On the fringes, where town and country meet, the scrublands, populated by semi-industrial works or forgotten agricultural sheds, unexpected beauty often emerges. In his 1973 book The Unofficial Countryside, soon to be republished, Richard Mabey 'explains how 13,000 tons of canary grass seed, fodder for caged birds, comes into Britain every year, and is recycled into landfill sites, to leach into the water table, to drift down embankments and sewage-outfall tracks; bringing life and colour to the uniform greys of spurned and disregarded places.'
I am quoting Iain Sinclair, reviewing Mabey's masterpiece in The Guardian last week. Sinclair has written the foreword for the new edition and wonders – like me – how he ever 'miss[ed], first time around, [a] book that linked, at a single stroke, burgeoning bureaucracy and the threatened pastoral of whatever lay beyond the city's horizon? Richard Mabey identified so neatly the transitional quality of unwritten places where slightly bemused survivors of the 60s, pocketing their battered copies of Food for Free, found themselves labouring at the dawn of a harsher era.' Sinclair observes that
The Unofficial Countryside is a proper reckoning, the Doomsday Book of a topography too fascinating to be left alone. Gravel beds, abandoned by film studios, were blissfully repossessed by passerine birds and opportunist plants. Mabey logs the tough fecundity of the margin, where wild nature spurns the advertised reservation and obliterates the laminated notice-boards of sanctioned history. Human tragedies of our paranoid cultures, raids and terrorist outrages, as Mabey points out, are nature's opportunity. "The first summer after the blitz there were rosebays flowering on over three-quarters of the bombed sites in London, defiant sparks of life amongst the desolation."
I'm honoured by a mention in Sinclair's article: 'A Liverpool clergyman, John Davies, took a sabbatical to hike down the acoustic footprints of the M62, from Hull to Crosby beach.' Honoured by this association with John Clare, WG Sebald, Ronald Blythe, Roger Deakin, Will Self, Nick Papadimitriou. Each connected by a 'trajectory, soul-sickness, walking in nature, swimming, planting, observing … Sickness was not always the launching point, unless it was the sickness in nature, in our broken treaty with living things.'
