First glimpse of Warren Farm
Remember those bright days of lockdown in 2020 when the spring sun was strong but there was nowhere to go? The parks were all full of forbidding signs and taped up benches .
The narrow tow paths of the Grand Union were too crowded with cyclists and joggers. I had heard of Warren Farm on the edge of Southall. It was a matter of local controversy because the Council were going to grant a 200 year lease for QPR to bury it in tons of landfill and turn it into a training ground. It was just within reach of my "permitted daily exercise"
I ducked through a gap in a chain link fence. The sky was very blue, the trees just bursting into leaf but, above all, there were skylarks, at least half a dozen of them soaring up into that spring day, the first skylarks I had ever heard in London. I later learned that Warren Farm is home to a quarter of London's breeding population of skylarks but not just that, over 10 years before the Covid epidemic, Ealing had run out of funds to maintain Warren Farm as the sports ground it once was and it had become a successfully rewilded meadow alive with insects and wildflowers. It was just the place to take a brief pause from the anxieties of the pandemic which were beginning to overwhelm me.
First glimpse of Warren Farm
Remember those bright days of lockdown in 2020 when the spring sun was strong but there was nowhere to go? The parks were all full of forbidding signs and taped up benches .
The narrow tow paths of the Grand Union were too crowded with cyclists and joggers. I had heard of Warren Farm on the edge of Southall. It was a matter of local controversy because the Council were going to grant a 200 year lease for QPR to bury it in tons of landfill and turn it into a training ground. It was just within reach of my "permitted daily exercise"
I ducked through a gap in a chain link fence. The sky was very blue, the trees just bursting into leaf but, above all, there were skylarks, at least half a dozen of them soaring up into that spring day, the first skylarks I had ever heard in London. I later learned that Warren Farm is home to a quarter of London's breeding population of skylarks but not just that, over 10 years before the Covid epidemic, Ealing had run out of funds to maintain Warren Farm as the sports ground it once was and it had become a successfully rewilded meadow alive with insects and wildflowers. It was just the place to take a brief pause from the anxieties of the pandemic which were beginning to overwhelm me.