Around this time of year I find myself strangely addicted to the World Snooker Championships. Having on occasion failed miserably at playing the game on a full size table the ability of these incongruously dressed men never fails to astonish me. Not only that, ever since I read that Ben Nicholson and Paul Nash would skip classes at the Slade to play Billiards (the forerunner to the modern game of snooker) I have also come to appreciate its peculiarly modernist aesthetic.

"Although I was not conscious of it at the time, I think that the billiard-balls, so cleanly geometrical in form and so ringingly clear in colour, against the matt-green of the baize, must have appealed to my aesthetic sense.." Ben Nicholson quoted in Sarah Jane Checkland (2000) Ben Nicholson: the vicious circles of his life and art. John Murray, London, p.21.

In praise of wasteland

Having recently been to view the shiny redevelopment plans for my town I noticed that they are planning to "develop" one of my favourite patches of wasteland into some sort of 'wildlife' area. Represented on the planning map by a pond and a nice circular path, presumably so the new inhabitants of the nearby apartments can enjoy a late evening stroll walking their dog. Something they would be unwilling (and unable) to do if they left the site in its scruffy and hazardous state (concealed shopping trolleys and broken glass litter the area). Unfortunately however, the local wildlife love this urban scruff, and is a favourite spot for flocks of House Sparrows, Goldfinches, Chiffchaffs and Sedge Warblers.

As the Field Studies Council points out "Where such sites are waiting for redevelopment they may be 'tidied up' to try and enhance their amenity value for people, but unfortunately in such a way that is detrimental to wildlife."

This sort of "bastard countryside" (Victor Hugo's apt description of the city edgelands) is the re-colonization of the industrial by a ponderous and feckless nature, and is the very antithesis of the tidy 'nature park' with its waymarked, colour-coded footpaths and 'information points'. For the very epitome of this tension see the rapid destruction of the Lea Valley by the Olympic 2012 behemoth, and its documentation by Stephen Gill.
Surely we can spare a small pocket of land for nature to do with it what it will?