Wild London by Sam Hodges

Author:Sam Hodges [Hodges, Sam and Sophie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473548275
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2019-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

JOYDEN’S WOOD

Joyden’s Wood is like a potted history from the Iron Age to the modern day, by way of medieval caves and Second World War memories.

The success of plots like Joyden’s Wood relies on the careful planting strategies that are the result of evolving attitudes towards forestry. Following the near-disastrous shortage of timber the UK faced during the First World War, the Forestry Commission was set up in 1919. The primary focus of the huge increase in afforestation was a commercial one – the building of a timber reserve and the rate of return on capital investment was the goal, and growing large quantities of timber in short rotations was the approach. In the 1950s, there was widespread planting of non-native conifers, which created monotonous forests across the country. In the case of Joyden’s Wood, it was only once the plot was placed under the management of the Woodland Trust that environmental concerns came to the fore. The conifer trees were felled in favour of native deciduous species such as oak, beech, silver birch and sweet chestnut. These sparser treetops opened up the forest floor to the sky and sun, creating the right environment for bluebells, lily of the valley, honeysuckle and wood sage.

The wood itself is scarred from north to south by Faesten Dic (pronounced ‘Festen Ditch’), meaning ‘strong dyke’; it is a mile-long Saxon defensive structure built around AD 457 to keep out the marauding Romano-British Londoners. In its heyday, the v-shaped ditch would have been up to 8 metres wide, but nowadays it is only a much gentler, leaf-filled impression of its more impressive past.

Two ponds within the woods are particularly good for newts: the smooth newt, the palmate newt and the rare great crested newt. This was the species at the heart of the EU habitats directive which set former chancellor George Osborne and building developers against conservationists in the build-up to the Brexit referendum. Stanley Johnson (Boris’s dad), who was instrumental in setting up the directive said, ‘The Spanish have the lynx, the Romanians and Slovenians have wolves, elsewhere in Europe there are bears. I think we should be proud of our great crested newt.’

The wood is full of surprises – including a sculpture of the tail and fuselage of a crashed Hawker Hurricane by a local chainsaw sculptor, to commemorate two Hurricanes shot down over the woods in 1940, and the remains of a medieval dwelling known as the King’s Hollow. But the jewel in the crown is the giant acorn seat, from which intones, on the turn of a handle, a poem that seeks to be the voice of the woodland.

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