Everyday Eden: A Potted History of the Suburban Garden (2014)

Because it's not grand, the story of the suburban garden has barely been told - and yet 8 out of 10 people in England live in the suburbs. In this documentary, writer and historian Michael Collins delivers a riposte to the urban intelligentsia which has spent a century sneering at the suburbs. His south London pilgrimage takes him to Bexley and Bromley, Surbiton and the new promised land of Bluewater in Kent to explore what the suburban garden has meant to us and to celebrate what one contributor calls 'their little piece of heaven'. George Orwell famously laid out the icons of English culture as 'solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and - red pillarboxes' and Collins shows that the suburban garden very much deserves a place in that canon.