The Parkland Walk, London: A Multi-species History

By Patrick Hegarty Morrish

Alpine Fellowship 2021 Academic Writing Prize Winner

My north London neighbourhood of Stroud Green, Hornsey, looks civilised from above: six streets running parallel, filled with identical terraced houses. In a way, this is a neat metaphor for civilisation: a rational landscape tamed by urbanity. Recently, environmental catastrophe and dwindling wildernesses have challenged assumptions about the inherent good of civilisation. Civilisation has bulldozed the wilderness, leaving a tamed, but ruined, landscape. As the anthropologist Anna Tsing writes, the modern, civilised economy alienates humans and nonhumans from complex interrelationships, taming them into simple, quantifiable assets: ‘simplification for alienation produces ruins, spaces of abandonment’.[1] Hence, to return to north London, locals view the Parkland Walk, a nature reserve near my home, as a rare enclave of wilderness: a ‘ribbon of calm’, or ‘a bit of countryside in a really urban environment’.[2] 

That is one way of seeing things. In contrast, with the Parkland Walk as my focus, and a Tsing-inspired approach – blending history, anthropology, and ecology – I want to suggest that simplified and rationalised spaces still flourish in their liveliness.[3] The Parkland Walk is neither a civilised urban space, nor a wilderness. Instead, it carves out room within this dialectic. Currently, the Parkland Walk is a nature reserve connecting Finsbury Park, Stroud Green, Crouch End, Highgate, Muswell Hill and Alexandra Palace. Before then, it was a railway line built to serve the growing metropolis; before then, agricultural land; before then, forest. This essay is a whistle-stop tour of this chronology, showing how the resultant landscape is a palimpsest, which has been made and remade, tamed and untamed, through the interplay between civilisation and wilderness.

***

Our focus is the ring of hills in north London, created at the last glacial maximum twenty thousand years ago, and, more particularly, on a ribbon of land running east-west from present-day Finsbury Park to Highgate, then curving north-east to present-day Alexandra Palace. The land is flat for half a mile until it intersects with the Hog’s Back, the ridge which looks over Hornsey Vale. It then climbs to Highgate, and runs along rolling terrain towards Muswell Hill and Alexandra Palace. Two thousand years ago, this land was covered by Middlesex Forest, which stretched at least twenty miles north of London. Typical of European deciduous forests, the two principal trees were oak, growing in clay, and beech, growing in dry soil. Heavier clays supported the common oak, Quercus robur, and a dense undergrowth, while gravely clays encouraged the Durmast oak, Quercus petraea, and a more open woodland.[4] Since Roman occupation, close to the Parkland Walk’s extremities, the forest was intersected by two Roman roads, Ermine Street and Watling street, bringing military might to the northeast and northwest respectively.[5] Already, with human road builders and wild forest interacting to create a composite landscape, we have our first vignette of multispecies life.

As late as 1086, as the Domesday Book indicates, 30% of the approximately 700km2 of Middlesex remained wooded, double the national average.[6] The land of the future Parkland Walk was owned by the Bishop of London, as a demesne of the Manor of Stepney.[7] Incongruously, the Bishop’s woods in Hornsey attracted highwaymen who used this niche as protection from the authorities, to pick on the trade route that stretched from London, through Muswell Hill, to the north. For example, in 1296, one Walter de Burton was found guilty of robberies at ‘Pynnesknoll’ – now Muswell Hill – amassing goods of two shillings tenpence.[8] To the assemblage of oaks, beeches, and undergrowth, we add vagabonds who used the forest to evade the authorities.

The forest was a rich inventory of multispecies life, where, according to the twelfth century administrator William Fitzstephen, ‘its copses, dense with foliage, conceal[ed] wild animals – stags, does, boars, and wild bulls’.[9] This ecological richness attracted further heterogenous elements. At one end of the social scale, it was attractive to the elite. In November 1241, Henry III ordered the keeper to deliver ‘ten live deer in the park of Haringeye’ to Walter Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, perhaps as a token of reconciliation, since Marshal had held a forbidden tournament in June.[10] On the other, locals used Middlesex Forest for subsistence. Hornsey Park was fenced by 1303, but thirteen trespassers felled oaks in 1318. Commissions for arrest were issued in 1354 for thieves of deer and fish.[11] The gaps between enforcement suggest less that thievery was uncommon, but that it was endemic: prosecution was difficult and attempted infrequently; the multispecies richness of Middlesex Forest was thus a common resource for the local peasantry. Therefore, this landscape both sustained the diplomatic niceties of elite politics, and provided crucial natural resources for the peasantry.

Thus, even as a forested wilderness, forces of civilisation were shaping the landscape, creating a unique assemblage. The Parkland Walk still offers a glimpse of this history, as oak and beech dominate, and Highgate Wood, which the railway circled round, is an ancient remainder of Middlesex Forest. As we see, to delve into this palimpsest requires an atypical cast of characters: humans are participants, but the ever-changing landscape assemblage is the protagonist.[12] In these mosaics of relationality, forces associated with civilisation and wilderness, human and non-human, are entangled.

***

After disafforestation in 1218, Middlesex Forest and the future Parkland Walk were steadily deforested and cultivated. This marked the first transformation of the landscape. Domesticating the landscape for agriculture might appear the first step towards civilisation. But perceptions of control are in tension with new multispecies assemblages which emerged, and the changes these enforced on human life.

In the medieval period, the agricultural land was farmed by a mixture of villeins and copyholders. A grange attached to the demesne, later Rowledge Farm, was situated in Shepherd’s Cot, through which the Parkland Walk now runs. In 1318, this held a herdsman, a ploughman, and a plough leader as villeins, with six oxen.[13] The emergence of bondage is telling. The domestication of the landscape depended on the concurrent domestication of villeins by the manorial lord. If farming entails the progress of civilisation, it also involved the expansion of social hierarchy and domination by the elite.

The changes to the landscape brought about by cultivators created new multispecies relationships. A range of crops was sown. An inventory of 1303-04 reports that the Bishop’s granary at Hornsey contained oats, wheat, rye, malt, and corn.[14] Added to this is the biodiversity of hedgerows, abundant given that only small patches of land near Stroud Green were farmed as open fields.[15] The multispecies richness of the medieval hedge is captured by a Middle English poem, The Owl and the Nightingale:

… a thick and green hedge

mixed with reed and green sedge …

It was all overgrown with ivy;

it was the Owl’s dwelling place.[16]

The 1303-04 inventory was ordered on the death of Bishop Richard de Gravesend to assess the Manor’s assets, amassed through villeinage and taxes.[17] Were the farmers who produced this wealth distinct from the trespassers who stole from the Bishops’ woodland? Since peasant mobility was limited, it is likely they were the same people. The inventory produced by the state represents rationalisation distinctive of civilisation, where yields are alienated from their ecology and turned into assets. But this marker of civilisation conflicts with the reality that Hornsey’s inhabitants engaged in a variety of subsistence routines, from farming to deer hunting – each of which enmeshed them in complex multispecies relationships.

After the population increased, post-Black Death, from the 1450s onwards, cultivated areas expanded at the expense of woodland.[18] Probably little more than a quarter of Hornsey demesne was farmed in 1540, little less than a half in 1647, and over two-thirds in 1820.[19] Villeinage also vanished, disappearing across England by the mid-sixteenth century.[20] From the eighteenth century, mansions appeared on the Hog’s Back, and the forests of Brownswood and Hornsey Wood at the current eastern extremity of the Parkland Walk were popular leisure destinations for Londoners. The radical political writer William Hone recalled in 1828 how ‘two sisters … kept’ Hornsey House, a pub near Brownswood, and usually ‘sat … between two venerable oaks, wherein swarms of bees hived’.[21]  As the future Parkland Walk was seen as a civilised leisure destination by the bourgeois elite, new multispecies assemblages emerged: woodlands, with trees and bees, perhaps attracted to the sweet froth on the pints served at Hornsey House.

In this second movement, the future Parkland Walk was a landscape of shifting agricultural ecologies. ‘Development’ easily trips off the tongue after ‘agricultural’: the rationalisation of the landscape for asset production is wedded to the expansion of civilisation. But at each turn, changes to the landscape brought new complex assemblages, untamed in their heterogeneity.

***

By the mid-nineteenth century, the edges of the metropolis were creeping to Hornsey. To ease overcrowding, Finsbury Park was opened in 1869, and this still borders the east end of the Parkland Walk. Figure 3 depicts Finsbury Park in the 1870s, with the Hog’s Back ridge at the top left-hand corner. By this time a railway skirted the Hog’s Back, leaving the mainline at Finsbury Park Station.

It is hard to think of a more potent symbol of civilisation than the railway. Dickens captures its fraught image in Dombey and Son: after necessitating the destruction of the ‘Stagg’s Gardens’ community, the railway ‘trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilisation’.[22] Intended to transport visitors to Alexandra Palace, and built with materials leftover from the 1862 International Exhibition, the railway from Finsbury Park was intimately linked to dreams of civilisation. Its 100-year history began with the opening of the Palace in May 1873; on 2 June 60,000 visited, mostly travelling by rail. To accommodate urbanisation, stations opened at Stroud Green in 1881 and at Cranley Gardens in 1902. Electrification was recommended in 1935, but paused in 1940. In 1954 London Transport decided the line could not run for its meagre 700 weekday passengers and the last passenger train ran on 3rd July 1954. The line to Highgate was used for goods services until 1964, and until 1970 to transport tube trains. In 1971, the tracks were finally lifted.[23]

Undoubtedly 1873-1971 brought profound change to accommodate the railway’s civilising mission. Remaining a conspicuous element in the palimpsest landscape, the topography was modified to accommodate the climb from Finsbury Park to Highgate. An embankment was built from Finsbury Park to the Hog’s Back, which was cut into from Stroud Green onwards. Tunnels were bored either side of Highgate Station; passing round Highgate Wood, the line emerged onto a seventeen-arch viaduct, then under a bridge carrying the road to Muswell Hill, and through a shallow cutting to Alexandra Palace.[24] As Figure 4 encapsulates, with the symmetry of platforms, tunnels and tracks, the expansion of civilised modernity resulted in profound alteration to the landscape. Encouraged by the railway, Hornsey’s population grew from 19,380 in 1871 to 84,592 in 1911. While, as Figure 5 shows, in 1888 the railway viaduct existed alongside fields, by the twentieth century arable land was replaced by terraced houses. The wild heterogeneity of woodland and hedgerow was tamed by the efficiency of the railway, and the urbanisation it brought.

However, multispecies liveliness returned. Two ‘railway plants’, which still form part of the Parkland Walk palimpsest, have stories of particular interest. First, the yellow-flowered Oxford Ragwort, Senecio squalidus, is native to volcanic Sicily, but was cultivated in Oxford and spread along the railways, reaching Scotland by 1950.[25] The Ragwort thrives in ruined landscapes, and as the botanist GC Druce noted in 1927, the brick and ballast of the railways ‘furnished the plant with a replica of the lava-soils of its native home in Sicily’.[26] Second, the Rosebay Willowherb, Chamaenerion angustifoliom, a native plant distinguished by magenta flowers, thrives after forest fires. Rare in the early-nineteenth century, it colonised railway embankments that had destroyed previous plant life.[27] These examples of Parkland Walk vegetation show that landscapes tamed by civilisation remained vibrant: ‘some kinds of disturbance’, as Tsing writes, ‘have been followed by regrowth … that nurtures many lives’.[28] The railway was thus a fusion between its industrial, civilised heart, and the wilderness which encroached from the edges, spreading along embankments, verges, and brickwork.

***

After 1971, the ecology of the Parkland Walk was transformed again. If the railway had attempted to civilise the landscape, once derelict, wilderness returned. As regular pruning ceased, Cranley Gardens Station was overgrown with grasses, tall herbs, brambles and shrubbery (Figure 7). Figure 8 shows the abandoned railway parallel to Blythwood Road in 1977, upended sleepers littering the track. Wildflowers were well-adapted to grow in the poor soils of the old track bed. The bright yellow Lotus corniculatus, the Bird’s-foot Trefoil, provided an egg-laying site for the common blue and wood white butterflies.[29] These are examples of Hustak and Myers’s ‘involutionary momentum’, where species are shaped by cooperation, not competition. A result of the intimate interrelations across species and landscape, this also serves as a synecdoche for the Parkland Walk as a whole.[30]

Municipal authorities are agents of civilisation, aiming to bring governance to the urban sprawl. And since Haringey Council bought up the land for housing in 1974, the state has had a complex relationship with the Parkland Walk. Original plans for housing were rejected in a 1978 public inquiry, and a warden, David Hope, converted the derelict railway into parkland.[31] But in the late-1980s, the Department of Transport proposed turning the Parkland Walk into a motorway. The proposal was dropped in 1990 after a vigorous campaign to ‘stop the Tarmac Monsterway Now!’.[32] But wrangling has continued. Recently, on 23rd March 2021 protestors held a funeral for trees felled by Haringey Council, the latter claiming that vegetation removal is in the ‘best interests of the environment’.[33] Considering the litany of damaging proposals over the Parkland Walk’s short history, no wonder locals mistrust good intentions. The landscape would have taken time to recover from the imposition of a motorway: civilised urbanites in Hornsey have protected their idealised wild space, keeping the bricks and mortar of the state’s civilisation in abeyance.  

In 1978 and 1990, activists achieved the preservation of a uniquely biodiverse landscape. Long-eared bats and Daubenton’s bats thrive in the disused railway tunnels (Figure 10), while a 2015 survey identified 291 species and sub-species of vegetation along the Walk, of which only 54% are native.[34] Admittedly, the authorities’ vegetation cutbacks help sustain this biodiversity: vegetation growing unchecked would create a dense woodland.[35] But activists and the state are just two participants in crafting this heterogeneity. Many alien species have escaped from local gardens. For example, near Crouch End Station, False Holly, Chinese Privet and Oregon Grape colonised the embankments after being planted in an adjacent garden in the 1990s.[36] Soil type also helps biodiversity. The infertile acid grassland near Crouch Hill limits vegetation growth, so the soil warms quickly in the sun, making it ideal for insects like the mining bee and the bee-wolf wasp.[37] Elsewhere, scores of dogs have enriched the soil by depositing phosphates and nitrates. Plants like the Bird’s-foot Trefoil, which thrive in poorer soils, have been crowded out by vigorous alien species like the Green Alkanet forget-me-not, and resultingly the common blue butterfly has disappeared.[38] In the Parkland Walk, then, civilisation and wilderness intermingle to create a constantly changing inventory of multispecies life, where bats, dogs, gardeners, native and alien vegetation interact.

This unruly assemblage has encouraged artistic creativity. Some artworks deliberately elide with the ecology: graffiti artist Vibes painted a frog and a snail, ‘to create something that was more suited to the surrounding environment’.[39] Marylin Collins had similar intentions when sculpting a spriggan into an old railway arch (Figure 11): these creatures have natural powers, able to raise whirlwinds and steal cows, according to Cornish legend.[40] Yet vibrantly coloured graffiti sitting within the vegetation’s greenish-brown palette (Figure 12), is another example of the Parkland Walk holding wilderness and civilisation in balance: at once representing the incursion of civilised urbanity, but also signifying artistic vandalism that reclaims old railway buildings from their erstwhile owners.

Since 2020, the Parkland Walk has been invaded by a new alien element, neither alive nor dead. COVID-19 has profoundly changed the nature of the assemblage. Flocks of walkers rely on the Parkland Walk for fresh air, while Haringey Council justified vegetation reduction to facilitate staying three meters apart.[41] But COVID-19 must be seen in the context of millennia of changing ecological relationships. Wilderness and civilisation continue to meet in the middle, as wildflowers and bats interact with railway buildings and pet dogs, creating an ever-shifting assemblage.

***

What significance does this unique landscape have? For one, it shows that narratives of civilisational progress, whether premised on the inherent good of civilisation or its potential to annihilate, drastically simplify the multispecies histories that emerge at every turn. Exploring diverse civilising projects – from road builders, to agriculture, railways, and motorways – wild, heterogenous elements have captured our attention, the resulting assemblages poised between civilisation and wilderness, tamed and untamed. We have also been alerted to the varied character of this intermingling, where civilisation and wilderness take many forms. Cultivators domesticated the landscape for agriculture but simultaneously relied on a wild forest, itself previously civilised by Roman roads. A railway bulldozed the wild hedgerows crafted by agriculture, but created room for wilderness at its edges. Battles between state and urbanite activists reveal two forms of civilisation. The former envisaged an extension of civilisation through housing or a motorway, while the latter sought to retain their local natural utopia. Amid this wrangling, wilderness returned to the Parkland Walk through the unruly assemblage of alien garden plants, indigenous vegetation, and animals and insects.

To experience the Parkland Walk, then, is to experience a palimpsest landscape, where many agents, human and non-human, have shaped its form. For a period, a civilising or wild force may bring drastic change, yet as the initial impact softens, we perceive a landscape which is not dominated by the effect of individual actors, but which reveals the mark of each. The rapid expansion of the human world over the past two hundred years might seem to have destroyed all which came before. But we can think about other landscapes, which appear tamed and civilised, as palimpsests too. I am not suggesting that we should be complacent about the destruction inflicted on the environment during the Anthropocene, and wait in hope for wilderness to return. But, as Tsing writes, when our environment is 'buffeted by … winds of destruction’, we must tackle ‘the challenge of living in that ruin, ugly … as it is’.[42] And the Parkland Walk’s multispecies histories show that if we ever feel suffocated by the forces of civilisation, we can search in railways, industrial estates, and urban parks, for the indelible imprint of wilderness.

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[1] A Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, (Princeton, 2015) pp. 4-5.

[2] S Johnson, ‘Graffiti on Parkland Walk: a welcome change’, (Ham&High, 22 December 2011) <https://www.hamhigh.co.uk/news/graffiti-on-parkland-walk-a-welcome-change-3426388> accessed 18 March 2021.

[3] Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 5.

[4] 'The Physique of Middlesex', in A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 1, ed. J S Cockburn et al, (London, 1969), pp. 1-10 <http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol1/pp1-10> accessed 24 March 2021.

[5] PH Blair, An Introduction to Anglo-Saxon England, (Cambridge, 2003), p. 256.

[6] O Rackham, Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape (London, 1976), p. 50.

[7] AP Baggs, et al, 'Hornsey, including Highgate: Economic history', in A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 6, ed. TFT Baker and CR Elrington (London, 1980), pp. 149-157 <http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol6/pp149-157> accessed 24 March 2021.

[8] SJ Madge, The Medieval Records of Harringay alias Hornsey, from 1216 to 1307, (Hornsey, 1939) p. 122.

[9] W Fitzstephen, ‘A Description of London’, in HT Riley, ed. Liber Custumarum. Rolls Series, no. 12, vol. 2 (1860), 2-15 <http://users.trytel.com/~tristan/towns/florilegium/introduction/intro01.html> accessed 24 March 2021.

[10] CL Kingsford, ‘Marshal, William, first Earl of Pembroke and Striguil of the Marshal line (d 1219).’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 1893) <https://www-oxforddnb-com.ezproxy.lib.bbk.ac.uk/view/10.1093/odnb/9780192683120.001.0001/odnb-9780192683120-e-18126> accessed 15 March 2021.

[11] Baggs et al, ‘Economic History’, pp. 149-57.

[12] Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, pp. 23-25.

[13] Baggs et al, ‘Economic History’, pp. 149-57.

[14] Madge, Medieval Records of Harringay, pp. 69-71, 99-101.

[15] Baggs et al, ‘Economic History’, pp. 149-57

[16] O Rackham, The History of the Countryside (London, 1986) p. 187.

[17] Baggs et al, ‘Economic History’, pp. 149-57.

[18] S Broadberry et al, ‘British Economic Growth, 1270-1870’, <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254453531_British_Economic_Growth_1270-1870_an_output-based_approach> accessed 20 March 2021.

[19] Baggs et al, ‘Economic History’, pp. 149-57.

[20] M Bailey, ‘From Bondage to Freedom’, in The Decline of Serfdom in Late Medieval England, (Woodbridge, 2016) pp. 307-37.

[21] J Hinshelwood, ‘Finsbury Park – Before and Beyond its 150 years’, (2NQ, 10 August 2020), <https://2nq.uk/blog/finsbury-park-%E2%80%93-and-beyond-its-150-years> accessed 22 March 2021.

[22] P Whitehead, ‘“Forced like a cucumber” Dickens on the railways’, (Dickens Museum Blog, February 2017) <https://dickensmuseum.com/blogs/charles-dickens-museum/forced-like-a-cucumber-dickens-on-the-railways> accessed 27 March 2021.

[23] R Davies and D Bevan, Rails to the People’s Palace, and the Parkland Walk, (Hornsey, 2006) pp. 7-15

[24] Davies and Bevan, Rails, pp. 15-19.

[25] RJ Abbot et al, ‘Recent hybrid origin and invasion of the British Isles by a self-incompatible species, Oxford ragwort (Senecio squalidus L., Asteraceae)’ Biol Invasions 11 (2009) pp.1145–1158.

[26] SA Harris, ‘Introduction of Oxford ragwort, Senecio squalidus L. (Asteraceae), to the United Kingdom’, Watsonia 24: 31–43 (2002), pp. 31-33; GC Druce, The Flora of Oxfordshire, (Oxford, 1927), pp. 157, 241, <https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/117622#page/5/mode/1up> accessed 27 March 2021.

[27] R Mabey, Flora Britannica (London, 1996) pp. 235-37.

[28] Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 190.

[29] SA Clarke et al, ‘Leptidea sinapis (Wood White butterfly) egg-laying habitat and adult dispersal studies in Herefordshire’ Journal of Insect Conservation, 15 (2011) pp. 23-35; Davies and Bevan, Rails, pp. 34-35.

[30] C Hustak and N Myers, ‘Involutionary Momentum: Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters’, Differences 23/3 (2012), pp. 104-6.

[31] Davies and Bevan, Rails, p. 30.

[32] London, Hornsey Historical Society Archive, B133, NI2335TRA, Friends of the Parkland Walk, ‘Leaflet advertising a public meeting’.

[33] M Boniface, ‘Climate protestors hold funeral along Parkland Walk, (Ham&High, 23 March 2021) <https://www.hamhigh.co.uk/news/parkland-walk-tree-funeral-haringey-islington-7845870> accessed 28 March 2021; Haringey Council, ‘Vegetation Reductions’, (17 March 2021) <https://www.haringey.gov.uk/libraries-sport-and-leisure/parks-and-open-spaces/z-parks-and-open-spaces/parkland-walk/parkland-walk-vegetation-reductions> accessed 28 March 2021.

[34] ‘Bats of the Parkland Walk’, (May 2020, Haringay Online) <https://harringayonline.com/forum/topics/bats-of-parkland-walk-courtesy-of-friends-of-parkland-walk> accessed 19 March 2021; D Bevan, The Flora of the Parkland Walk (2015) <https://bevanconservation.co.uk/the-flora-of-the-parkland-walk/> accessed 28 March 2021.

[35] Davies and Bevan, Rails, p. 31.

[36] Bevan, Flora of the Parkland Walk.

[37] London Biodiversity Partnership, ‘Acid Grassland: a nationally important habitat in London’, <https://www.lbp.org.uk/downloads/Publications/Management/Acid%20Grassland%20-%20a%20nationally%20important%20habitat%20in%20London%2020.pdf> accessed 15 March 2021.

[38] Bevan, Flora of the Parkland Walk; Davies and Bevan, Rails, p. 35.

[39] Johnson, ‘Graffiti on the Parkland Walk’.

[40] J Wright, The English Dialect Dictionary, (London, 1905) <https://archive.org/details/englishdialectdi05wrig/page/690/mode/1up?view=theater> accessed 23 March 2021.

[41] Haringey Council, ‘Parkland Walk Vegetation Reductions’.

[42] Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, p. 213.

About the author

Patrick Hegarty Morrish

Patrick is a twenty-two year old Londoner who graduated from Oriel College, Oxford in summer 2020 and is preparing to begin an MA in Comparative History at Central European University in Vienna, taking a Distinguished Graduate Scholarship. He wrote his undergraduate thesis on the experiences of cycling in Sweden from 1918-39, which studied how cyclists interacted with the ecology, explored landscapes overseas, and shared bike rides with friends and family. Aside from writing and academia, he enjoys cycling, writing, music, and bonsai trees.