Park and Ride – Miranda Sawyer

I am child of the suburbs and I’ve always enjoyed Sawyer’s journalism, but this light read came as a major disappointment. There are too many of the forced jokes and arbitrary decisions common to the “journalist takes a light-hearted look at X” genre which is a shame, because the brief mentions of true suburban totems like the Ideal Home Exhibition show what could have been.

The oddest thing for a book published in the year of Tony Blair’s ascension to office is the lack of political context – where were the mentions of the Daily Mail, or the tensions between Major’s Britain and Cool Britannia?