Porch life

When I first started visiting Philadelphia a few years ago, I was surprised by the ubiquity of the porches. From the grandest mansion to the meanest row house, there's always this intermediate space, neither indoors nor outdoors, where people can sit and watch the world go by, eat, drink, smoke, doze, gossip with neighbours, fire up a barbecue, hail passers by, enjoy the daytime shade or the cool evening air. For many, the porch seems simply the place to keep a bicycle, dry the laundry or stow some junk. For others it's more about expressing personality or showing off a lifestyle, with fancy paintwork and displays of plants, flags and lights. But it seems to be more than that, as if it could transcend the purely practical and become a stage for social drama. However, Porch Life (there's a hip-hop group of that name) has also become elided with Poor Life and, it should be said, has attracted class and race associations of a negative kind.

Before I knew better, I'd always associated porches with the South: Gone with the Wind and To Kill a Mocking Bird, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams. There's even an academic study Swinging in Place: Porch Life in Southern Culture in which the author, shows how porch use and porch culture cross ethnic and cultural lines and discusses the transitional quality of the porch space - how it shifts back and forth, by need and function, between a place that is sometimes interior to the house, sometimes exterior....Originally derived from a number of ethnic traditions, the porch evolved in America into something both structurally and culturally unique. Interesting, but it's evidently not an institution that's confined to the South if my experience of the North East is anything to go by.

Here, I've snapped a random sample of porches without leaving the saddle of my bike. Top left is a simple, basic but nicely presented porch; top right has already been tricked out for Halloween, with garlands of autumn leaves and faux-rustic straw figures (nearer the day there will no doubts be pumpkins as well); bottom left, the porch stands back across the yard of which the fence has been brought into service as an impromptu sales rail for second-hand clothes; finally, bottom right, one of South Philly's fine old 'Victorians' (now a B&B) boasts a classic wrap-around porch whose proportions could challenge a luxury liner for privileged splendour.