Histories and Context - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 21

passers-by back on a council estate in the late 1950s, and which exists to this day
in ordinary British gardens, certainly had no positive place in late 1990s lifestyle
media. A working-class image, so redolent of what middle-class audiences knew

Figure 2.4 Refusing Establishment Aesthetics: the Leaded Windows at

Bentley Avenue, 1955

to be 'vulgar taste' was denigrated by lifestyle garden designers. In an episode of
Gardening Neighbours (BBC2, 1998-) for example, Ali Ward and Andy Sturgeon
makeover an older couple's back garden in a row of terraced houses in Sheffield. The
garden they treasure, one that virtually repeats the design of my grandparents' back-
garden, a concretised space with a raised central bed of multi-coloured impatiens,
is bulldozed in favour of a French formal garden of topiaried bay trees. Designer-
presenters Ali Ward and Andy Sturgeon are proud to have swept away a tasteless and
dated design. But the reaction shot shows that meaning and personal recollection
have been lost for Terry and Joan - 'it was beautiful before you changed it' remarks
Terry. Working-class aesthetics, at that moment in television history, were simply
not valued beyond the confines of the local; it was middle-class gardening tastes
which the lifestyle media lauded and legitimated. 5 Indeed, when I began to garden

5 Using Bauman (1987) I argue that the lifestyle media interprets ideas for consumers.
Yet, even though as Bauman argues, institutions such as the media hold less authority as
legislators in the current climate, their interpretations still laud middle-class aesthetics.