Rus in Urbe behind closed doors.

When I was a child I didn't realise that people wanted to live in the countryside. 

I also thought allotments were shanty-towns because I couldn't conceive of anyone choosing to leave a proper building and huddle in a shed surrounded by mud.

That's all changed, but I still don't understand why people build miniature rural replicas inside city houses.

Take this two bed flat on the Hornsey Road:

Battered stainless steel wardrobes, distressed floorboards, grey everywhere. It's all very post-industrial and urban until you get to the wooden logs:

There's nothing sinful about little-house-on-the-prarie fantasies, but why live one out on the Hornsey Road?

Thanks to Kate in the Attic for finding this.

Acer campestre

Trees, as all wise people know, are better than flowers.

They are more beautiful, more lasting, and they have better names: Common ash, Bird cherry, Cedar of Lebanon, Douglas fir, Elder, Field maple, Grey willow, Holly, Irish yew, Juniper, London plane, Monkey Puzzle, Norway spruce, Common oak, Purging buckthorn, Rowan, Sycamore, Tulip tree, Variegated sycamore, Western Hemlock.

Paul Wood at the Street Tree has kindly let me share his photograph of a Field maple (Acer campestre) 'a plucky, messy and often overlooked tree' dealing insouciantly with the Hornsey Road.

                   

Go look at his blog. He does orchids and the countryside too, which is all very well if you like that kind of thing, but it's his London tree postings that are a revelation. He's discovered perry trees off the Holloway road, a Persian silk tree (see what I mean about names?) in Southwark and Robinias in Bedford row.

This is why London is infinite. The streets and houses run out eventually, but there is no end to the different ways of seeing it. You can name its trees or model its bus routes or remember streets because a friend you lost touch with lived there decades ago or hold an internal map of all the places where you lost umbrellas.

Meta blogging (Mizhenka)

Smoky, ghostly, Hornsey Road as opening scene for M.R. James story, picture here.

Also, many pictures of bears.

Also, a blunt appraisal of the road's merits.

Steve Potts' 'Hornsey Road' drawing.

Steve Potts is a local artist (here since 1997) who one day took some photographs from the top deck of the 91 and decided to draw this:

His blog is worth looking at, for his other drawings and for his thoughts on why and what he draws.


'Perhaps there’s something about the combination of immediacy and intimacy of drawing that instinctively attracts me. Drawings tend to live their lives on a small scale, and as such are quieter and often more personal than the declaration of painting. These objects, often made from the most basic materials of pencil and paper, invite us into their world without thinking.'