The Urban Jungle

I can understand if most readers will automatically assume that I am making reference to the any number of ills afflicting our inner cities with the title of my post today. They would be completely mistaken.

I am referring to the actual "jungle" of nature and wildlife which survives despite the concrete and the asphalt, the residential, the commercial and even the industrial despoliation of our environment.

London has a 50 odd mile Circle Route which is a walk around and through the city called the Capital Ring. We walked a 5 mile section of it yesterday from Richmond to Osterley.

It was a very strange feeling to leave our house and walk down the hill towards the station and then veer off to a part of town I had never explored walking past a house first "built" by one of William the Conqueror's liege men, lived in by many Kings and died in by Elizabeth the First.

This then spilled us out onto the Thames Tow Path going North along the river, a section I had never walked.

A renovated River Barge chugged past us, 70 feet long and about 7 feet wide, a lone woman at the helm. We were to meet her and her husband many locks and about 4 miles further down river, but I get ahead of myself.

The river Thames is both a tidal estuary and has a natural bottom which explains the muddy nature of the river making it appear even dirtier than it is. To be fair the clean-up projects have been relatively successful in that salmon have been sighted quite far upriver returning to natural spawning grounds.

The path meanders along the river passing cute, not so cute and outright trashy pubs reflecting the various housing offerings ranging from gated communities to council estates which then repeats itself in the river life.

The riverside has a cacophony of houseboats ranging from the long narrow barges already mentioned to much larger conversions of channel barges which are only movable with much time and money.

The river has been a major thoroughfare for over a 1000 years with the last of the cargo barges having given up the ghost in the 60's and 70's.

We veered off the Thames to follow the Grand Canal tow path past the Glaxo-Smith Kline global headquarters which uses canal water to cool their air conditioning unit creating a water feature out of a cooling water outlet.

Around the bend we suddenly found ourselves on a stretch of canal with trees hanging into the water on the far bank and the tow path narrowing to a footpath wide enough for one horse to walk along. Crossing a high narrow bridge, over which said horses would have traversed the canal had a fork with a weir to one side by which the river Brent was directed back onto its natural route.

Brentford is now perhaps famous in our family for the rough nature of the supporters of the Brentford Bees who have yo-yo'd between the 1st and 3rd divisions in the English football leagues and should be our local team.

Aside from football Brentford has been the site of at least three major battles, an the oldest a battle led by Julius Caesar against the local king, Cassivellaunus, in 54 BC during the second invasion of Britain.

More recently there was a pitched battle between the Danes (Vikings) and the English in 1016 and decisively in 1642 the town was sacked by both the Royalists and the Parliamentarians in the Battle of 1642 which the Royalists won.

The sacking, or more specifically the foraging/looting of the town, although devastating for the inhabitants was part and parcel of the continental style of warfare which Oliver Cromwell apparently had learned while fighting in the 30 Year's war and for which the Irish would hold him in contempt for forever and a day following his campaigns there as the Grand Protector.

Rounding another bend we came across a medieval stone church tower with an ugly brick addition, all of which looked as if it had been hit by a bomb. Given that often in England when a building looks like it has been bombed the chances are more likely than not that it was, by the Germans. I have to assume this is one of the reasons that the War is so close to the surface of English culture and that is but one of the ways by which history is "maintained".

In this case my wife groaned and the English smirked only to have their eyes go wide with surprise as I read "...on the night of November 12th, 1943...TWO ENGLISH SCHOOLBOYS SET THE CHURCH ON FIRE"!

We then crossed under the A4, the M4, a railway bridge and then just before the lock at Osterely caught up with the barge we had seen at the start of our journey.

The lone woman had been joined on deck by her husband and were now waiting patiently for the lock-which they had to operate manually-to fill up. We struck up a conversation he watching the water level and she dancing with the tiller. They had been travelling the waterways for the past 3 months this time around and were now returning to Rugby. They were retired however, and had been living on their barge for the last 8 years.

The reason we caught up with them, despite having stopped for pints twice on the walk, was that each lock takes them 15 minutes to transit and they could only go 3 miles an hour in the canal.

Behind them was a second barge on its way to Paddington. They still had 12 locks to pass until they reached their destination, some 8 miles away, and they didn't expect to reach there until late that day!

It suddenly put everything into a different light. That walk had taken us from the pressure and demands of living in London, from the street noise, the cars and trucks, the crowded pavements and relentless motion of a city and dropped us into a parallel universe of coots and moorhens, abandoned wharfs, questionable dry dock marina facilities, and travellers moving at the pace of the canals, which just happens to be the same speed that the average human walks.

Perhaps we are more connected to our natural environment than we think.