Here’s a list of things we’re reading—we’re mostly reading excerpts to give us a wider range of voices, but each of these books is worth a deep dive on its own! (note: annotations are still in progress, and other titles might get added to this list as we go)
Peter Ackroyd, London Under
From one of England’s most popular biographers, this small volume explores “what lies beneath,” in the watershed, infrastructure, and human culture that has helped define London. We’re looking particularly at the thirteen “hidden rivers” that feed the Thames and have defined London’s built landscape, even while most of those waterways have been culverted over the last few centuries.
Donella Andrews, Systems Thinking: A Primer
Not technically nature writing, this book offers an excellent introduction to systems theory as a way of seeing how ecologies form and operate. Key to the intellectual challenge of our course is how to use the tools of nonfiction narrative writing and those of systems theory to describe and understand what we experience in our travels.
Kerri Andrews, Wanderers: A History of Women Walking
This book presents portraits of ten women whose walking was notable in itself as well as enabling remarkable work, whether in writing, science, or activism. Several women authors in our bibliography feature here, and there is also now a companion anthology of walking women’s writing, edited by Andrews.
Patrick Barkham, ed., The Wild Isles: The Best British and Irish Nature Writing
One of a burst of new anthologies in this area from the UK and British Isles (not the same thing), this collection goes back to Gilbert White, the 18th-century Hampshire parson often considered the forerunner of modern nature writing, and continues up to the very latest contributions to the tradition.
Michael Corker, Our Place
William Cronon, “The Trouble With Wilderness”
A classic essay by one of the US’s preeminent environmental historians, Cronon’s call for breaking down the binary between “us” and the “the wild” resonates thirty years after it first appeared. To me, this is still the best introduction to the history of wilderness as an idea and what changes to our thinking would help modern conservationist and environmentalist efforts move forward in protecting a wider diversity of “natures.”
David Crouch and Colin Ward, The Allotment: Its Landscape and Culture
This study from the 1980s, in the tradition of Marxist historians such as Raymond Williams, traces the past, present, and possible future of the allotment, a British tradition of providing (usually) low-rent gardening land to urban dwellers that has transformed from a coping mechanism in the wake of urbanization and the Enclosure Acts to a UK-specific form of community gardening.
Roger Deakin, Waterlog
Swimming in open water is a major, if modern, British tradition, and Deakin’s book puts his body where the waves are in an effort to understand the interactions between ancient and modern that characterize British landscapes, from canals to coastlands. We’re looking particularly at a chapter questioning why the penguin exhibit at the London Zoo reminds Deakin so much of the bathing ponds on Hampstead Heath.
Amitav Ghosh, Smoke and Ashes
Through his cosmopolitan career, novelist-thinker Ghosh has become one of the major writers today on the relationship between environmental crisis and imperial history. Following on his books The Great Derangement and The Nutmeg’s Curse, this book traces the British Empire’s role in linking India and China together in a “South-to-South” agricultural empire centered on two addictive crops: tea and opium.
Jay Griffiths, Kith
Jacquetta Hawkes, A Land
Before “deep time” was a phrase, Hawkes was interested in deep time. This Rachel Carson-esque book from the 1950s blends Hawkes’s expertise in archaeology with a careful look at the geology of Britain, starting from her London backyard.
Seamus Heaney, “District and Circle”
Though most renowned for his depictions of Irish life, history, and political struggle, Nobel Laureate Heaney is also among the keenest observer-poets of recent London, and his sonnet sequence “District and Circle” blends myth, natural imagery, and wry commentary on the strange mundaneness of traveling on London’s Tube.
Kathleen Jamie, ed., Antlers of Water
Jamie is currently Scotland’s makar, the nation’s equivalent of poet laureate, and her interest in the many landscapes and seascapes of her part of the world have led her to create the first-ever all-Scottish nature writing anthology. From the urban to the remote island, this collection highlights the diversity of Scotland’s writers as well as its ecologies.
Kwesia, City Girl in Nature (YouTube channel)
Richard Jefferies, After London
This is a post-apocalyptic novel set following the collapse of English society and the natural re-wilding of London. It was also first published in 1885! Jefferies was part of a Victorian generation of nature writers that used a wide variety of genres to explore what they saw the Industrial Revolution doing to the island and speculate on what would become of it. Later writers have looked back to him as an early inspiration in “cli-fi,” among other kinds of environmental writing.
Jennifer J. Lee, “Pond: A Dendochronology”
David Lindo, The Urban Birder
Growing up in the densely populated suburbs of Northwest London in an Afro-Caribbean family, Lindo has become one of the UK birding community’s foremost authorities and spokespeople. In this memoir, he describes the realities of urban birding, from the racism he has endured for “birding while Black” to the challenges and tricks of finding “your patch” for observations in a crowded metropolis.
London in the Wild
This guidebook to the flora, fauna, history, and geography of London’s green spaces (and even some we might not consider so green) is a publication of the Wildlife Trust of London. Several of our local itineraries are inspired and informed by this book.
Richard Mabey, The Unofficial Countryside
Decades before Cronon’s “Trouble With Wilderness,” this book made the case that Britain’s traditional city/country divide rendered invisible the vast ecosystems that either formed within cities or ignored the rural/urban divide altogether. Looking at parks, dumps, streets, and other “human” spaces, Mabey sparked a new way of looking at, and writing about, British nature in the 1970s.
Helen MacDonald, H Is for Hawk
———, Vesper Flights
Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks
This book’s thesis is that having access to the language of nature (weather, land features, wildlife) is vital to sustaining human relationships with our environment. Alternating narrative chapters and glossaries of hundreds of nature words that Macfarlane has collected over decades, this is a rich study about the value of nature writing, and nature-speak.
———, Underland
Macfarlane explores “what lies beneath” in this book, from caves and sunken roads to bunkers and catacombs. In support of our class trip to the Epping Forest, the largest expanse of old-growth trees in England, we read Macfarlane’s chapter on the deep roots, literal and figurative, of this forest in London life, with everything from the fungi that live around the trees’ roots to the humans walking above them included in his imaginatively told ecosystem.
Michael Malay, Late Light
Noreen Masud, A Flat Place
Michael McCarthy, The Moth Snowstorm
Roy Porter, London: A Social History
Beatrix Potter, selected letters
Most famous as the author-illustrator of the Peter Rabbit books, Potter had many other interests and pursuits. Her letters from her teenage and young adult years involve correspondence and collaborations with Scottish naturalists, Kew Garden professionals, and others whom she taught and learned from in her fascination with fungi, mosses, and other “overlooked” elements of the wooded landscapes she loved. Later in her life, after her marriage to Cumbria attorney William Heelis, her letters often involved the business of buying farmland in the Lake District to protect it from development around the booming tourist industry. Much of that land she bequeathed to the National Trust, which paved the way for the Lake District becoming the nation’s largest national park.
———, selected scientific illustrations
While Potter’s letters show her scientific acumen, much of her most original scientific work was in her virtuoso botanical drawings and watercolors. The paper she submitted to the Royal Society has been lost, but associates such as the Armitt sisters have ensured that many of her drawings still survive.
Nina Mingya Powles, Small Bodies of Water
A New Zealand writer of Anglo-Chinese descent, Powles is an accomplished poet whose first nonfiction book has won a number of prestigious awards. This book is a series of meditations on her relationship to her family, to the places she’s lived, and particularly to the role of water in shaping her identity, from New Zealand’s seismic shoreline to ponds in Hampstead. We’ll read her chapter centered on the disorientation she experienced as a graduate student in London when she came across her favorite New Zealand flower, the khowai, (pronounced koh-fye), in a London garden.
Claire Ratinon, Unearthed
Anita Roy, “Stag Beetles”
This brief, delightful essay interweaves the experience of learning London’s natures as an immigrant, a childhood encounter with a “gigantic” stag beetle, and a reflection on what has changed in London to make once-ubiquitous stag beetles a much less common, and more rural, sight.
John Ruskin, Elements of Drawing
While his work is little-read today, John Ruskin was perhaps the foremost critic of arts and culture in Britain’s Victorian era. An early champion of the controversial landscapist J. M. W. Turner and a forerunner of the modern British conservation movement, Ruskin was also Oxford University’s first professor of art. His focus on drawing as the key to artistic excellence, and on closely looking at nature as the key to good drawing, was radical for its time, and his populist tendencies (and insistence on being right) led him to produce this book to bring his approach to a wider audience.
———, selected essays
Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain
Zadie Smith, NW
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust
———, “The Thoreau Problem”
Why does Henry David Thoreau include the detail in his two accounts of his stay in jail (in Walden and “Civil Disobedience”) that he went to pick huckleberries after his release? Solnit poses this question as a way to highlight the divide between Thoreau’s nature readers and his political readers, and why such a divide leads us to miss what might be most important about Thoreau’s approach to nature writing.
Isabella Tree, Wilding
J. M. W. Turner, Liber Studiorum (in facsimile)
Turner was one of the 19th century’s most influential artists; he turned landscape into a prestige genre in the art world and developed a style that led the way to a shift from painting things to painting the light around them. To reach a larger audience, he undertook a collaborative project with a number of engravers to circulate dozens of representative works as bound prints, which he called the Liber Studiorum (book of studies). As a lifelong Londoner with a love of landscapes human and otherwise, Turner left his massive personal collection to the nation, and it’s now housed in the Tate Britain Museum. This book gives us access to important angles of Turner’s vision in preparation for some focused study time in the Tate.
A. W. Wainwright, Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells
This is actually a seven-volume series providing maps, views, and practical advice for adventures throughout the fells (steep, glacial hills) in what is now Lake District National Park. Facing frustrations with publishers’ design limitations compared to his vision for the series, Wainwright created each page by hand—lettering, drawings, and all. First appearing in the 1950s, these books are now in their third edition, reflecting the Lake District’s changing landscape while preserving the handmade look of Wainwright’s originals. Select volumes will help guide our Cumbrian excursions.
Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journal
William Wordsworth, A Guide to the Lakes
———, selected poems, including “Michael,” “Tintern Abbey”
