Landmarks (20 page)

The zone goes by different names, few of them complimentary. The landscape theorist Alan Berger calls it
‘drosscape’
. The activist and writer Marion Shoard calls it
‘edgeland’
. The American artist Philip Guston called it
‘crapola’
. In
Les Misérables
, Victor Hugo christened it
‘bastard countryside
’, or ‘
terrain vague
’, by which he meant the debatable realm, ‘somewhat ugly but bizarre, made up of two different natures, which surrounds certain great cities’:

To observe the city edge is to observe an amphibian. End of trees, beginning of roofs, end of grass, beginning of paving stones, end of ploughed fields, beginning of shops, the end of the beaten track, the beginning of the passions, the end of the murmur of things divine, the beginning of the noise of humankind.

The decades since the Second World War have seen a surging literary and artistic interest in this ‘amphibian’ and hotchpotch terrain. In 1949 Kenneth Allsop published an experimental work of nature writing,
Adventure Lit Their Star
, which described the attempts of a rare species of wader, the little ringed plover, to breed by a gravel pit near Staines, Middlesex – in what Allsop called
‘the messy limbo
which is neither town nor country’, a ‘scrappy bit of outer-Outer London’. A quarter-century later came Richard
Mabey’s prescient book
The Unofficial Countryside
(1973), in which Mabey documented the nature that existed opportunistically and exuberantly in scrubby bombsites, crumbling docks and litter-strewn canal banks. A quarter-century after Mabey, Iain Sinclair set off to walk the
‘asphalt
… noose’ of the M25, recording the extruded suburbia that he found out there on the capital’s rim, and publishing an account of his penitential circuit as
London Orbital
(2002).

Sinclair and Mabey’s brilliant examples inspired hundreds of other chroniclers to take to Britain’s edgelands: urb-exers, psychogeographers, biopsychogeographers, autobiopsychogeographers, deep topographers and other theoretically constituted lovers of the detrital and neglected, cramming their notebooks with sketches of brownfield sites and crypto-cartographies of pylon lines, sewage outfalls, culverted rivers and the ‘soft estate’ of the British road network and its verges. The edgelands have sprawled all over late-twentieth-century English painting, photography, film (the
Robinson
trilogy of Patrick Keiller, the work of Chris Petit and Andrew Kötting) and children’s literature (
Stig of the Dump
(1963),
The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler
(1977)). So modish have the edgelands become that in 2011 a short-film festival was held in London dedicated to Britain’s ‘urban outskirts’, and a book of essays called
Edgelands
appeared, which was animated by the conjoined beauty and banality to be discovered amid the pallet yards and car parks of cities’ fringes.

Long before all of these, though, the edgelands of London were being documented by the journalist and nature writer Richard Jefferies, in a series of essays and sketches collected as
Nature near London
, first published in 1883. It is a book fascinated by the strange braidings of the human and the natural that occur where city and country fray into one another, at what Jefferies called the
‘frontier line to civilisation’
. Jefferies was a countryman by upbringing, attracted by London’s energies but repelled by its voracity and greed, and wishing – by means of his writing – to alert the city’s inhabitants to the ‘wild life’ that existed alongside their own.
‘Why, we must have been blind
,’ declared Walter Besant in 1888 about the experience of reading Jefferies: ‘here were the most wonderful things possible going on under our very noses, but we saw them not!’

~

In 1877 Jefferies moved from Swindon in Wiltshire to Surbiton in Surrey. Surbiton was then at the limit-line of London’s growth: a high-Victorian edgeland. Jefferies had been born and raised in the countryside at Coate, a village near Swindon. His father was a farmer, and from a young age Jefferies was free to explore the landscape around his home. He hunted with snare and gun, he fished, swam, built boats and rafts, and became something of a minor local eccentric, known for his long hair, swift stride and hunched posture. In 1866 he started as a reporter at local Wiltshire and Gloucestershire papers, for which his work might be described as right-wing populist, but he had different ambitions – both literary and political – and it was in the hope of securing work as an essayist and writer of fiction that he, his wife Jessie and their young son Harold moved to Surbiton.

London’s edgelands today comprise jittery, jumbled ground: utilities infrastructure and haulage depots, crackling substations and allotments, scrub forests and sluggish canals, slackened regulatory frameworks and guerrilla ecologies. The Surbiton to which Jefferies moved was less disrupted, and therefore sharper in its main contrasts: fields began where suburban streets ran to their end; footpaths
led quickly into copses and woodlands; streams and rivers ran under stone bridges and between houses. Nevertheless, it was still recognizably a marginal zone, intersected by roads and railways, and travelled through both by Londoners escaping the city and by itinerant workers seeking it out.

London was, when Jefferies reached it, the world’s maximum city. By 1870 someone died there every eight minutes, and someone was born every five minutes. London had a population of 1 million in 1800, 5 million a century later and would have 7 million by 1911. In the course of the nineteenth century, Britain was the country that
‘broke most radically with
all previous ages of human history’, in Eric Hobsbawm’s memorable phrase, and its industrialization was so drastic that in 1850 it became the first nation in the world with more urban than rural inhabitants (a tipping point that the planet is thought to have reached only in 2010). A massive migration of people was underway from fields and villages into towns and cities – and the towns and cities were themselves sprawling out into the fields and villages. In a charismatic reversal of terms, London came itself to be figured as a wild place: ‘be-wildering’ in its fierce seethe of humanity.
‘Wilderness!
’ cries a poor, elderly Londoner in Dickens’s
Nicholas Nickleby
(1839). ‘Yes it is, it is. It
is
a wilderness. It was a wilderness to me once. I came here barefoot. I have never forgotten it.’
‘London looks so large
,’ thinks Little Dorrit, ‘so barren and so wild.’

Jefferies, too, was awed by the ‘wilderness’ of London, and he sensed its
‘unseen influence
’ upon him even when he was outside its perimeter. ‘The strong life of the vast city magnetised me,’ he wrote, ‘and I felt it under the calm oaks.’ One of the distinctive tensions of his prose about the capital is between the centripetal pull he experiences towards its centre, and the centrifugal efforts he makes to
escape it. The decisive motion of
Nature near London
, though, is outwards and away: nearly every chapter starts with Jefferies
‘quitting the suburb’
, in his phrase, by following field-path or stream-side on foot.

Jefferies came to know Surrey, as he came to know all his landscapes, chiefly by walking. He became, on foot, a connoisseur of the capital’s marginalia – alert to the unexpected ecologies of the fringes: how
‘rubbish heaps
’ were the ‘haunts of the London crow’, say, or how ‘thrushes … build their nests’ in suburban shrubberies, or how London honey tastes different from country honey because of the flavours imparted to it by ‘the immense quantity of garden flowers about the metropolis’. Railway cuttings caught his eye – as they had caught the eye of Henry David Thoreau (who writes about them in the ‘thawing sandbank’ section of
Walden
), and as they would catch the eye of Edward Thomas, Jefferies’ disciple and biographer – because on their tangled banks grew weeds and
‘coloured
’ wild flowers, ‘seen for a moment in swiftly passing’, ‘border[ing] the line like a continuous garden’. Repeatedly, Jefferies finds London not to have suppressed nature, but rather to have provoked it to odd improvisations. One winter, he watches a
‘very large cinder and dust heap
’ that has been dumped ‘upon a piece of waste land’, and delightedly records how it has become ‘the resort of almost every species of bird – sparrows, starlings, greenfinches, and rooks searching for any stray morsels of food’.

The published text of
Nature near London
draws on journal entries and field notes gathered over years of walking and looking. The simplest way to read the book is as an almanac or diary, as intimate and accidental as White’s accounts of Selborne or Roger’s
Notes from Walnut Tree Farm
. Jefferies was alert to the nuances of both climate and season, and the details of the book bring old weather back to
life. He records the great snow of October 1880, heavy enough to shatter the oak trees that carried its weight (a snow that recurs in his other writings of the 1880s, much as the bitter winter of 1962–3 exerts a keen climatic influence on
The Peregrine
). We learn that the haw-berry harvest in the autumn of 1881 was profuse, and that it was a
‘berry year
’ more generally, with blackberries ‘thick’ in the hedges and ‘prickly-coated nuts hang[ing] up in bunches’ on the horse chestnuts, ‘as many as eight in a stalk’. On 14 February 1882 a yellowhammer sings, brambles
‘put forth green buds
’, ‘two wasps buzz in the sunshine’, and Jefferies listens to a songbird’s mellifluously unpredictable notes coming ‘like wild flowers not sown in order’. On 1 January 1882 he sees
‘fully two thousand
’ lapwings settled on a field, and then watches amazed as they take flight – the sudden upwards snowfall of ‘a vast body of whitebreasted birds uprising as one from the dark ploughed earth’, before turning and descending, ‘all so regular that their very wings seem to flap together’.

~

I am an edgelander. Like Jefferies, I grew up in the country, at the end of a lane in rural Nottinghamshire. And, like Jefferies, I moved in my late twenties, newly a father, to live in a house at a city’s fringe. A few hundred yards from that house, in which I still live, the southern edge of Cambridge gives way to arable fields that are split by B-roads and hedgerows, and scattered with copses and spinneys. The landscape rises to a pair of low-lying chalk hills – the Gog Magogs, named after the hyperborean giants whose prostrate forms the hills were once thought to resemble when seen in profile. By Scottish standards, the Gogs are molehills. By Cambridgeshire
standards, they are Himalayas. Cambridge is, unmistakably, a curious place for someone who loves mountains to have ended up. I live in a county so flat (as the old joke goes) you could fax it; a county so flat (as the older joke goes) you can stand on a chair and see into Norfolk. Up in the Fens, near the village of Pidley, there is a roadside collection box for ‘The Fenland Mountain Rescue Service’, to which I give generously whenever I pass, on the superstitious basis that I might somehow be paying forwards to the day when I do need an airlift out of a corrie or off a crag.

When I first came to live in south Cambridge, I barely registered the bastard countryside on my doorstep. Why would I have? My eyes and dreams were all for the Highlands, Snowdonia, the Lake District, the Peak – the places I would quit Cambridge to reach. The edgelands were there to be travelled through and left behind: a pure transit zone. The notion of developing a relationship with this mixed-up, messed-up terrain did not occur to me. Disruptive of the picturesque, dismissive of the sublime, this was a landscape that required a literacy I didn’t then possess: an aesthetic flexible enough to accommodate fly-tipping, dog shit, the night-glare of arc lights at the park-and-ride, and the
pock-pock-pock
of golf balls being struck up the driving range by architects and fund managers – as well as the yapping laugh of green woodpeckers through beech trees.

Slowly, though, I have acquired that literacy. I have learnt to read the edgelands, and have come, if not quite to love them, at least to arrive at an intimacy with them. Proximity and time have helped: I have lived here a decade now, and in that period I have walked and run thousands of miles back and forth over the few hundred hectares of edgeland between my home and the Gogs. Just past the last house on the road that leads up towards the chalk tops, there is a hole in the hedge through which you can duck to reach a quiet field-path
rich with bird and plant life. Grey partridge, sparrowhawks, woodpeckers, charms of goldfinch; foxes, rabbits, big golden hares; scabious, cowslips, a rare orchid. The hedgerows that flank it are of dogwood, hawthorn and dog rose mostly; each autumn they are thick with haws and hips, which bring the birds: fieldfares and redwings by the dozen, a gang of waxwings, all powder-puff pinks and hipster hairstyles, and – unforgettably – the peregrine I saw the day I went to Baker’s archive. I have also gained a sense of the deeply layered history of the area: the Roman road that runs to the north-east of the hills, the causewayed enclosure of Magog’s open down, the Bronze Age burial mounds here and there, the Neolithic trackway that probably underlies the Roman road, and the wooded and mysteriously earth-worked summit of Gog.

My children have also helped me explore the edgelands. Becoming a father altered my focal length and adjusted my depth of field. Children are generally uninterested in grandeur, and rapt by the miniature and the close at hand (a teeming ants’ nest, a chalk pit, moss jungles, lichen continents, a low-branched climbing tree). From them – among countless other lessons – I have learnt that magnitude of scale is no metric by which to judge natural spectacle, and that wonder is now, more than ever, an essential survival skill.

I have also come to ‘see’ the edgelands thanks to the art and literature of what contemporary conservation calls ‘nearby nature’: the work of English hedge-visionaries and foot-philosophers including Samuel Palmer, Edward Thomas, Roger Deakin, Dorothy Wordsworth, Virginia Woolf – and Richard Jefferies. Jefferies was absorbed by what lay hidden in plain view.
‘It would be very easy
,’ he noted of his favoured Surrey haunts, ‘to pass any of these places and see nothing, or but little.’ His engagement with the landscape was not prescriptive but exemplary, offering what he called – with an epistemological flourish – a ‘method of knowing’.
‘Everyone must find their own locality
. I find a favourite wild-flower here, and the spot is dear to me; you find yours yonder.’ His method was based on long-term and patient acquaintance, and on careful observation. It involved
‘keep[ing] an eye
’ on one’s locale ‘from year’s end to year’s end’, and in this manner coming ‘to see the land as it really is’: the creaturely bustle of hedge, copse, sky and field.