The Wood that Built London by C. J. Schüler

Author:C. J. Schüler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781913207502
Publisher: Sandstone Press Ltd
Published: 2021-08-23T00:00:00+00:00

Wren and long-tailed tit, from W. Aldridge, Wild Birds of Norwood, Upper Norwood, 1885.

In 1882, W. Aldridge, a local cabinet maker and upholsterer with premises on Westow Street28 and a keen amateur ornithologist (he judged the stuffed-bird category at the Crystal Palace Bird Show in 1887), published a series of articles on the birds of the area in the Norwood Review; in 1885, they were collected in a small book, A Gossip on the Wild Birds of Norwood and Crystal Palace District, illustrated with charming engravings. His book reveals this Norwood tradesman to have been a keen pipe-smoker, angler, painter and amateur taxidermist, well travelled – he had visited Paris, Holland, Switzerland, Norway and Prussia – well read, and a believer in a benign Creator; he quotes approvingly Izaak Walton’s remark on birdsong: ‘Lord, what psalmody hast Thou provided for Thy saints in heaven when Thou affordest bad men such music on earth?’

In all, he listed fifty-one bird species, which he considered ‘a very respectable quantity for a suburb of London within a few miles of St Paul’s’. The only raptors he reported were the ‘much persecuted’ kestrels, occasionally sighted hovering on the air currents between Westow Street and Beulah Spa, and on South Norwood Hill. One evening, smoking his pipe in a friend’s garden on Belvedere Road, he saw a barn owl glide silently over the ground. He also reported rooks and jackdaws in the taller trees from Dulwich to Beulah Hill; green woodpeckers in Sydenham Hill Wood; nightingales nesting in Sydenham Woods and at Elmer’s End; cuckoos, goldfinches and bullfinches in Grange Wood; redwings and fieldfares in winter between Central Hill and Beulah Spa; and skylarks in the open fields that still existed on either side of Wells Road between Sydenham Hill and Sydenham town. ‘The oldest inhabitant,’ he reported, recalled that thirty years previously there was ‘a small Heronry in the old Norwood woods’, the nests ‘as large as bushes, at the tops of trees’.

Aldridge took a melancholy view of the future of bird life in the area. ‘In a few (very few) years,’ he wrote, ‘when, by the increase of population, Norwood will be a part of London, undivided by fields and hedges, most of the birds will have retired beyond our district, and be as extinct in Norwood as the Ichthyosaurus and Plesiosaurus – nay, more so, for these monsters, or, rather, their restored figures may still remain in the Palace grounds . . .’

He was perhaps too pessimistic, underestimating the capacity of many species to adapt to urban conditions. While it is true that nightingales and skylarks have long since disappeared from the suburbs of South East London, the swifts and swallows, thrushes, finches and tits have held out, while other species, absent in his day, have reappeared. In addition to kestrels, buzzards and sparrowhawks patrol the skies over Sydenham Hill Wood; magpies, made scarce in Victorian times by persecution from gamekeepers, staged a recovery in post-war years and are now ubiquitous; the green

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