(^178) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
reflecting urban growth, municipal reform and Victorian piety. Here again
a broad distinction can be made between the elaborately planted private
examples created on the edges of the larger towns and cities in the early and
middle decades of the nineteenth century, many influenced by the design of
contemporary parks and gardens and more specifically by the writings of the
landscape gardener John Claudius Loudon; and the more open and generally
blander designs of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries.^91 It is the
former which, following a period of neglect in the course of the twentieth
century, often evolved (like Abney Park or Highgate in London) into wildlife
havens.^92 Covering a larger area were golf courses, which experienced a boom
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often being laid out at the
same time as adjacent areas were being developed for housing. While their
role in maintaining biodiversity on coastal dunes or upland moors may be
debated, in suburban situations golf courses have always, on balance, been a
benefit. Many retained large numbers of trees, and in some cases fragments
of hedgerow and even blocks of woodland, from the earlier landscape.
Where they were established at the expense of heathland, heather and other
characteristic plants usually survived (although often accompanied, on the
greens themselves, by species brought in with the maritime turf employed
for this purpose such as sea milkwort (Glaux maritime) and sea plantain
(Plantago maritime)).^93 Some golf courses developed from landscape parks,
and preserved much of the parkland planting (itself often, as we have seen,
originating as hedgerow trees). While chemical weedkillers were being widely
employed by the inter-war period on greens and fairways, the long grass,
roughs and scrub areas – which might account for as much as 70 per cent
of the total course area – were less intensively managed.^94 Recent studies
have demonstrated that golf courses carry more bird and insect species than
adjoining areas of agricultural pasture^95 : and while this contrast will have
been less marked in the period before 1950, when agricultural pastures were
less subject to re-seeding and chemical ‘improvement’, they may often have
sustained as many plants and animals as the farmland they replaced.
urban edgelands
From the mid-nineteenth century, distinctive ‘edgelands’ began to develop on
the margins of the larger conurbations, although they were also interdigitated
with them in complex ways, often extending deep into their interiors along
river floodplains. Here such things as power stations, rubbish dumps and
sewage works were located, away from city centres and residential areas.
These provided further novel habitats, many rivalling or even surpassing
those now available in the countryside.
Instead of earth closets and ‘night soil men’, and the direct discharge
of effluent into streams and rivers, by the last decades of the nineteenth
century major cities had sophisticated sewage systems. Waste was taken via
elle
(Elle)
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