I came to live in Shepperton in 1960. I thought: the future isn’t in the metropolitan areas of London. I want to go out to the new suburbs, near the film studios. This was the England I wanted to write about, because this was the new world that was emerging.

J. G. Ballard moved in 1960 to Shepperton, a commuter town in Surrey close to the large film-production complex at Shepperton Studios. The relocation marked a decisive shift in his imaginative geography: away from traditional “literary” London and toward the postwar landscapes of ring roads, housing estates, shopping precincts, and media-saturated suburbia. Ballard increasingly treated these spaces as the real frontier of modern life—places where technology, consumerism, and mass culture were reshaping English identity. The remark reflects his self-conscious decision to make the suburban periphery, rather than the metropolis, the setting and subject of his fiction and essays.

Ballard frames suburbia as the true site of the future: not the historic center of London but the expanding margins where new forms of life are being built. “Near the film studios” signals more than geography; it points to a world organized by images, simulation, and mediated experience—key Ballardian themes. By calling this environment “the England I wanted to write about,” he asserts that the novelist’s task is to register emergent realities, even when they appear banal or culturally suspect. The quote encapsulates his broader project: to treat motorways, estates, and consumer spaces as psychologically charged terrains where modern desires and anxieties are produced.