London sits upon its foundations of clay, stone and gravel. For two millennia the city has grown steadily outwards and upwards. Its layers pressed and thickly compacted into one another, a density of weight and time. Now, out of room, it rises, never content, reaching higher, reluctant to stop. I walk in the shadow of its chasms, underneath deepening streets, down cobbled lanes and yards worn centuries smooth, and marvel at nature’s quiet persistence. She lives alongside us, untroubled by our noise and urgency. I wonder if we were to vanish, if the city’s restless movement were suddenly stilled, how long would it take before the natural world came back? How many weeks before deer moved cautiously along Cannon Street, or seals, heavy with spring pups, found their way to the sandy margins by the Strand?
There is a particular magic which belongs to the city, its to be found not in the trading floors, the glass towers, the sea of people, no it’s the spaces in-between. In the moments when you look, really look, then you’ll notice. The natural world leans in, craning around the corners, reaching up through the cracks, poised for its inevitable relaunch. The most beautiful of which are trees, especially at the beginning of spring.
In the old churchyard of St Helen’s Bishopsgate, near where Shakespeare once lodged among wealthy tradesmen, a branch from a plane tree, stubbly with early spring buds, reaches in front of the diamond-latticed skin of the Gherkin. The loose, wandering geometry, the branches trail and sway freely in the spring air. The tree is all improvisation. Its limbs fork and wander, tracing paths that appear neither efficient nor symmetrical. The organic and the engineered, the living and the made, held together in the frame of my camera, a quiet, ongoing negotiation, a moment of cool moving air and spring sunlight.
In front of the old oak door of the tower at St Alban’s, Wood Street, a bare-limbed young plane tree stands diligently its ground, branches cast wondering shadows across the pale golden stone. The tree grows as it pleases, still a sapling, it does not yet command the space; instead it occupies it provisionally, like a renter, aware of its own fragility. But it is there nonetheless. It has taken hold and will in time grow and mature.
Trees to me suggest a future as well as a past. They seem to fit well within the structure of a city. Their presence doesn’t impact the place, indeed often buildings are built around a spreading canopy or a leaning trunk, the city accommodates to an extent this natural world.
And you begin to notice how often this occurs, nature does not reclaim London instead it lives in a continual accord, a mutual agreement. It grows in its margins, in the little gardens and churchyards, in the thin soils gathered at the base of walls.
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