I’ve spent quite a lot of my life writing about buildings, especially old buildings, from castles to cathedrals. But I also have an abiding interest in the architecturally out-of-the-way – a term that suggests for me everything from buildings that did not even get built to the architecturally small, neglected, and apparently insignificant. It’s the second category that’s a major preoccupation of this blog – shacks, lock-ups, telephone boxes, outside privies: regular readers will know what I mean. People sometimes ask me how I became interested in this sort of thing. One answer is that I seem to be naturally disposed to favour underdogs of all sorts. Another reason is the influence of certain books, and one of these books might strike you as surprising.
Richard Mabey’s The Unofficial Countryside* is not an architecture book at all. In a bookshop you’d find it in the Natural History section – it chronicles the author’s explorations of edgelands, wastelands, and other bits of urban land that turn out to be havens for wildlife of all sorts. This unofficial countryside includes old gravel pits, canals, railway sidings, vacant lots, and rubbish tips, while also embracing golf courses, parks, gardens, and graveyards. In observing the plants, birds, and animals that colonise these spaces, Mabey develops a distinctive way of seeing, with all the naturalist’s usual alertness, curiosity, and sensitivity to place applied to a new and, it turns out, fascinating set of habitats.†
Mabey’s descriptions of the rich bird life to be seen in flooded gravel pits, of resourceful birds making nests out of wire in industrial sites, of botanising expeditions to rubbish tips and the ‘rough’ around golf courses, are all gripping. His explorations of the relationships between humans and kestrels, foxes, blue tits, and ‘weeds’ like thorn apple, are fascinating. And his enthusiasm for the places and their plant and animal inhabitants is infectious; all the more so, I think, because he doesn’t romanticise things, and knows that some of these habitats are by definition ephemeral.
This way of seeing things, this looking with an inquisitive interest at the apparently marginal and generally neglected, suggested to me a way of approaching my own areas of interest, buildings in particular. There are actually hints in The Unofficial Countryside of a relevance to architecture, for example when Mabey points out that buildings and plants have things in common, especially that both exist in a context; or when he writes about parish churches as bat roots, or ledges on buildings as gathering-places for pigeons, or temporary sandbanks on construction sites being taken over for a season by nesting sand martins.
I’d urge anyone with an interest in natural history, or with curiosity about places, or who just likes really good non-fiction writing, to read The Unofficial Countryside. The photograph of the book’s cover above is of the 1990s paperback copy on my shelves, but enterprising and on-the-ball publishers Little Toller Books have reprinted the book in a handsome new edition. I see that the Little Toller edition has a new introduction by Iain Sinclair, another writer about places who has influenced me.¶ What I have to say about him must wait for another post. Meanwhile, confined mainly to my house and garden, I have noticed that there seems to be more birdsong audible in these quiet times.§ Nature, places, open eyes and alert ears: they all offer consolations.
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* Richard Mabey, The Unofficial Countryside, first published 1973; further reprints subsequently.
† The stream of now-fashionable books about urban edgelands hadn’t started in 1973, when Mabey ’s book came out.
¶ Newcomers to Iain Sinclair should be warned that his fiction is often challenging to read. His non-fiction is more accessible, however, and excellent. A good place to start might be Lights Out For the Territory (1997).
§ Wood pigeons, a blackbird, and a thrush have been at it while I wrote this, and other birds I can’t identify. Perhaps the birds were singing as much all along, but now, my locked-down ears are more attuned to their music.
Richard Mabey’s The Unofficial Countryside* is not an architecture book at all. In a bookshop you’d find it in the Natural History section – it chronicles the author’s explorations of edgelands, wastelands, and other bits of urban land that turn out to be havens for wildlife of all sorts. This unofficial countryside includes old gravel pits, canals, railway sidings, vacant lots, and rubbish tips, while also embracing golf courses, parks, gardens, and graveyards. In observing the plants, birds, and animals that colonise these spaces, Mabey develops a distinctive way of seeing, with all the naturalist’s usual alertness, curiosity, and sensitivity to place applied to a new and, it turns out, fascinating set of habitats.†
Mabey’s descriptions of the rich bird life to be seen in flooded gravel pits, of resourceful birds making nests out of wire in industrial sites, of botanising expeditions to rubbish tips and the ‘rough’ around golf courses, are all gripping. His explorations of the relationships between humans and kestrels, foxes, blue tits, and ‘weeds’ like thorn apple, are fascinating. And his enthusiasm for the places and their plant and animal inhabitants is infectious; all the more so, I think, because he doesn’t romanticise things, and knows that some of these habitats are by definition ephemeral.
This way of seeing things, this looking with an inquisitive interest at the apparently marginal and generally neglected, suggested to me a way of approaching my own areas of interest, buildings in particular. There are actually hints in The Unofficial Countryside of a relevance to architecture, for example when Mabey points out that buildings and plants have things in common, especially that both exist in a context; or when he writes about parish churches as bat roots, or ledges on buildings as gathering-places for pigeons, or temporary sandbanks on construction sites being taken over for a season by nesting sand martins.
I’d urge anyone with an interest in natural history, or with curiosity about places, or who just likes really good non-fiction writing, to read The Unofficial Countryside. The photograph of the book’s cover above is of the 1990s paperback copy on my shelves, but enterprising and on-the-ball publishers Little Toller Books have reprinted the book in a handsome new edition. I see that the Little Toller edition has a new introduction by Iain Sinclair, another writer about places who has influenced me.¶ What I have to say about him must wait for another post. Meanwhile, confined mainly to my house and garden, I have noticed that there seems to be more birdsong audible in these quiet times.§ Nature, places, open eyes and alert ears: they all offer consolations.
- - - - -
* Richard Mabey, The Unofficial Countryside, first published 1973; further reprints subsequently.
† The stream of now-fashionable books about urban edgelands hadn’t started in 1973, when Mabey ’s book came out.
¶ Newcomers to Iain Sinclair should be warned that his fiction is often challenging to read. His non-fiction is more accessible, however, and excellent. A good place to start might be Lights Out For the Territory (1997).
§ Wood pigeons, a blackbird, and a thrush have been at it while I wrote this, and other birds I can’t identify. Perhaps the birds were singing as much all along, but now, my locked-down ears are more attuned to their music.
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