On the Aleutian Islands, south-west of Alaska, least and crested auklets nest in vast breeding colonies. They make their homes in the rocky crevices formed by fresh lava flows – these are volcano birds. In 2008, the volcano Kasatochi, at the remotest tip of the archipelago, erupted: tens of thousands of auklet nestlings were buried in hot ash. But the next year, the birds returned. It’s what auklets do. It’s how they live.
Kasatochi is a long way, of course, from Hampstead, or Aldenham, or Sydenham, or Downe. But W. H. Hudson might have had the auklets in mind when in 1897 he wrote of the leafy suburbs of London, and the constant threat they faced from London’s ‘great and continuous’ growth. ‘These little green rustic refuges’, Hudson says, introducing his book Birds in London (1898), ‘are situated on the lower slopes of a volcano, which is always in a state of disruption, and year by year they are being burnt up and obliterated by ashes and lava.’
That these refuges survived the black surge of the Industrial Revolution had come as a surprise, a little over a decade earlier, to the Victorian nature writer Richard Jefferies: in Nature near London, Jefferies writes of moving to a spot ‘about twelve miles from town’ (Surbiton, in the south-west) and of the astonishing quantity and variety of life he found there. Jefferies’s book was about the country beside the city, the green alongside the black; ‘nature’ for Jefferies meant ‘countryside’, and that, by and large, is what he looked for in his corner of Surrey (in spite of what he called ‘the unseen influence of mighty London’, the great beast squatting a few miles downriver). Hudson chose a different theme. The title tells you: Birds in London. It would be easy, Hudson says, to draw up a list of the birds to be found ‘in such rural and even wild p
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Subscribe now or Sign inOn the Aleutian Islands, south-west of Alaska, least and crested auklets nest in vast breeding colonies. They make their homes in the rocky crevices formed by fresh lava flows – these are volcano birds. In 2008, the volcano Kasatochi, at the remotest tip of the archipelago, erupted: tens of thousands of auklet nestlings were buried in hot ash. But the next year, the birds returned. It’s what auklets do. It’s how they live.
Kasatochi is a long way, of course, from Hampstead, or Aldenham, or Sydenham, or Downe. But W. H. Hudson might have had the auklets in mind when in 1897 he wrote of the leafy suburbs of London, and the constant threat they faced from London’s ‘great and continuous’ growth. ‘These little green rustic refuges’, Hudson says, introducing his book Birds in London (1898), ‘are situated on the lower slopes of a volcano, which is always in a state of disruption, and year by year they are being burnt up and obliterated by ashes and lava.’ That these refuges survived the black surge of the Industrial Revolution had come as a surprise, a little over a decade earlier, to the Victorian nature writer Richard Jefferies: in Nature near London, Jefferies writes of moving to a spot ‘about twelve miles from town’ (Surbiton, in the south-west) and of the astonishing quantity and variety of life he found there. Jefferies’s book was about the country beside the city, the green alongside the black; ‘nature’ for Jefferies meant ‘countryside’, and that, by and large, is what he looked for in his corner of Surrey (in spite of what he called ‘the unseen influence of mighty London’, the great beast squatting a few miles downriver). Hudson chose a different theme. The title tells you: Birds in London. It would be easy, Hudson says, to draw up a list of the birds to be found ‘in such rural and even wild places . . . as exist within a sixteen-mile radius’, but then, ‘it is clear that most of the inland species found in the counties of Kent, Surrey, Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Essex would be in it’. This was pretty much what Jefferies had done, but Hudson had another sort of book in mind. Hudson wanted to go inside the volcano. Not that he was especially fond of inner London, ‘the metropolis’, the ‘brick desert’, ‘an endless forest of chimneys defiling the air with their smoke’. Hudson was more or less immune to whatever murky charms the Victorian inner city had to offer: the birds of London were important to him because they represented contrast, counter point, relief. They were flickers of not-London in among the shadows of the smokestacks. Hudson often gives the impression that the birds are primarily an aesthetic benefit, an ornament to the city, and he seems to look on them with the eye of an interior designer rather than a conservationist or an ecologist. In one passage he expresses the wish that the capital’s crowds of sparrows could be ‘varied somewhat’, brighter colours introduced, the ‘monotonous burly forms’ of the sparrows reshaped, their voices refashioned to ‘give a new and strange delight to the listener’. In another, he writes of how the resident jackdaw populations complement the architecture of the cathedrals of Wells, Salisbury and Canterbury. But this is, for him, never just about ‘pretti- ness’ (or, if it is, then the prettiness itself has a profound purpose): the primary value of London’s wild birds, Hudson argues, is ‘the extreme pleasure’ which the confined Londoner experiences in seeing and hearing them. The birds are ‘a necessary part of those pleasure- and health-giving transcripts of nature which we retain and cherish as our best possessions’; they ‘bring home to us that glad freedom and wildness which is our best medicine’. Hudson returns again and again to the role played by birds – and by ‘nature’ more generally – in maintaining the physical, emotional and moral health of the population. He laments the lack of green spaces in the three miles between Wormwood Scrubs and Regent’s Park (‘three miles of houses inhabited by a working-class population, with no green spot except the Paddington Recreation Ground, which is . . . of little or no use to the thousands of poor children in this vast parish, being too far from their homes’), and characterizes West Kensington as ‘a brand-new yet depressing wilderness of red brick . . . far for children’s feet to reach a spot of green turf’. Hudson was a nature writer who – for all his occasional outbreaks of purple prose – had his feet planted solidly in the real world. He walked London, and he knew London. For a reader like me, who knows London well enough to love it, but not so well that its glamour – its history, its amplitude, even the faded charisma of its place-names – has worn out entirely, Birds in London evokes the post-Dickensian metropolis, ‘the smoky, roaring City’, with a deft combination of authority and individuality. Hudson is always Hudson even when – or especially when – he makes us roll our eyes (the twentieth-century ornithologist James Fisher lamented ‘the humourless introspection, the self-conscious pessimism, the nostalgic obscurantism’ of Hudson’s writing, but even he rated Hudson highly as an observer). Fisherites will purse their lips at the strange and presumably allegorical scene in which Hudson regards some felled trees in Kensington Gardens in the company of an ‘idle-looking young woman’ – ‘I had met her before, often and often, in London and other towns, and in the country and by the sea, and on distant seas, and in many uninhabited places’ – and is vouchsafed, in her smile, a cheering vision of a rewilded London in ‘some far time . . . after the dust of all her people . . . had been blown about by the winds of many centuries’. But without the gauche romanticism – and this in a seasoned writer in his fifty-seventh year, we might note – we surely wouldn’t have the vigour, the colour, the compass and richness of Hudson’s best writing; we would never have seen so vividly the ancient rookery of Gray’s Inn Gardens, the ‘sparrows’ chapels’ of the inner city, the black-headed gulls that came upriver as far as Putney Bridge and drew huge crowds in the hard winter of 1887–8, the ‘loud triumphant notes’ of a mistle thrush in Ravenscourt Park, the soaring larks on Hackney Marsh in the teeth of a February gale, and countless other vignettes from a London long gone. Change, of course, is one of Hudson’s themes: the comings and goings – but mostly goings – of birds and bird populations amid the relentless making and remaking of what was then still the biggest city in the world. As readers a hundred-odd years on we can add additional layers to Hudson’s study. London is no longer a city of sparrows (Hudson guessed at a London population of ‘two or three millions’). You can no longer buy ‘scores, nay hundreds’ of greenfinches at the bird-dealers’ shops ‘at about twopence a bird’. We don’t think of the magpie as an urban rarity. So much of London’s bird life, in Hudson’s reckoning, seems to depend on the goodwill of ‘the park authorities’; Hudson seldom looks very far beyond the parks, whereas today we’re more inclined to do so, and with good reason: black redstarts now sing from rooftops in the City itself, and peregrines hunt from Battersea Power Station, the OXO Tower, the Parliament buildings – anywhere with a good view of pigeons (Hudson was at his most dramatically wrong when he wrote that ‘it is exceedingly improbable that the . . . peregrine falcon, kestrel and kite will ever return’, or rather, he was quite right – it was exceedingly improbable – but it happened anyway). Hudson was always not only an observer of birds but a committed conservationist (and a driving force in the development of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in its early days). That’s evident here, too: there’s ambition as well as passion in his closing chapter on how various species might be ‘introduced or restored to London’ – by relocating nuthatch eggs, say, or constructing kingfisher breeding holes in Battersea Park. The preceding chapter, on ‘The Cat Question’, comes from a similarly well-meaning place, even if it does begin ‘Sooner or later, the cat question will have to be dealt with in a manner not pleasant for the cats’ and recommends that the Metropolitan Police ‘be instructed to remove all stray cats and send them to a lethal chamber’. This is the hard-scrabble life of urban birds. This is the volcano, London: London in all its complexity, its moral and aesthetic ambiguity, its superabundance – and perhaps above all its unpredictability, from one day to the next, from the nineteenth century to the twenty- first.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 91 © Richard Smyth 2026
About the contributor
Richard Smyth is a novelist, nature writer, critic, birdwatcher and cross word compiler. He lives with his family in Bradford, West Yorkshire, where there are peregrines on the mill chimneys and parakeets in the parks.
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