Urban Gardening Hazards

It has always been a favourite parental phrase, used possibly for millenia in some form or another but with the version heard in my generation  being "Will you just get out of my way and go and play in the garden".

It was, to me, never a punishment or sanction for bad behaviour as I was fortunate in that the family houses of my childhood and formative years were always a great source of entertainment as far as their gardens were concerned.

My earliest recollections were in fact of back gardens of my respective Grandparents where I would be asked to go if there was important business to be discussed by the grown-ups.

These seemed to me then to be expansive and seemingly endless areas of crazy paved paths, shady glades, neatly trimmed hedges, secret hiding places and, in season, an endless supply of soft fruits to be scrumped and savoured all the more for that.

In fact they were nothing more than standard rectangular gardens as typically found with pre-war and inter war suburban dwellings but to very imaginative young minds they were so much more.

The defining factor about such spaces were that they had not previously been built upon. Those house building eras had been able to take shape on previously agricultural land what is now called Greenbelt.

There was little chance therefore, even though I tried hard in my excavations, to actually unearth anything that could be called an artefact or object of interest. Worms, snails, bone fragments and the occasional bits of a labourers clay smoking pipe were the only things that warranted being dragged with accompanying mud and grime into the house to show Grandad Dick and Nanna Nelly, Grandad Donald and Gran Helen dependant on who we were visiting at the time.

Fast forward by a couple of decades to the construction of housing estates on old industrial and commercial sites or those of any previous use, described as Brownfield, and this has opened up a great many more opportunities for curious and energetic children to dig up strange items from bygone eras. Some should not, perhaps, have been buried there in the first place on account of levels of toxicity or other hazardous or downright dangerous attributes.

I have often consulted historic and archived maps to find out what used to exist on sites which give the impression of only ever having been residential in character and identity.

In my home city an area of former derelict docklands is now well established as a trendy waterside housing estate. Previous functions of the wharves and quays was for the reception of vast quantities of timber from Scandinavia, imports of livestock and about 2.2 million immigrants making their way from Europe to the Americas.

One interesting bit of land use on the docks was a Cholera and Leprosy Hospital. The footprint of the buildings associated with this medical operation is now firmly under a terrace of tidy, executive houses. I am still waiting for a news report of an enthusiastic junior archaeologist bringing something a bit unsavoury to the dinner table after being discovered in the back garden of these homes.

In other city locations where historic manufacturing sites have long since disappeared to be replaced by housing I have heard of accidental discoveries of large man made holes just beneath the made up ground where coal gas had been stored after having been produced from a noxious process. One such case significantly increased the cost of putting up a domestic conservatory as the cavernous voids had to be filled before any building work could be contemplated.

Brick pits and other sites of mineral extraction have also built upon in the modern era.

One former field where iron filings and other ferrous waste from an engineering works had been dumped legitimately over about 50 years made the soil so corrosive that metal drainage pipes in the ground were continually bursting and the smart looking bungalows began to subside with unnerving regularity.

On my way to my first infants school I used to walk past a development of townhouses which had been built on a chalk bedrock but unbeknown to those who had put them there was the existence of an underground complex of caves and voids that had been dug out in an old quarrying process which had not been recorded. Those three storey houses began a slow transition into two storeys and then bungalow format as they sank.

Perhaps the most interesting discovery was that, in a house garden, of a old railway turntable. This had previously been inside a huge railway engine shed in a vast acreage of sidings and maintenance depots built from the late 1800's and at that time right out on the very edge of the city.

Somehow buried and forgotten during the demolition and clearance of the old railway site sometime in the 1950's it was only found when builders started to dig the foundations for the extension to a 1990's built house on the large residential estate that had become established there.

Wartime damage was extensive in my local area and every time that footings are dug or the ground opened up there is invariably a risk of uncovering 80 year old unexploded shells and ammunition.

A few unfortunate residents of modern housing estates built on landfill sites have had to endure the periodic eruption of methane burners in plain sight which cannot do much for the nervous system or property values.

With the pressure to secure new housing land, without encroaching upon sacred Greenbelt, areas of natural beauty or of bio-diversity the prospect of unearthing something interesting is increasingly possible.