Parks and Greenery

Mar 132014
 
Magnesium Burns

by Gary Budden
The fourth and final image is simpler, easier to interpret. It gives Andrew more hope than the previous pictures. A solitary young girl clutching a balloon with the spriggan’s face its decoration stands smiling with genuine joy. In the background, the Olympic Park is consumed by hungry flames as tattooed looters ransack a shopping centre. [read more…]

Jan 232014
 
London's Campest Statues No.15

Yuri Gagarin, Greenwich Observatory by Matt Haynes
When, at 06:07 on the morning of 12th April 1961, Lieutenant Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin of the Soviet Air Force strapped himself into the capsule of Vostok 1 as it waited on the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and uttered the words “Let’s go!”, thus inaugurating the history of manned space flight, it always seemed likely that, should he return safely, he would be fêted around the world. [read more…]

Nov 252013
 
The Peckham Panama

by Matt Haynes
In the grass are, unmistakably, the ghosts of abandoned roads: cracked tarmac and kerbstones, carless and homeless, fading to brown and green. And here’s the thing: if you look in an old A-Z – one from the sixties, say – Burgess Park isn’t there. But those spectral streets are; and they have names, and purpose, and they’re drawn in hard black ink. There’s also a line of turquoise, running dead straight between them. [read more…]

Nov 032013
 
The Ghost of Tooting Bec Common

by Kevin Acott
Normans from Bec ended up in Streatham, as everyone does, and settled on Tooting Common, building a swimming pool but running out of money before they could get the roof done. Eventually, they integrated with a local tribe of fearsome, though eternally disappointed, warriors known as Palisfans and, to all intents and purposes, disappeared, leaving behind only the name of the place and the infamous South West London shoulder shrug. [read more…]

Nov 012013
 

As the one o’clock mums race their prams round Wandsworth Park, she suddenly falters, breathless, and – staring down at Archie’s gurgling face – thinks bleakly of sports days to come.

Oct 212013
 
A History of Fennel in Wimbledon

by Mark Sadler
If Father Hendlam were alive today he would grab Martin Young vigorously by the shoulders and shake him from his stupor, not in anger, but in a kind of evangelical fervour. He would drag him before a mural in the nave at St Mary’s that depicts a cross-section of a London fennel bulb, and point out a small section in the labyrinth named “the alleyway of lust”. “Do you SEE that, boy?” he would bellow. “There’s where you are.” [read more…]

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