'London Subterranea' 2012 by Stephen Walter [psychogeographic map]

Strange Shack Appears in Wildcorner - SE12

 I recently went though a shoe box full of old camcorder tapes, which i thought were lost. To my absolute joy I found this grainy footage, which i thought I had taped over a while back [and berated myself many times for doing so.]
It features a mysterious looking shack, which appeared sometime in the early Summer of 2010.
It looks like it is made from a jumble of found materials and stands alone in a large sealed off piece of wasteland [a Wildcorner] on Barring Road, SE12, in the London borough of Lewisham.
What was it for? Who had made it?
 The materials possibly could have all been salvaged from within the corner.
You can see a longish narrow window facing across the wasteland and a small door at the back. A shelter made by a vagrant perhaps? Or maybe some kind of 'viewing hut' for observing the wild nature in the Corner?
 The reason the footage is so special to me is that I suspect this to be the work of the infamous city explorer Solomon Wild. The shack serving as a base to work in, while studying the corners wildlife and graff.
I used to travel past regularly on the 261 bus, who's top deck overlooks the site and I was sure I'd never seen it there before. I filmed it with my old camcorder on three separate passes of the bus.
 The shack stayed there for the rest of the Summer until one day in mid Autumn, I saw from the bus, that the shacks roof and two of its side panels were twisted and broken.
My guess is that it was caused by unusually high winds that swept through the city a few weeks previous. Over the next few months i watched it slowly deteriorate, becoming again part of the wildcorner it was possibly built from.
It looked like whoever lived in or used it, had long gone. This leads me to think the shack was only intended to be a temporary base, to use just for the Summer.
I wish now that I had got inside the corner somehow, to inspect the wreckage.

From the Ashes - LNM - Kidbrooke SE3

Last Friday, I was joined by my friend Sam on a walk along the quaggy's banks. As it passes through Kidbrooke's South Western corner, we saw something that intrigued us. 

 The old Willow Country Club, that now stands in ruin after a fire that savaged the building years ago.  I remembered I had been there once before, at my Schools 'end of A-levels' party back in the late 90's. I had pretty much forgot it was there.

 We stuck to the edge of Weigall Road sports ground, as we followed the river through the fence. We found a point where the fence disappears into the ground and the river is thin enough to jump over. This spot is known to some local people who use it as a cut-though from a nearby estate.

 On the other side we climbed up through the trees and came out at the far end of the clubs old playing field, now virtually marshland.  

The building looked quite foreboding standing facing us across its grounds. Its burnt out shell was covered in layers of graff and years of weathering.

 As we approached, I tried to read some of the lettering at the front and then something caught my eye through one of the gutted out windows on the ground floor. 

Something white. 

We stayed calm and carefully negotiated the bog infront of us with our heads down. When I next looked up i was near enough to see, and my heart leaped. I could see it was him.

Many types of urban weeds thrive in places where fires have destroyed man made habitats;

Rose Bay Willow Herb was carried on the breeze down the railway lines into London and settled in bomb sites and on derelict land, preferring scorched earth.
Another plant that grows well on this type of land is Fireweed, which grows best on soil that is still warm from the remains of burning fires. 

Both of these plants were rarely seen in the city until WW2. The sudden areas of wilderness and burnt land created by the bombings of the Blitz, gave both these plants the perfect conditions for their takeover of the capital.
The Rosebay’s purple bloom became a symbol of hope amongst the devastation, new life growing from the darkness. It is said that by the end of the war almost every bomb site in London was awash with these two bright flowering weeds.

               “Human tragedies of our paranoid cultures, raids

                 and terrorist outrages, are natures opportunity.”

                 (Sinclair (2010)

The Lewisham Naturman Spotted Again in SE14

It has been a little while now since any new appearances of the weed spirit have been seen in the blue borough.

 So it was to my excitement that i found him [or at least his echo] in one of his chosen forms; that of the white stag, also known as 'The Wild Walker'. He can be seen emerging from the scrub and graff in this fenced off wildcorner in New Cross.  

In Celtic legend, the white stag was seen as a messenger from the otherworld and always remained elusive.

 According to old legends, King Arthur was forever in pursuit of a white stag but the creature had the  perennial ability to evade capture. This pursuit of the animal represented mankind's spiritual quest.

 It also signalled that it was the right time for the knights of the kingdom to pursue a quest. 

Lewisham's Arms and the White Stag

When the Metropolitan Borough of Lewisham was created in 1900, a committee was appointed to design a coat of arms. This device [another word for arms], adopted in the following year, included a shield, crest, supporters and motto.

The shield had four quarters. The first quarter had the attributed arms of King Alfred first lord of the manor. The second quarter showed a white on red horse, taken from the former Borough of Deptford’s arms. This is originally taken from Kent's arms. The Lewisham area was part of the County of Kent until 1889. The third quarter showed a buck's head, from the arms of the Earl of Dartmouth lord of the manor of Lewisham in 1901. The fourth quarter featured a bear's head and fesse or horizontal band, from the arms of Lord Northbrook, lord of the manor of Lee in 1901.

The crest was a raven, representing the Ravensbourne River. The supporters were a silver buck sprinkled with red stars and a bear with a gold portcullis on his shoulder. These were also derived from the arms of the Earl of Dartmouth and Lord Northbrook respectively. 

The Latin motto was Salus Populi Suprema Lex, or "the welfare of the people is the highest law" - [a motto common to many English municipalities] is carried on a scroll at the bottom or the arms. 

In 1950, in celebration of the borough’s golden jubilee, a grant was obtained to make a new coat of arms.

The shield was greatly simplified and the supporters [as they are known] were altered to make them unique to the borough. The White stag was kept but the brown bear is replaced with a white horse, which is taken from the second corner of the original shield. Around their necks were placed mural crowns representative of local government, civic dignity and authority. 

The motto at the bottom of the arms was kept on the new coat and continued to be used by the London borough of Lewisham, when borough arms became obsolete. The background colours of green, purple and black allude to Lee Green, Hither (Heather) Green and Blackheath. The two lions' faces each donned with a Saxon crown, as in the old arms of Lewisham, symbolise the royal and Saxon connections both of Lewisham, where King Alfred was the first Lord of the Manor, and Deptford, where the same King fought the Danes. 

The golden ship in the base represents the famous Royal Shipbuilding Yard established in Deptford by King Henry VIII in 1513. 

The reversed pall consisting of wavy bars of blue and silver forms a heraldic map view, representing the meeting point of the rivers Ravensbourne and Quaggy. This was the original settlement point of what is now Lewisham [and Lewisham Rail and Bus Station, and where The Lewisham Natureman was once seen drinking.] The river then flows north toward the River Thames. 

The two green dolphins represent the close association of the Borough with things nautical and refer also to the dolphins, which were the supporters of the unofficial arms formally used by Deptford. The silver wings and golden mullet are from the arms of Lord Northbrook, Lord of the Manor of Lee. 

These arms became obsolete when the metropolitan boroughs were abolished in 1965. Deptford and Lewisham became The London Borough of Lewisham.

This is another version of the arms, featuring a brown stag and a crown with three tall points, later used as Lewisham's logo and developed into the crown we know and love now. The date this was produced  was somewhere between the two above.

Growing Towards the Light; survival of the wild.

A great short article explores the question; Will the switch over to digital kill off pirate radio?
Pirate radio was born from adaption, ingenuity and opportunism and continues to innovate and propagate for its own survival.
Long live London's Weeds!
here

New spotting of the solitary spirit

In a particularly hidden spot below a bridge, sheltered by over hanging trees,

 The Lewisham Natureman can be found drinking from a tributary of the River Quaggy [possibly the Middle Kid brook.] in Lee Green, Lewisham.