You are here: Home : News : Limbo Land
8th Jun, 2007
Urban Wildlife Network President Chris Baines has been reflecting on the landscape of his childhood - the Limbo Land of the following article. (This first appeared in Green Places Magazine in 2006.) An interesting perspective in the light of recent stories about the restrictions on roaming the neighburhood which parents place on children today.
When I was seven, my favourite landscape was “the hills and mountains.” This was a scruffy patch of fly-tipped land between my home and school where I built dens, found hidden treasure, gathered blackberries and garden-escaped raspberries and sought out nests of hedge sparrows and blackbirds. By the time I was ten my “hills and mountains” had become a housing estate.
It is in the nature of our crowded landscape that it changes. In urban and suburban areas a patch of ground may be transformed from buildings to a pile of rubble in an afternoon - may then lie idle for a month, a year, even a decade or two - and then resume respectable use as a new built development. These limbo landscapes are important and we need to take them much more seriously.
As a seven year old I had no difficulty recognising the special qualities of my own interim landscape, and nature responds in much the same way. After a single settled spring, disturbed ground may yield colourful poppies from long-dormant buried seeds. One summer is usually long enough to capture windborne seeds of pioneer species such as groundsel, thistle and goat willow. Within a year the kinds of birds and insects that struggle to survive in farming countryside are likely to appear and such interim landscapes have become the salvation of species such as goldfinches and burnet moths. They thrive in landscapes that are bouncing back.
There are a few celebrated urban landscapes that remained in limbo long enough to grow into protected treasures. Birch woodlands have naturally colonised many of Dr Beeching’s redundant railway shunting yards, to the delight of willow warblers and infant warriors alike. Impoverished grassland has carpeted other interim landscapes, and now there are skylarks nesting in a host of post-industrial pastures-new. Land settlement and leaking waterways have frequently combined to form new wetland habitats that support rare birds, insects and amphibians – roosting swallows on migration, great crested newts and diving beetles would all be having an even tougher time without the ponds, reed beds and marshy ground of temporary open space.
Interim landscapes are not all roses. Whilst it is true that management by denial and neglect does sometimes yield spectacular success it can also deliver massive disappointment. These are the landscapes of burned-out cars, unlicensed dumping and parental paranoia (what chance of exploring the hills and mountains as a modern route to school?) So it is not sufficient to rely on casual neglect and happy accidents. There is a need to take the limbo-landscapes seriously and find far better ways to celebrate their special short-life qualities.
The answer is partly ecological - we need to improve our skills in working with dynamic natural processes. We also need to recognise the added value that can come from gentle intervention. Junk -sculptors in residence, school holiday play leadership schemes, itinerant community gardens growing local food-crops, archaeological digs, seasonal ponds as flash flood water storage, tethered pony grazing, green-waste composting: there are plenty of possibilities for positive short-term use. Our temporarily vacant brownfield land is already highly valued in the world of casual play and nature conservation. It could contribute so much more to quality of life in urban areas.
