The Natural History of London

R.S.R Fitter's 'London's Natural History' (1945) is what we would now call an environmental history of Greater London. It is strangely antiquated, refreshingly modern, stunningly original, and, at times, bloggerishly quirky. All at the same time.

When Fitter cites Piltdown man it is a thing of the past but when he writes about houses as a new form of habitat that by necessity have to be pioneered by plants and animals seeking living space and using adaptation to make it theirs, he opens my eyes to the evolutionary cunningness of the ants, slugs and silverfish crawling in my living room. 

There is plenty of raw material (plant and bird lists) for Fitter to use and as a writer of guidebooks he loves that stuff. There are also many good maps and that is one reason why this book lives: it is a source of raw data that is still of interest to birdwatchers and phyto-psychogeographers. This book was written during WWII and the most original chapters are those in which Fitter documents the results of the Blitz as a great opportunity for nature to return to the surface in some of the oldest continuesly built-over parts of the City. It strikes me as both eccentric and typical of the stoic attitude that famously is said to have come over the citizens of London in response to German attacks. Bombs or not live must go on and that included scouting bombcraters for unusual flowers. 

Nice book.

Cryptoforestry with the luftwaffe

London Garden in bomb crater 1943

"Many city children of my generation got their first experience of nature courtesy of the Luftwaffe, when bombed-out houses were transformed into little wildernesses of thistle, teasel, willowherb and loosestrife. Redstarts and other birds nested in crannies in the ruins, among staircases leading to nowhere, peeling wallpaper and upper-storey fireplaces, still with ashes in the grate, now open to the sky. The bomb sites, where I yearned in vain to be allowed to play, appeared to me to be immemorial landscape features, full of character and mystery, and one of the major attractions of family visits to London, Liverpool and Birkenhead in the late 1940s and early 1950s." - Jonathan Raban (source, earlier, wikipedia)

Urban forage psychogeography

Oliver Rowe's attempt to open a restaurant feeding its clients with London produce only made for a vaguely amusing BBC series. My favourite bit is when Rowe teams up with Fergus the Forager and finds himself unable to keep up with the foragers antics of moving silently through the underbrush. As said before: foraging = psychogeography.

...after a long wait, the forager finally arrives: in a battered old Volvo!

One of North London's many woods...

"Fergus!?"

"I think I lost Fergus..."

"Fergus... Fergus!" 

"Oh, is that a squirrel or is that Fergus? No that's a dog"

London Psychogeography with Tom Vague

The cheap thrills of Ebay!

Tom Vague's 'Rachman Riots and Rillington Place', an episodic treatment of certain key moment in the recent history of Nothing Hill, is a real page turner even though I had never heard of most of the people discussed (Christie Evans, Rachman, Michael X). They are probably household names to the average Londoner.

On the face of it Vague's treatment of history is conventional to the point of barbaric idiocy: his use of a timeline to structure the narrative can hardly be called sophisticated and his refusal to interpret events or people psychologically or sociologically would be below most hystoriographers. 

Almost all history is written by dinosaurs but Vague is of the 1-2-3-GO! school and the result, raw and elementary, creates a lot of space for your own associations, relevant knowledge and mental garbage to fill the gaps. In the context of psychogeography Vague is moving in the opposite direction of most psychogeo writers. Instead of writing about a spatial entity from the perspective of the individual (place and space presented as malformed after a rollercoaster ride through the maelstrom of the personal madness and deep emotions of a very special person (as, you are aware, all writers (boring fucks) are)). If you read carefully - the last page gives the biggest clue - Vague presents this almost as the autobiography of Nothing Hill with him as the inspired mouthpiece, his own biography mixed with that of the subject. He is the place. 

Turning Japanese

Japanese Knotweed, Fallopia for short (NL: Japanse Duizendknoop), must be the Guerilla Gardener's weapon of choice. Either you pay me 1000 euro or I will sow the damn superweed in your prize-winning ornamental garden! "It can grow three quarters of an inch a day and its roots can burrow 10 feet down, cracking concrete foundations and damaging walls and roads." It's one of the world's top 100 invasive species and it took £70 million pounds to remove it from planned 2012 London Olympics sites but it is edible. According to piece on the BBC website: "There have even been reports of mortgage companies refusing to lend to house buyers whose dream homes have Japanese knotweed in the garden. " See it dance/grow here. 

The Here is one image of Japanese Knotweed on the site of the London Olympics and here is more.

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