Writing the Woods by C. J. Schüler

A few years ago, I took a book called The Great North Wood: With a Geological, Topographical and Historical Description of Upper, West and South Norwood out of the London Library. Written by John Corbet Anderson, it was published by private subscription in 1898 and is, I believe, quite rare.  Its subject is the wood that once stretched across what is now South London from Deptford to Selhurst, and was the haunt of smugglers, gypsies and charcoal burners – hence place names such as Colliers Wood. Most of it had already been cleared in Anderson’s day, first for farming and then for building development, although he was able to talk to elderly locals who remembered the area before it was swallowed by the expanding suburbs. A few patches of this ancient woodland survive in Norwood, and at Dulwich and Sydenham Hill Woods, where I have volunteered with the London Wildlife Trust for almost a decade – hence my interest.

Travelling home on the Orpington line from Victoria, I read how, on the 11th of August 1668, Samuel Pepys and his wife came to have their fortunes read by the gypsies, and Daniel Defoe’s grim account of the plague of 1665, when ‘several that wandred into the country on Surry side were found starv’d to death in the woods, that country being more open and more woody than any other part so near London, especially about Norwood and the parishes of Camberwell, Dullege and Lusume.’

I was so engrossed that I missed my stop at Herne Hill. West Dulwich sped past, and Sydenham Hill, and I realised I was on a fast train, which only stopped when we got to Bromley South. I got out there, crossed over to the other platform and, as it grew dark, took the slow, stopping train back to Herne Hill. Resuming my reading, I noticed, under the brand new London Library bookplate, another that read ‘Presented to the London Library by Bromley Public Libraries 2012’.

I was the first reader to have borrowed the book since then. Did it have some kind of homing instinct, I wondered, luring me into taking it back to Bromley? Unknown to me, it would launch me on another unexpected adventure. Despite the 120 years that had elapsed since its publication, no other full-length history of the woods had been written. Clearly the time was ripe for a new one that would take advantage of the technological resources now available to researchers, and bring the story up to date, culminating in the London Wildlife Trust’s National Lottery-funded Great North Wood Living Landscape Project, which ran from 2017 to 2021 with the aim of conserving and enhancing the remaining fragments of the wood. Having travelled 2500 kilometres through Eastern and Central Europe for my previous book, Along the Amber Route, I now found myself writing about a place I could see from our back garden.

As I began to research the subject, I found a handful of other Victorian books on the area: Allan Galer’s Norwood and Dulwich Past and Present (1890), and the charmingly illustrated A Gossip on the Wild Birds of Norwood and Crystal Palace District (1885) by a local cabinet maker and upholsterer called W. Aldridge. I also discovered, slightly embarrassingly, that the name ‘Great North Wood’ only became popular in late Victorian times, and may even have been invented by Anderson himself. Old maps and written accounts invariably give the name as simply the North Wood, or Norwood.

Over the centuries, the proximity of this sylvan landscape to London attracted writers and artists, including Pepys, Byron, Robert Browning, Samuel Palmer and John Ruskin. Browning, who grew up in Camberwell, used to go for long walks in the woods by night. His biographer William Sharp records that the young poet composed parts of his early plays ‘Paracelsus’ and ‘Strafford’ ‘in these midnight silences of the Dulwich woodland’. In his memoir Praeterita, Ruskin, who lived on Denmark Hill, recalled the area as it was when, in his youth, he surveyed it from Herne Hill: ‘East and south, the Norwood hills, partly rough with furze, partly wooded with birch and oak, partly in pure green bramble copse, and rather steep pasture, rose with the promise of all the rustic loveliness of Surrey and Kent.’

The fame of these woods was not confined to England. In 1871, the French Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, while living over a dairy in Norwood to escape the Franco-Prussian War, painted the view towards Lordship Lane station from the footbridge that crossed the railway in Sydenham Hill Wood, and the newly built St Stephen’s church on College Road, with the wood on the left of the canvas.  A quarter of a century later, the novelist Emile Zola, who had fled to Britain in 1898 to escape imprisonment for seditious libel for his defence of Alfred Dreyfus, settled in the Queen’s Hotel in Norwood. A keen photographer, he sent for his camera and darkroom equipment and set about recording the life of the suburb, with the great bulk of the Crystal Palace looming over it all. Several of his photographs include parts of the North Wood: he captured the view up Wharncliffe Road as it ran through White Horse Wood from the junction with Grange Road; photographed his wife Alexandrine at the bottom of Hermitage Road, by one of the surviving oaks of Great Stakepit Coppice; and recorded the view up College Road, with Low Cross Wood on the left and St Stephen’s Church on the right, where Camille Pissarro had stood twenty-eight years earlier. The scene had changed little then, and has still changed little today.

A description of the woods even reached Marcel Proust, who never set foot in England, in his parents’ house in rue de Courcelles, Paris. A great admirer of Ruskin, he translated The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies, and claimed to know Praeterita, with its nostalgic description of these wooded hills, by heart. Who knows if Ruskin’s evocation of a lost rural idyll in Norwood did not seep into Proust’s lyrical evocation of the country lanes around Combray?

For much of the 20th century, little seems to have been written about the woods apart from a handful of botanical and zoological papers in the London Naturalist. From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, however, J. K. Adams, the editor of Country Life and a Dulwich resident, was a regular contributor to the Guardian’s Country Diary. Between dispatches from such large, unspoiled landscapes as the South Downs and the Yorkshire Dales, he also reported on the smaller, semi-secret wilderness on his doorstep.  On 23 April 1961, he noted that: ‘The resident willow-wrens have arrived and this morning there were several singing on the outskirts of Dulwich Wood. In a shrubbery near one of them a blackcap was trying out its song, and some way inside the wood chiffchaffs were repeating their names with monotonous regularity from their favourite station: the tops of the oaks.’

Between the 1960s and 1980s, Sydenham Hill Wood came under repeated threat from development. This gave rise to a vociferous and ultimately successful campaign to save this rare fragment of ancient woodland so near to central London, and to the establishment of the London Wildlife Trust’s first nature reserve here in 1982. The protests and public inquiries generated widespread coverage in the national press and on TV, and even questions in the House of Commons. A Friends of the Great North Wood group was formed, and in 1987 the London Wildlife Trust published the local campaigner Lucy Neville’s booklet The Great North Wood, which packed a great deal of well-researched historical information into 32 pages, along with a map showing its former and present extent.

The Great North Wood was, both literally and figuratively, on the map once again. In Gossip from the Forest (2012), Sara Maitland paired accounts of her walks through woods around Britain in the course of a year with her own retellings of twelve classic fairytales by the Brothers Grimm. A chapter on ‘The Great North Wood’ takes her up Cox’s Walk – ‘an avenue of big oak trees, like a country house drive’ – into Sydenham Hill Wood and along the disused railway trackbed to the Peckarmans Wood estate. From there, she passes through ‘a little secret gateway’ in the hedge into Dulwich Woods: ‘For me,’ she writes, ‘this vanishing path through places where ancient woodland and human habitation meet – a ruined past and a lively present – felt like a potent and moving image of fairy stories themselves.’

The novelist and nature writer Melissa Harrison, then living in south London, was familiar with these woods. ‘One of the last remaining fragments of the ancient Great North Wood is turning golden,’ she wrote in her Nature Notebook in The Times for 29 October 2016 – subsequently collected in her anthology The Stubborn Light of Things – as ‘bats come together to hibernate in a disused railway tunnel deep in the woods.’ Over in the Guardian in March 2021, the writer, conductor and local resident Lev Parikian, author of Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? and Into the Tangled Bank, said goodbye to the last redwings of the winter as they departed on their migratory journey to Scandinavia from Norwood Cemetery.

The woods have continued to nurture and inspire a new generation of nature writers. The author and illustrator Tiffany Francis-Baker volunteered at Sydenham Hill Wood from 2014 to 2015 before moving to Hampshire. ‘I feel so lucky to have volunteered in the woods,’ she says. ‘I had just moved to London and was looking to get to know some of the city's green spaces. I had also just discovered the new wave of nature writing while studying for my Masters in English, and the two came together very organically. Not only did my time volunteering allow me to relax and contribute to the protection of the woods, it fuelled my creative work and kick-started what would become a full-time career in nature writing and illustration. It really helped me rediscover my love for nature and forge a creative path for myself.’

Tiffany’s first book, Food You Can Forage, was published in March 2018 by Bloomsbury, followed in 2019 by Dark Skies: A Journey into the Wild Night. She has also written, edited and illustrated for publications including The Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, Countryfile and BBC Wildlife, and in 2019 was chosen as a Writer in Residence for Forestry England.

For the past 17 years, Amanda Tuke has lived with her family on the edge of Sydenham Hill Wood Nature Reserve, a remnant of the Great North Wood that provides ‘endless inspiration’ for her writing. In May 2020, she ditched a stressful day job to become a freelance nature-writer. She set up the blog Freelance Nature Writer which has since attracted contributions from established nature writers such as Paul Wood, Amy-Jane Beer and Mark Avery. Her first article was published two months later, and was followed by commissions for Bird Watching magazine, The Pilgrim and the British Ecological Society’s journal The Niche.

Writing articles, as Amanda soon discovered, is not particularly lucrative in itself, so she applied, successfully, for Arts Council funding to be a Great North Wood Writer in Residence for the London Wildlife Trust. In addition to working on a book, the residency involved running online nature-writing workshops with the Trust’s Great North Wood project officer and writer Chantelle Lindsay. The first of these, focused on the theme ‘The Nature of Light’, was delivered online via Zoom in June 2021, and attracted 34 participants from as far afield as Australia and Pakistan. Further workshops are planned for August, October, December and February.

Daniel Harwood began volunteering at Sydenham Hill Wood after moving to London from the Isle of Wight six years ago. ‘Where I used to live I could hear the sea from my front door, and in three minutes’ stroll be in the midst of gorsy downland bejewelled with flowers and butterflies. In the city you need to look harder and look more closely to find the non-human world.’

During lockdown, however, volunteering was suspended and the woods became very busy as people sought outdoor spaces to meet and exercise. ‘If you stopped to peer at a flower,’ Daniel recalls, ‘you’d get pushed off the path by a herd of Labradors. It saddened me too to see the undergrowth trampled by so many visitors.’ Instead, he discovered the Horniman Museum Nature Trail in Forest Hill, a former railway track lined with mixed woodland, a small pond and a meadow, just five minutes’ walk from his home.

 ‘I decided to make this my lockdown walk, and visited it three or four times a week with my daughter. If you went early on a spring weekday, it was so quiet; a blackcap was singing and speckled woods dancing. We made ourselves a little project to identify everything we could see without going off the path and without killing, picking, or trapping anything. We took blurred photos on our phones and, with a mug of coffee, pored over our books and the websites, identifying wasps, mining bees, umbellifers and heliotropes.’

Daniel then asked the Horniman if they’d be interested in their findings, and began to submit a monthly report. This developed into a regular blog for the museum’s website, in which their seasonal observations are related with a leavening of gentle humour. In May 2021, Daniel gave an online talk on the project for the Urban Tree Festival, and he is now working on a more detailed account of their year on the trail.

All these writers bear witness to the fact that nature exists not just ‘out there’ in National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, but in the midst of our cities, in the interstices of our busy urban lives. Like Ruskin before them, who brought lichen and fungi from these woods for students to draw in his art classes at the Working Men’s College in Red Lion Square in London, they understand that nature is all around us, and that even the smallest, often overlooked organisms can be a source of wonder.

‘What I am trying to do,’ says Daniel Harwood, ‘is to encourage all the people who have enjoyed getting out in the fresh air in the last year to take the next step; get a hand lens, and look and listen more closely to our non-human neighbours. Because by getting to know living things we develop compassion and love for them. And if we love something we will look after it, support it and fight those who want to destroy it.’

C. J. Schüler’s The Wood That Built London will be published by Sandstone Press in October 2021.