Old Hornbeam coppice, Highgate Wood – this is one tree, the ‘trunks’ growing from a now buried stump
Hornbeam, Carpinus betulus, also known as iron wood, or yoke elm because the wood is so hard it can’t be worked easily. It was mainly used for ox yokes, cogs and cartwheels. The grown-out coppice stools like this one in Highgate wood would also have been used for firewood or charcoal, as it burns slowly and brightly ‘like a candle’. It was used for the tall, dense hedges of the original maze in Hampton Court, although these have since been replaced.
The poet John Clare was fond of hornbeam, which is one of the principal trees in Epping Forest, where he spent four years in the High Beach asylum, from 1837-1841, suffering from severe depression. He was allowed considerable freedom to walk in the forest and, indeed, in July 1841 walked out of the asylum and followed the Great York Road until he reached his home in Northborough, 80 miles away, four days later. That year, while at High Beach, he wrote Child Harold, mentioning the hornbeam:
How beautiful this hill of fern swells on. So beautiful the chapel peeps between The hornbeams with its simple bell – alone I wander here, hid in a palace green.
Seeing the hornbeams, I was reminded of a three-trunked hornbeam in the Bois de Vincennes, just east of Paris, in whose shade for seven years, every Saturday morning, I learned tai chi with my friend and teacher Li Gui Sheng and fellow student and friend Claude.
Every Saturday that is, until, in a few hours after midnight on 26 December 1999, a hurricane blew down the forest. Miraculously ‘our’ tree was spared, though it took us several hours to find it amid the tangled mess of fallen trunks. About a year later we cleared a space beneath the tree again, now sporting a mass of side shoots from its trunk in an all-out fight for survival. But it wasn’t the same. The squirrels had gone, replaced by pheasants, now the forest was more like heathland or scrub. And the dog walker who had shouted after “Whisky” and “Frisky”, as we fought invisible opponents in slow motion, had found another route.
In a documentary on BBC2, celebrated war photographer, Don McCullin, discusses some of the harrowing images of war and man’s inhumanity to man that still haunt him. He has turned to landscape photography as a way of forgetting.
I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to eradicate [these harrowing memories]. I’m just going to photograph landscape. The English landscape is my heaven. But the one thing that upsets me about it is that there’s always a threat surrounding the things you love. When I hear a chainsaw in the distance, I think a tree is dying. When there’s pheasant shooting I think there’s going to be some blood somewhere. The gunfire immediately switches on another part of my nervous system. I feel that as much as you try to run away from these things, someone always presses a button and says ‘here’s a reminder of what you used to do.’
Towards an Iron Age hill fort, Somerset, 1991. Don McCullin
On a walk around Kenwood this morning, the repeated notes of a song thrush were, for once, the first I heard, rather than the squawking of ring-necked parakeets that has started to dominate the birdsong in the woods around here. The ribald laughter of a green woodpecker interrupted the caws of carrion crows and descending song of a chaffinch. Familiar sounds that seem at home here among the old oaks and beech trees. But there are human parakeets today, dressed in fluorescent lycra, sweating as they jog or wade like space-age shepherdesses among flocks of spaniels, poodles and grinning labradors.
Far off sounds of an aeroplane, an ambulance siren. By a pond, what I think is a fisherman under a large green umbrella turns out to be a homeless person lying on a sun-lounge, his bald head emerging from a sleeping bag. And in a car park in the Vale of Health, fairground people live in caravans called Monza and Barracuda, next to a jolly painted cart advertising Happy Falafels, in the shadow of bankers’ houses.
Extraordinary documentary on BBC2 last night about Vivian Maier, a nanny living in New York and Chicago who took stunning photos with her Rolleiflex. She never showed them to anyone, never exhibited them, never had any fancy prints made. She stored them in containers in a warehouse – tens of thousands of prints and negatives. They were only discovered when, in old age and without her job, she could no longer pay the rent for the storage space. The contents were sold as job lots to a couple of dealers for a few hundred dollars. They didn’t know what they were buying…
Her website: http://www.vivianmaier.com
The BBC Imagine documentary is on iPlayer this week:
The longest day of the year / summer solstice. There was a slight mist over the lake at Kenwood this morning, more reminiscent of Autumn. And it’s dull, shadowless. The sun is somewhere else today, not in London. Nine years ago on this day I was living in the Perche, a beautiful part of lower Normandy in France. A 15 minute car ride away was a 600 year-old oak tree, with a trunk that was over 4 metres around. I got up very early and stood under the tree waiting for the sun to rise, hearing owls hooting and little rustlings on the ground, realising how vulnerable small creatures like voles and mice are to hunting birds at night. The sky started to fill with light several minutes before the sun finally appeared in the east. It lit up a bead of water hanging from one of the oak leaves, silhouetted against the sky.
Following on from the swift sightings, I realised a few days ago that telegraph poles have almost disappeared from the landscape, at least in London. It was common, when I was growing up (in Buckinghamshire) to see swallows lined up along the telephone wires – a photographic cliche. This pole with its radiating wires, one to each house, now seems like an anachronism.
The Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) at Goldsmiths now has a new blog and kicked off with a little post about my Walking the Dog photographic project, which is also on my Facebook page. You can see the CUCR blog here
Urban photography summer school 2013
Goldsmiths, university of london
Designed for photographers, artists and urbanists whose work address notions of urban space and culture, the international Summer School provides a highly intensive two-week practical and theoretical training in key aspects of urban visual practice. The course aims to offer participants a wide range of relevant skills resulting in the production of a photography portfolio drawn from London’s urban environments, combined with a collective final exhibition.
The programme has been developed in collaboration with Urban Encounters (Tate Britain), the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR), Photofusion and the International Association of Visual Urbanists (iAVU). The course is taught by experienced tutors from Goldsmith’s top-ranked Sociology Department and the international MA in Photography and Urban Cultures. The programme draws on the advanced theoretical, research and practical image-making specialisms of key practitioners in the field.
Summer School tutors include: Paul Halliday (MA in Photography and Urban Cultures Course Leader),Beatriz Véliz Argueta (Coordinator/Goldsmiths), Les Back (Goldsmiths), Caroline Knowles (CUCR Director), Mandy Lee Jandrell (Southampton Solent University/Goldsmiths), Peter Coles (Oxford/ Goldsmiths), Alex Rhys-Taylor (Goldsmiths), Manuel Vazquez (Goldsmiths), Laura Cuch (Goldsmiths) and Jasmine Cheng (Goldsmiths).
The programme will explore how the practice of urban image making informs the development of a reflexive and critical research perspective and will include assignments and guided fieldtrips focusing on(1) urban landscapes, (2) street-based photography and (3) material objects.
On a walk around Kenwood this morning, the repeated notes of a song thrush were, for once, the first I heard, rather than the squawking of ring-necked parakeets that has started to dominate the birdsong in the woods around here. The ribald laughter of a green woodpecker interrupted the caws of carrion crows and descending song of a chaffinch. Familiar sounds that seem at home here among the old oaks and beech trees. But there are human parakeets today, dressed in fluorescent lycra, sweating as they jog or wade like space-age shepherdesses among flocks of spaniels, poodles and grinning labradors.
Peter Coles 