Rewilding my childhood

Courtesy of the Mayor of London

I think of my childhood as a pretty idyllic one.

In summer the sun always shone. The school holidays were endless. And we enjoyed total liberty.

I know, it’s a tiresome cliché to contrast your own childhood with those now.

Today the young are supposedly cloistered in their rooms with all manner of devices connected to who knows what to keep themselves amused.

But yesterday in those halcyon days we roamed free, casting a cheery wave to mum at the doorstep first thing, promising to be home for tea. Hackneyed the picture may be but there was a ring of truth to it for me growing up.

My early years were spent in an end of terrace house near Wembley in the London suburbs. There was a gate out of the back garden onto playing fields. A hundred yards away was the Grand Union Canal.

My earliest memories are shaped by old ciné film watched much later in life.

I can see my brother and sister playing cricket with my dad in the back garden.

There’s a jump cut to a bargee, a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, his horse drawing the boat and its load along the canal towpath.

Fast forward to my primary school years and the memories are my own, unrefracted through film and photo.

I’m climbing trees, playing football and beating a path to the park behind our new home, now further out in Metroland.

That park was a narrow strip of green that followed a stream for a couple of hundred metres before being swallowed up by more mock Tudor houses. Rather unimaginatively the park was called Streamside.

The waterway is the Yeading Brook which in turn feeds the River Crane that empties into the Thames at Isleworth.

The goalposts in Streamside I used to guard when I was a boy

That’s where both those sets of a memories stayed from different eras, in a box called ‘random childhood memories’.

That was until March 2023 when there was a fanfare of publicity to accompany the launch of the Rewild London Fund.  £1 million was being parcelled out by Sadiq Khan the mayor of London to deserving projects promoting biodiversity in the capital.

Imagine my astonishment when I read that the first two initiatives in the press release were those childhood playgrounds of mine.

‘Yeading Brook Unbound’ aimed to ‘re-wiggle’ the eponymous stream of the Streamside park to benefit wildlife and reduce flood risk.

And ‘Bringing Beavers Back to Ealing’ was going to restore a key-stone species to London after 400 years.

The beavers return

The location for the latter was the optimistically named ‘Paradise Fields’ sandwiched between a busy ‘A’ road and a McDonalds car park just a couple of hundred yards from my first childhood home.

Don’t worry. The big gates are to keep beavers in rather than people out.

A family of translocated Scottish beavers plus a mature female were re-introduced that winter. A year on there is a sighting of a kit, as a baby beaver is called. So it looks like that project is going swimmingly (excuse the pun).

Of course when I was young I had no sense that either of these playgrounds were degraded and in need of help in any sense.

Looking at old photos from back then, knowing what I know now, those two landscapes can’t be described as pristine. Their banks look denuded and I don’t remember seeing anyone trying their luck at fishing.

In recent months I have gone back to visit both, to see what had happened to those landscapes nature of my youth. It was clear that the Mayor’s money had started to make a difference.

The Ealing beaver project is managed by Ealing Wildlife Group and the inspirational Sean McCormack.

I bumped into him by chance when I took my mother to Ealing Hospital for one of her last visits there before she died in 2023.

Her cognitive decline was marked at this point but Sean was very kind and patient with her explaining to her about the peregrine falcons screeching across the hospital car park.

The goalkeeper’s return

When I returned to Streamside, the scene of epic goalkeeping displays as a boy, it was clear that this was a rewilding project that was going to take longer to come to fruition.

Some important clearing of some of the non-native invasive species like Japanese knotweed and cherry laurel had taken place.

That was creating light above the Yeading Brook to let wildlife back in.

However, putting a wiggle back into the river was going to take much longer.

The concrete banks were still holding back access to the water for wildlife.

And wetland creation would have to wait until the watercourse could make its own decision about where it wanted to go.

Time to let go

In both places the fact that local communities many decades later have devoted thousands of hours of their free time to making them better for nature, is something I find curiously satisfying and nostalgic at the same time.

I can mentally photoshop in those early images from my childhood memories and retrospectively fill them with the kingfishers, reed warblers and cute-looking beavers that are there now.

But Streamside and Paradise Fields are owned by their communities now, not by me.  I will continue to quietly visit both projects to see how they are getting on.

They look a lot smaller than they did when I was a small person as everything does. 

But the magic of those memories will only grow as these places re-wild themselves with a nudge from the wonderful committed locals helping them along.