces Make the most of every inch of your home with these clever ideas and creative solutions

• from the tv series We revisit Dean Marks at his eighteenth-century church conversion near Birmingham to see how life has changed since he first appeared on Grand Designs
• report Discover how to successfully manage your project with our expert advice and easy-to-follow tips
• building blocks Staircases don’t just link floors, they can also help to define the look of an interior. Here’s all you need to know, from tips on construction and materials to choosing the latest designs