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London and its outskirts became Greater London in the inter-war period" (Bowdler 103). With this simple declaration, geographer Roger Bowdler identifies the physi cal transformation of English landscape that underlies my analysis of Stevie Smith's literary fantasies about the suburbs. Described at the time as the "outskirts" and "fringes" o f the capital, London's suburbs achieved their regional identity as inter mediate or in-between spaces-between town and country, commerce and agricul ture, bricks and birds, crowds and calm. Semi-detached houses, arterial roads, new underground stations, building societies, mortgages, vanishing woods, disappear ing hedgerows, consumed villages, diverted streams-all of these geographical signs of tremendous social change accompanied the post-World War I mandate to build "Homes fit for Heroes." Suburbs had existed as identifiable regions in landscape and the public imagi nary long before the 1919 Housing or Addison Act led to the first interwar develop ment boom. Yet never had suburbs so troubled people's ideas of what it meant to be a Londoner or to be English. Smith merits special consideration in studies of this suburban trouble because, in contrast to the vast majority of 1930s and '40s writers, she does not naively celebrate or thoughtlessly excoriate the suburb in her writings. Instead, she uses her position as suburban insider to describe and ana lyze more acutely than others the ambivalent role of the suburb in English life. To