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‘The healing of the land and the healing of the human spirit are the same process.’ Given prominence – twice! – in Wild City, this quotation from the philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka must surely be a lodestar for Jon Davies and Steve Williams, the founders of a studio of the same name. Arguably ever since the age of enclosures, our connection to nature has been steadily diminishing. That sense of urban anomie has been deepened by a global pandemic, the climate crisis and economic hardship, and supercharged by an online culture that fosters alienation and passive consumerism. Both men are themselves products of the concrete jungle, with Steve as a teenager photographing abandoned spaces from his BMX bike, and Jon first finding the joy of community through London’s rave culture. Both men have struggled with their mental health. In their case, getting ‘hands in the soil’ – another mantra of theirs – had the kind of profound effect that the internet’s ‘touch grass’ meme alludes to semi-sarcastically.
Finding their ‘band of rough diamonds’, they began to ask what would happen if we stopped treating nature and the city as opposites? What if we looked to the many brownfield sites in built-up areas, everywhere from abandoned railway lines to disused car parks, where the hardiest flora have begun to invade. True enough, to shape, nurture and edit these worlds involves shaking up conventional ideas about horticulture: to embrace plants growing through concrete, fungi in old industrial structures, graffiti alongside food forests, wasteland becoming a refuge for biodiversity and – to foster community – people making gardens collectively rather than simply commissioning them.
Many of these ideas were trialled in the duo’s Balance Garden, funded by the Centre for Mental Health, at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in 2023. It caused much head-scratching among the horticultural establishment, as if an anarchist had rocked up at Ascot. Soon after, the same core principles blossomed in full at Markfield Park, in down-at-heel Tottenham, the beating heart of this book. The site’s Markfield Beam Engine was part of pioneering sewerage infrastructure that operated from 1888 to 1964; all that remained was a set of overgrown filtration beds and lots of antisocial behaviour. ‘To enjoy this piece of unique wild,’ Steve and Jon write, ‘you had to share it alongside the syringes, fag butts, baggies and broken bottles. And a fear of what was round the corner.’
Instead of clearing the plot and imposing a pristine new landscape, Wild City retained its rough character and got residents, volunteers and Haringey council involved. We meet several ‘local heroes’, including a retired professional pianist who happens to have a species of mugwort named after him, and Abed Rabbaa, a café owner and vice-chair of the ‘Friends of’ group, who has served as a bridge to the Muslim community. Now the site has six distinct ecological/social zones, including the Crush Corridor (where compacted building rubble becomes a growing medium for plants adapted to poor, rocky soils), an orchard for communal fruit growing, a mushroom den made from an old shipping container, an allotment and a pond. One example of their ‘light-touch’ approach occurs when Steve and Joe discover children there sword-fighting with saplings they’d just planted, leaping from concrete boulder to boulder above the swirling water. Instead of telling them off, they ask them to be careful not to disturb the newts. ‘What’s a newt?’ one of them asks, and soon they are poring over the surface to catch a glimpse. Wild City now oversees the Gladesmore Gardening Crew, with children from the school of the same name pond-dipping, gardening and observing wildlife.
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People and plants, the authors continually stress, are all part of nature, and they mine a rich seam of metaphor to give their idea emotional heft. We lose the ‘wild’ within ourselves when we allow our spirits to be tamed; recovering it means rising up against perceived control. Harshness breeds resilience. When a tree falls, and light is let in, wildflowers take root; when the ground is broken up, pioneer plants take root and fill the ground with nutrients. Likewise punk, graffiti and breakdancing have been creative responses to the oppressive monotony of sink estates and urban blight. Rather like people abandoned by the system, ‘weeds’ capture a conventional distinction between plants we want and those we don’t that is often ecologically arbitrary. Mycorrhizal fungi, and how they can enable other species to communicate, are a kind of proxy for the psychological benefits of community. ‘Just like in nature,’ they say at one point, ‘it takes all sorts to create a healthy ecosystem.’
The book’s structure is free-wheeling and almost kaleidoscopic, with the two men continually ‘breaking off’ from their central Markfield project to chat and draw inspiration from a host of urban farmers, permaculture experts, entomologists, plant specialists and landscape architects. They also travel to Derby, Paris and Copenhagen to immerse themselves in similar projects in impoverished areas and gain ideas from other like-minded ‘punk horticulturists’. Reminiscent of a fanzine, with a DIY aesthetic (think marker pens, reversed-out type and aerosol stripes), Mark Swan’s superb design really channels the book’s energy. No two spreads look the same. The collage-y layout also reflects the fact that there’s a lot more culture here than in your typical horticulture book, with aphorisms, comic strips, street art and essays jostling with interviews, practical instructions and landscape photography. Hell, there’s even a playlist on the penultimate page. Isn’t this precisely the kind of dynamic manifesto that might have appealed to Steve and Jon’s younger, disaffected selves?
For all its punk exuberance, Wild City has a serious argument to make: that reviving neglected places can restore something in the people who inhabit them. Fukuoka’s proposition that the healing of land and spirit are the same process is perhaps a little too neat. But Markfield Park and the other projects highlighted here offer intriguing glimpses of what it might mean in practice. The landscape has not been sanitised or separated from the life of the neighbourhood; it has become a place where children, plants, fungi, fruit trees, newts and people can all, in their different ways, make themselves at home. Nature isn’t something precious that has to be protected from urban life, but something that can take root in the cracks of it – and perhaps in us too.
Wild City: Punk Horticulture for a Connected Urban Future by Jon Davies and Steve Williams (Duncan Baird)
