The future is overgrown
I come here a lot. Tottenham Cemetery, a place from the past, full of long dead folk memorialised in stone.
It's also one of the most alive places I know, full of birds, squirrels, wildflowers, lichens and moss, gently dismantling and composting the stone expressions of love, regret, and grief. Large friendly trees lined in formal avenues, their crowns touching and alive with the breeze. In stormy weather it can be scary, the tall trees billowing and thrashing in the wind.
It's a place that bears the scars of austerity, of a lack of resource to care. Graves are collapsing into the ground. Stone angels have lost their heads. Fallen tree branches block paths.
It's a spacious place, quiet even though just a stone's throw away from the high road. I'm definitely not the only one who finds solace here.
This place feels to me like a vision of one kind of future, one where there is much less central resource to get things done. One where we let nature do what it does best and burst through, take over, “rewild”. There's beauty in this but fear too: how can we collectively maintain the things that are important to us? What's the right balance of wildness and cultivation?
Under the cobblestones, the beach. Under the gravestones, the roots. The soil here is fertile.