You may have read this in the past few days but not seen any of the photos. Many apologies, but there’s been a bug in the software for which I’ve found a workaround for the time being.
In an unsettled age my childhood home changed its address from Bath Street to Teewell Avenue. That was when they knocked down the scrapyard at the end, which was piled high with surplus and unwanted Britannia aeroplane propellers, and they drove through to the real Teewell avenue by demolishing Rickford Kennels whose bird-bath was made from a large unexploded bomb painted maroon and cream to match the attached and undamaged bungalow.
So I was born in that liminal strip between city and countryside and lived my early years roaming between the miners’ cottages up the road and the derelict buildings behind them; or, if I was in the mood, the footpath to Charnhill passing the corset factory and into the countryside at Rodway Hill. At the end of the garden the old LMS railway line left the tunnel and made its way via the Pines junction to Bath where it terminated outside what I shall call Potwell Villas – a 1980’s vision of luxury living in concrete and steel where we now live. All of twelve miles without even crossing the tracks!
Now we have no garden but two allotments and a marvellous collection of wildflowers growing in the pavement outside the door. I counted sixteen species in a 25m stretch of pavement just before we left. In Bath Street the old gas street lamp marked the moment of decision; whether to turn right and head for the country or left and head into Bristol. But even such a simple decision turned out to be more complex than you’d think because the countryside was largely post-industrial and almost (in those days) post -coalmining. The city was still smouldering from the blitz and looked like some of the photos we now see of Kiev. Castle Green still boasted a civic canteen and a scaffolding boardwalk to keep citizens safe from falling into bombed-out basements. We, as children, took it all in our stride because it was our normal. Even the accordion players with one trouser leg pinned up with a large blanket pin were normal. I suppose we thought that was just the way some people turned out.
I became hefted, habituated to my normal; its culture, its history and its strong Gloucestershire accent; but above all to its wildlife – the sparrows generally, but its plants especially. They were the visual furniture of my childhood. I had no idea what any of them were called because my mum, brought up in deep countryside in the Chilterns was patterned differently. She knew all her plants by their Stoke Row names but probably wouldn’t have known the hedge mustards and wall barleys of my familiar pavements. But now, looking back, I envy her for knowing the Lady’s Slipper. So I went to school and became bi-cultural but I always walked and thought in my first language. If I get particularly puzzled by a local plant name now – not the Latin ones – I look it up in Grigson’s “Englishman’s Flora” as if I were ordering a coffee in Tarragona with the aid of a guidebook. My Mum’s family all lived in Stoke Row and had done since the 1700’s. They were carpenters, vernacular builders and part-time smallholders. My Dad’s family seem to have migrated to Bristol from Somerset some time in the 19th century and settled in Hotwells which was also half destroyed in the Blitz. Both sides of the family were of the gaffer but not the middle classes. Whichever way I went it was post-war, post industrial, liminal urban fallow.
All of which is a very long introduction to the fact that I just finished reading the book I mentioned yesterday – “Urban Plants” by Trevor Dines – published by Bloomsbury which, again, I can’t recommend too highly. Most people will read it as a first rate textbook on urban plants but, for me, it was a kind of botanical biography. As I tuned the pages I found the answer to my strange addiction to urban and post-industrial plants, aka weeds, because it miraculously riveted two halves of my memories together. The old man and the child still live in the same world; nothing is the same, but in the manner of the tides and seasons nothing has changed either. The old dram roads (tram roads but we have the soft mutation in Gloucestershire) are still largely there for walkers but no longer thrum with rusty tubs of coal from Coalpit Heath. Parkfield Rank still sits on top of the pits where Eddy, my closest friend, and I played dares miles from home. The old brickworks flues at the bottom of the escarpment which we loved to crawl up to peer at the sky are all gone, but the clay is still there. You can still pick up sherds of drainpipe where the kilns of Warmley once stood. Priddy Mineries and Velvet bottom are still capable of leaching dangerous quantities of cadmium into the water but aside from a few dogs and their owners and the cavers, no smelting has gone on for a century, Only the plants that can tolerate heavy metals tell the story as they eke out a living on the waste and slag.
It’s not that I don’t like “proper” flowers. One of my greatest pleasures is to walk the unimproved grassland of the Cotswold escarpment and, indeed, I see a lot of “proper” flowers on the Kennet and Avon Canal that enters the river Avon just down the road from Potwell Villas. I like them, I photograph and record them but ….. well they just don’t have that jolt of familiarity. Eddy and I used to catch the bus into Bristol and wander around the docks on a Saturday afternoon. If we walked down Gasferry Lane we would always see Buddleia growing out of the walls. There would always be Dandelions growing at the foot of the same Brandon Hill stone walls; three meters high to keep small boys out and the evil naphthalene polluted soil in.
I’ve never made a secret of my love for Cornwall yet, even there, I’m drawn towards the same post-industrial landscape. In Cadgwith I could – if I had the DNA in my ancestry – look at the sea and say “that’s my place, that’s where I belong” . But I can’t do that, or at least only if we walk a couple of miles along the coast to the old Serpentine works where I can happily turn my back to the sea and explore the ruined walls – poking, peering, turning things over in my hand like the found treasures of childhood. Even on the Lleyn peninsula we found ourselves drawn to a place which turned out to be the biggest manganese mine of its day – complete with headworks and winches rusting artfully in the sun.
This is something you can’t fake. A few years ago the Council specified some “wildflower” planting to brighten up a bit of fallow land awaiting development on the riverside. In year one, there was a magnificent and colourful display of flowers that didn’t really belong there at all. Dare I say it was rather lovely to see Cornflowers in the centre of Bath? but nature had other ideas and by the next year the local thugs had taken over again and they just loved the rich soil growing tall and fat. Then the following year there appeared a couple of plants of Weld – widely used for making dyes in the past. To return to the book I’ve been reading, it suddenly came to me that possibly – just possibly – this was a local species returned to its old haunts. I’d be amazed, but very pleasantly amazed if those seeds had – like the devil in the temptations – hidden in the ground until an opportune moment came for a return. The disturbance of the riverside soil near the site of an old dyeworks was just such an opportunity and up they came for a season and flowered – so maybe we’ll see them again, unless some beady-eyed council official deems them to be weeds and therefore not to be tolerated in a wildflower garden. It’s just another reason why urban plants feel like my dispersed cousins; their history is just as much my history. Hunting for them is like a free subscription to an ancestry website, and – as the children used to roar after an assembly at Redcliffe Primary School “Aaaaarrrmen!!!” to that.
