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Soundwalk



 This year we repeated the Soundwalk that we undertook last year and highlighted the changes. Well for a start there was no Lucy, although we were able to play recordings of her reading her poetry, secondly we were limited to six participants. Here is an account of last years walk.


Soundwalk on the Cambridge Road Estate by Alison Whybrow 2019

I love the walks that Alison organises, I discover so much about the place I live. This one didn’t disappoint. About 20 of us assembled outside the cemetery gates wrapped up and ready to go, some from across London, mostly local. It was going to be a chilly evening. We took time to listen to the birds, Jackdaws, making a racket in a tree next to us, and notice the connections and avenues that the trees created both on and off the estate. The older the tree, the richer the biodiversity that it houses.

Walking with Alison is a different way to experience place. A deeper more personal way, seeing things I wouldn’t see and sharing knowledge that google wouldn’t know how to provide. With recorded snippets of sounds and stories of her own life there, Alison introduced us to the people, the place, and the wildlife. The community hall where Save the world Club rescues perfectly good food destined for landfill and stocks the fridges for a community of refugees. A robin singing determinedly over the sounds of the summer strimmers, short clips of people who lived and worked on the estate. Walks with Alison often include Lucy Furlong, who read her own and others poetry as we reached particular trees. 

The depth of community, the history, the love for the place and its ecology was gently and humorously shared. Is it a ginnel, a jitty, a snicket, no – an entirely different name applies down here. The relationships between the estate, it’s surrounding area and the way it is used by travelling and resident species of birds and small mammals mirrors the relationships of the human populations who similarly are both resident and travelling through. The trees are magnificent. I learned a lot. Finishing off with a bat detector, listening to the social calls of the common pipistrelle and the soprano pipistrelle up by the cemetery gates offered another new landscape. It was time to go home before we froze.

Another reason for wanting to join the walk was that this place may not be here in the near future. A proposed total footprint development that would raze the entire estate to the ground to provide a new housing development, it would remove the habitats for protected species and destroy the biodiversity. It would raze at least 197 mature trees to the ground. Trees that are as familiar to those on the estate as are their neighbours. Trees that provide corridors, shelter and food for wildlife. In the face of a global climate and ecological emergency and a social housing crisis, there are a four practical points:

· This development will not address the housing crisis. Of the mass selloff of public lands that the government has undertaken since 2011, only 6% are available for social rent with up to 1 in 4 deemed affordable, reports Hanna Wheatley of the NEF. The plans for the CRE development are similarly aligned with the provision of social and affordable rents a key aim. It’s not immediately clear what the targets are for social and affordable housing.

· This development will not deliver the Net Gain goals of government to leave biodiversity in a better state than before. There will be cumulative impacts of the development on insects, birds, bats and ultimately, biodiversity extinction.

· Demolition, according to Struan Dudman, releases ten time the embodied carbon from the building compared to the amount released on refurbishment.

· Giving a social perspective, eco-anxiety is now a ‘thing’ and the importance of contact nature to our growth, health and well-being recognised. Loneliness is on the rise. A total footprint development means not only the wildlife and nature is removed, it means the connectivity between people, between neighbours across the estate goes too.

If we took a regenerative design approach to the CRE development, where nature was put at the heart of every decision and our current crisis was fully recognised, what would happen? Interestingly, there are policies and strategies and goals in the councils framework that would take us a little way towards that, but they are simply not being regarded. It’s at this point that Margaret Heffernan’s concept of wilful blindness rushes sadly into view.

If you’ve made it this far well done the reward is the sound of Sparrows of Willingham Way


House Sparrows
There are at least ten breeding bird species on the Cambridge Road Estate.This includes a colony of house sparrows- a bird that appears on the JNCC red list of conservation concern or can be deemed endangered. There are more than 25 pairs of house sparrow breeding in features associated with the semi-detached houses (dropped hanging tiles, broken soffits and gaps behind rainwater goods, and a permeable roofline) with this years brood numbers have reached 140-150 individual birds.

​

Developers ecologists sometimes think they can assist, by replacing the features that the birds are dependent on with sparrow terrace boxes. This doesn't understand the communal nature of the bird, the requirement for safe places to breed, squabble and dust bathe. There if further requirement for ease of communication with other house sparrow colonies (to prevent breeding with brothers and sisters) and a healthy functioning environment full of insects and seeds (even seed eating birds require insects to feed their young).


There are 100's of bushes and plants important for nature  on the Cambridge Road estate and the wider environment. Berries are important for birds especially members of  the thrush family in winter. Fungi are the recyclers and important for channelling nutrients to where they are needed. The fruiting bodies are used by fungus gnats in the autumn and produce a late rise of flies for the bats, which have been found around the estate. These pictures were painted by Sim during October and November 2018


 

Hi, I'm Damon Hart-Davis.

I was asked to describe 'Something about your sustainable home' (for the SOUNDWALK) Something about the nature visiting the garden and how you feel about your neighbourhood'. Anything at all in fact.

Our house is in its 50s like me. It's timber-framed with a concrete-tile roof, end-terrace with hanging tiles on the side walls, and has a small garden front and back. It is on the Cambridge Road Estate in Kingston-upon-Thames, very close to a cemetery and the Hogsmill river. And not so far away from us, though usually downwind, is the local sewage works!

I have for one reason or another in the past run quite a few computers. I ran an early Internet Service Provider from home. It was pointed out to me that I was probably wasting a lot of energy with them — I was having to run air-con in summer to keep them cool! I took that as an energy-efficiency challenge to do more with less. My Earth Notes Web site at Earth.Org.UK is one outcome. A house that uses less than half of the electricity and gas of those around it is another. Indeed, the house is about net-zero-carbon for those two, given the solar panels on the roof.

We have small gardens, front and back. Both have lawns, but somehow in the back garden we also manage to squeeze [in] herbs, pumpkins, blueberries, beans, tomatoes, and some of radish, rhubarb, peppers, carrots, cucumbers, and courgettes. Never mind lots of flowers and some trees! Our apple tree struggled with the heat and lack of rain last year and dropped all its fruit early, but this year I'm hopeful that we may end up with something to taste. The pumpkins try to take over the garden, and they finish up in autumn and the nasturtium then tries to out-do them!

The variety of birds we get is astonishing. From pigeons (wood and feral) and magpies, to more exotic green and spotted woodpeckers and jays. Parakeets swarm up to seven or eight at a time on our feeders, hanging from our washing lines, coming from nearby Richmond Park and the cemetery I think. We also get hordes of smaller birds: robins, blue tits, coal tits, great tits, goldfinches, and more rarely chaffinches, greenfinches, dunnocks and wrens. Noisily, sparrows are swarming and squawking again recently in a way I don't remember since I was a child. Occasionally, starlings murmurate overhead!

There also seems to be a thriving bat population, and at dusk you can see them whooshing past just above head height it seems.

In the cemetery I think that crows are still probably top of the pile, though the parakeets may be muscling in. And some of the loudest sounds are from the squirrels by day! At night the foxes bark and squeal and whine, and make other noises that I don't have words for.

We also have had excitements, such as boys apparently lighting a fire behind our back wall and setting fire to our ornamental tree, and things that maybe I shouldn't air publicly!

Our house stands out a bit with the solar panels on top, and at least one nearby house has followed suit. Our walls are lined with the same stuff that the Space Shuttle used to survive the heat of re-entry, called aerogel, to keep us warmer in winter and cooler in summer. The triple glazing helps too, and helps keep out noise. We have a warm and efficient home, with rather more nature on our doorstep than I'd realised. I hope that our energy saving is also nature saving, taking a little heat out of climate change.

Listen to the rest of Damon's experience on his website here http://www.earth.org.uk/about-16WW.html

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