Uncle of Europe Book

Nearly half a century old, this fairly short but readable book captures the natural condition of the urban environment at that moment in the 1970s when a decaying industrial modernity was about to give way to environmentalism and a service economy.

Mabey's message, insofar as there is one, is that nature is resilient and can find niches in the most surprising places disregarded by us as wastelands - brown field sites, urban streets, rubbish tips, sewage farms, railway and canal networks and quarries as well as in urban gardens.

This is a personal account in a long tradition of British nature writing. He does us a service by pointing out that our wastelands are refuges as far as many birds and plants and some mammals are concerned. He coruscates manicured municipal parks as perhaps the true wastelands.

For Mabey, it is the chaotics of nature that make it interesting. He emphasises the importance of allowing children access to things they can pick rather than be told to keep off the grass and not touch. He sees how life uses our trash as tools for its own survival.

Ironically, relative prosperity and urban development may since have helped protect obvious green areas with the rise of the conservation movement but possibly at the expense of the loss of really productive (for nature) wastelands and brown field sites to construction projects.

He is also open-minded about natural aliens and visitors, seeing them as finding their own niches and creating new natural balances. This was to became the attitude of urban humans to human migrants until very recently and the emergence of terrorism and the low wage economy.

The book has one flaw - or at least it is a flaw of the publisher of the Pimlico Edition. Mabey reels off the names of plants and birds but each requires some sort of line illustration if not photograph or else it becomes just a list of inside information by a specialist.

If we are to make use of this book, we need to be able to go out into the areas he identifies and see what he sees. Simply saying that we may see groundsel, petty spurge, fat hen, shepherd's purse and docks on disturbed ground tells us little if we do not have a 'show and tell'.

Nevertheless, Mabey is a good and evocative writer. Even if he is writing about a world that will have changed since (there are many excellent 1970s BBC and ITV dramas of the period on YouTube that give you a feel for the wasted London of the period) it is still useful.

Mabey also has a good sense of historical change exemplified by his short account of the history of Hampstead Heath but also by interesting snippets on the shifting spread of particular birds and plants. What is clear is that there is no fixed English nature now if ever there was one.