My flat, in darkest south London, is so close to a main road the floor shakes when buses pass. But I love living here for the nature. I don’t just mean the fat grey rat I found dead in a flowerbed between here and the station (the flowers stayed crushed for a month), nor only the foxes, which are scared of us, close up. Not even the screech of the green parakeets, which sounds exactly like a child’s squeezy toy.
This whole area used to be woodland and, still, I can run from my bed and reach an eight-hundred-year-old oak within minutes. The patch of woodland which contains this oak, along with around twelve others, are all that is left of the Great North Wood, which used to cover this whole area.
They are all dense little pieces of forest, larger inside than out. Only a few steps in and you wouldn’t know you were right in the heart of a city of eight million people.
These places are precious to a lot of people, including me. London Wildlife Trust is now running a conservation project in these areas, and I went to interview Sam Bentley-Toon, the Project Officer, to understand a bit more about the place, what it is, has been and could be.
Can you tell me a little bit about the Great North Wood Project?
I was first employed at the beginning of 2016 for the development phase of the project. Before that, colleagues put together the first phase of the application to the Heritage Lottery Fund and they gave some seed money for a year to develop the project. I was taken on as Great North Wood Project Development officer to go out, meet lots of different community groups, work with the ecologist to survey the sites and come up with our set of key sites, which turned out to be 13. A huge amount of consultation was involved, trialling lots of different types of events, getting feedback on how it might work, going into schools, doing pilot volunteering sessions, lots of meetings with different landowners of the sites to get together a partnership agreement–
Oh my god that must have been complicated!
Yeah, there are five boroughs.
And when you were doing that surveying what did you find?
It was really getting the lay of the land and seeing what is there that’s valuable, ecologically speaking, and getting to grips with what needs to happen to improve the sites for wildilfe
Is that about diversity primarily? What’s important for ecology?
That’s a kind of a philosophical question – we tend to favour biodiversity, and also have an idea of what we think woods should be. There’s lots of things that we draw on to create that image. I think you should be truthful about the fact there’s lots of things that shape that image of what we think woodland should look like. That can include current trends in conservation, specifically woodland conservation, as well as thinking about traditional management of those woods or even thinking back to pre-human intervention – and more recent industrial and cultural interventions – like the Victorian Gardens or the railway.
With this site in particular there’re so many layers aren’t there? What is it like unearthing that strata of what people have done with the land before?
It is fascinating to discover those different strands – I have this recurrent fantasy that I can turn a dial and switch back through the ages and through all the different types of management to see what was happening and what was there at different points. A lot of that history is very opaque. You can consult old maps and start to try and understand what was being done but the records aren’t complete; you have to use your imagination.
It was used for timber for a really long time, right?
Going back potentially thousands of years it was used as a source of timber, and we think that the predominance of oak (and the majority is sessile oak in these woods) is because of management. That tree would have been selected for because going back to pre-human intervention, evidence suggests that trees like small-leaved lime would have dominated. I don’t think there’s any naturally occurring small-leaved lime in these woods nowSo presumably that tree is not useful for timber, and it would have been, over centuries, selected out of the woods. So what we think of as “natural” is this oak woodland, but to what extent is that a product of centuries of management? That is how the woods were for centuries: this mixture of mostly oak and hornbeam. Those were the trees that would have been used for timber, for ship building and charcoal burning,
It sounds like a weird farm. How would the management have worked?
The woods were owned – some church land, some Dulwich Estate. And the landowners had a say over who could harvest the various different products. There were also commoner’s rights, so anyone would have been able to take deadwood for fuel. They wouldn’t have been able to fell any trees or collect the product of coppice unless they had an agreement with the landlord. That started to change with enclosures, where commoner’s rights were extinguished and land was fenced off and sold to build houses. A lot of the bits that remained became the grounds of big mansions, big estates.
It is interesting to think what the woods would have looked like going back a century or two when they were being managed. It would look very different to how we see them now, which is lots of mature trees quite close together. They probably would have largely been managed as coppice with standards.There would be coppice stools with poles emerging out of them which would be cut on a rotation of around eight years. Standards were cut on a longer rotation of about eighty years to provide the timber for ship building. It would have been a low, bright woodland with a scattering of larger trees.
The really big old trees would be the ones that were allowed to persist as boundary trees to mark out, for example, different parishes.
Have you noticed since the project started that the space has changed? How long have you been working on it now?
It’s been two years since the project officially started. I feel like the biggest changes we’ve made are in areas that were densely covered with cherry laurel. We’ve removed stands of that, which has opened up the woods and allowed lots of light to come in. It’ll be a while before we see how the woods develop from that, although we have seen oak seedlings coming up which has been really encouraging. Those haven’t always survived – particularly in the drought last summer – but one of the things we really want to try and promote is oak regeneration, because they don’t seem to be regenerating particularly well in that kind of closed canopy woodland. They aren’t shade tolerant, as a species.
So one theory is that oaks were naturally found in a much more open landscape which was maintained by big grazing animals, the Frans Vera school of thought on Western European Ecology – as opposed to the wildwood theory that there was thick dense woodland covering almost the whole of the UK. Frans Vera suggested instead it was more of a savannah type habitat kept open by big grazing animals like the auroch, deer, and tarpan (wild horse). That kind of habitat, insofar as we know, would look like what is being replicated by places like Knepp.
But we can’t get the aurochs back…?
Not in the Great North Wood, no.
Do you get deer?
Not really – you occasionally see a muntjac that has come up the railway, but it’s just an occasional sighting; they’re not really having an impact.
What do you think is the most important thing about the work that you’re doing?
We are only able to do this work for a limited amount of time: we have four years. I think if there’s anything ecologically, from a conservation perspective, that we can achieve in that time I would hope that we can create the next cohort of oaks – basically to make changes to the woodland structure to allow the next generation to be recruited and to survive into, potentially, old age.
How long do oak trees live?
A thousand years – in a woodland context maybe not as long as that – but hundreds of years, easily.
That must be quite amazing. You’re creating the space for these and they will still be around in maybe 600 years…
I mean that’s the kind of timescale you have to think about in woodland management. And it’s challenging when you have, like I say, such a tiny amount of time to do anything – and we don’t really know if it’s going to work. I always think about coming back as an old man, in my eighties, seeing what’s happened.
There is some controversy over cutting trees down, which we are going to be doing soon. There’s less controversy over cutting, say, cherry laurel down; most people can see quite clearly why we do that. But when we start cutting semi-mature or mature oak trees down, people have a real emotional response to that. But bearing in mind what I was saying about trying to promote regeneration, and oaks not regenerating under a closed canopy and the traditional way of managing woods being basically to cut a lot of things down. It’s about trying to help people understand that cutting trees down is not always a bad thing for wildlife, sometimes it can be beneficial. – Also where we cut oak trees down we do so in the hope that they regenerate, as coppice stools. There are definitely different ways of viewing conservation. Some people are like “don’t intervene” and believe that if you do, it will be not natural anymore.
You’d end up with Japanese knotweed though?
Or cherry laurel – and some people react against the infrastructure elements, like the fencing or paths which we do mainly to change the way people move through the woods – to exclude them from some parts and encourage them to use other parts. This is especially important in places like Dulwich Wood and Sydenham Hill Wood, where the sheer numbers of people visiting is starting to have a bigger and bigger impact – if you don’t do something to control that you basically just get trees and mud. And eventually the trees would also die.
Does the word natural really even mean anything in this context?
Woodland ecologists talk sometimes about the idea of “future natural” which includes things like sycamore, which is likely to be a very dominant tree in the future woodland landscape of the UK.
Is that because of climate change?
Just because it was introduced and it does really well here. Where trees like oak don’t regenerate well, it does.
Do you see an impact of climate change?
It happens over such long timescales it’s hard to say. There’s some evidence that suggests that plants are just growing more because it’s warmer all year round and more light all year round, so things don’t go into such levels of dormancy particularly species like ivy and bramble. There’s an idea that these things are increasing relative to other plants because they’re able to take advantage of that extra bit of growth – but then that also may be about nitrogen deposition from the atmosphere, soils becoming more nutrient-rich and certain plants being able to use that more effectively than others. There’s all these changes that happen to the woods which as land managers we are powerless to do anything about, and how much impact those changes have is really difficult to see, especially on such a small area, unless you are researching it properly over many years
You also do a lot of work with volunteers – what is the value you are adding with this – what is the bit of magic?
For our volunteers we give people a chance to have an intimate relationship with the woods in a way you don’t get just from walking through. They are making changes to the woods that could, as we are saying, reverberate out for centuries. And also just in terms of how much time people are able to spend in the woods; a day or two a week. And it’s not just volunteering – we do lots of guided walks, work with school groups and all of that. I hope it is giving people the tools to see woodland in a slightly different way and to appreciate the complexity of the ecological communities that exist within them.
Do you see that happening with people? Do you see people change because of that experience?
I think so – particularly with the volunteers because we work with them over a long time. But also working with school groups you can see changes happening almost immediately, especially with younger kids. You can see that in some cases they’ve really learnt to distrust anything natural or dirty, and it doesn’t take much at all for them to overcome that and they are touching bugs and open to it.
What do you enjoy most about being in that environment?
A lot of different things about it: taking kids out into the woods, seeing their enthusiasm. I really like doing workdays because we’ve got a really nice group of volunteers. There are lots of new people coming in, but we have a core group of people who come out pretty regularly. It just feels like a really nice team, and just being able to be in the woods a lot of the time is great. To see the changes over the year and just how much I’ve learnt over the last two to three years of doing this job. I’ve worked with colleagues who are really knowledgeable, doing my own observation and research – having to do guided walks is an amazing way of learning stuff.
What do you think will happen at the end of the project? Will there be enthusiasm to do something more?
Yeah, we’ll carry on our work in Sydenham Hill Wood, and we’d like to continue to expand our work into Dulwich Wood and have a more active role there. It would be a shame if, at the rest of the sites, activity drops off, but there’s also friends groups that are active at some of them. One of the legacy goals of the project is to enable them to keep working, but it’s always a tricky one when you’ve got volunteer groups; how stable is that? You need people to really drive it forward and if people move away you can’t really guarantee that.
People spend a lot of time in the woods and leave things behind, what sort of stuff do you find?
The car at Hillcrest Wood was a surprise. We often find bikes and motorbikes in various states of decay. We found evidence of drug use, needles, lots of condoms – Beulah Heights is a site that’s particularly well known for sex. And all kinds of rubbish that you can imagine: bags full of costume jewellery… and then there’s the older stuff.
We found a Victorian perfume bottle when we were doing some tree planting that we were really excited about. We were doing some tree planting with some kids and – well, to be fair, one of the kids found it – it went missing almost immediately. One of the kids asked me “is it treasure?” and I was like, “yeah.” Maybe that was the wrong answer.
Old Victorian architecture. We found this amazing well that has this domed structure – that’s also in Hillcrest Wood. And there’s all of the old basements and things in Sydenham Hill Wood from where all the houses were demolished
It hasn’t been woodland again for that long really has it?
Since the 60s for the top section. And then there’s plants – like the lily of the valley and Solomon’s seal that we found in Low Cross Wood. We didn’t think those plants were still here – ancient woodland plants which may have persisted just in that section of woodland. You don’t see them elsewhere. We found an interesting fungus called cobalt crust[1], which is a rare find, on some old chestnut paling fencing we put up in Sydenham Hill Wood. We found an orchid in New Cross Gate; a broad-leafed helleborine[2], which again is a rare find – not nationally, but in London. You find the odd little gem like that. Firecrests[3] too, which we think are nesting in Sydenham Hill Wood.
And of course, homeless people, living in the woods, which is symptomatic of broader things going on in society. We try and work with Streetlink and Councils to try and find alternative places for them to be. In one wood there is a particular guy who is living there on and off and he just leaves huge amounts of litter, piles and piles of rubbish. It’s not great.
But the woods have always had that – like Samuel Matthews[4], gypsy communities and encampments. They’ve always been places for people to seek refuge in.
[1] Terana caerulea, commonly known as the cobalt crust fungus or velvet blue spread, is a saprobic crust fungus in the family Phanerochaetaceae. Usually found in warm, damp hardwood forests on the undersides of fallen logs and branches of deciduous trees, this unique fungus has been described as “blue velvet on a stick”
[2] A tall orchid of woodland and scrub, the Broad-leaved Helleborine has greenish, purple-tinged flowers that look a little ‘drooping’. Strongly veined, oval leaves spiral around its stem.
[3] This tiny, restless jewel of a bird vies with the goldcrest for the title of the UK’s smallest bird. Compared to the goldcrest, the firecrest is brighter and ‘cleaner’ looking, with a green back, white belly, bronze ‘collar’ and a black and white eye-stripe. They have a yellow and black stripe on their heads, which has a bright orange centre in males. Like goldcrests, they move through trees and bushes in search of small insects. Read more at www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-guides/bird-a-z/firecrest/.
[4] londonist.com/london/history/the-hermit-of-dulwich. Samuel Matthews left society after the death of his wife in the late 1700s to live in the Great North Wood, in a cave. He was sadly murdered in 1802.
*
Eloise CC Shepherd is a writer and poet, with a surprisingly successful sideline in boxing. Her work features in New Writing 13, The Fiction Desk, and MIRonline. She recently spent a month in the Rockies as part of the Banff Centre Mountain and Wilderness Writing Programme. Like every twat she is working on a novel. Her website is www.eloiseccshepherd.co.uk.