Mitcham Common.

For years it was somewhere I drove through, a low-lying scrap of land on the outskirts of south London – brownfield, neglected, semi-derelict.
Photo by @welshandyfreeman

It was just about scenery on the way to Gatwick, or, on bad days, Croydon IKEA. I like feral land though, the rough edges of things, and promised myself one day I’d take a closer look.

Then came lockdown. Tooting Common, closer to me, was rammed. Even the neglected paths were now freeways, tramped by homeworkers to hardened mud. The woods became pissoirs. To avoid collision, I cycled the roads instead, up to Crystal Palace for a view south to the Downs; north to the Thames and east into the city – seeking some air and perspective.

A friend had already taken a shine to Mitcham Common.

She had been bitten hard by the walking bug, and it was on her doorstep. She went out early and late and couldn’t get enough of it. Legs a bit tired from the hills and with some lockdown time on my hands I scratched an old itch and cycled there one lunch time, taking the one-way route through the ghost-village of Mitcham. The village was once pretty enough I imagine, but now it’s lovelorn and down on its luck, the homely old houses squeezed by unlovely suburban infill, just enough of the old place left to make you pause and look again.

There is no fanfare to Mitcham Common, no car parks or gated entrances. It doesn’t seem to mind much whether you stop or not.

Trash filled ditches and blackened, self-seeded trees – poplar, ash, sycamore – fence it in.

The roads, permanently crawling with traffic, have no inlets or lay-bys. If you come by car you have to park up a side road. The occasional entrance road is barricaded against travellers, fly-tippers, off-roaders, quad bikers. Routes in look homemade, trodden by dog walkers, lovers, misanthropes.    

A road runs through it. Courtesy of @welshandyfreemam

Although not always easy to say where the Common begins and ends – it bleeds away into verges, gardens, sidings – on the map it’s roughly pennant shaped, the fly end pointing east toward Thornton Heath. It is split by roads – the A236, the B272.  Rail and tram lines nick the corners. South east – the fly end – funnels you down the side of a roomy neglected cemetery. Ronnie Corbett was cremated here; Sandra Rivett, Lord Lucan’s murdered maid, is buried here.

If the Common is a pennant, then the – outsized – flagpole is the sewage works at Beddington. Built in the 1870s to process the filth flowing down the Wandle, it now treats the accumulated effluvia from more than half a million locals. It is both a teeming artificial wetland and the source of the ‘Beddington pong’, the stench from huge pans of air-drying excrement.

Shades of Victorian miasma, pestilential breath of a city once running in sewage.

The drying shit attracts huge numbers of insects which in turn bring in the birds. Processing our excreta has turned Beddington into accidental wetlands. Shifting accident into design, much of it is being re-purposed as a nature reserve. Old gravel pits are becoming lakes and reed beds, the feral land reformatted as habitat. One hundred and forty odd species of bird at the last count. Chinese money is rumoured to be capping the remaining sewage beds. Maybe the promise lies behind the huge housing development at nearby Hackbridge, otherwise why do the flats have balconies? To take the air?

Hereabouts the eye is held by the rectilinear bulk of the Viridor energy recovery facility, its paired chimneys leaking steam into the sky.

Painting of Viridor energy recovery facility by www.susanrentoulpaints.com

Those drab curtain walls conceal a machine that chews through more than a quarter of a million tonnes of domestic rubbish a year.

More of our excreta. It was built on an unlovely tract of former landfill. It is interesting that we are now making new land from our own compressed filth. A geology for the Anthropocene. Will future fossil hunters break it out with a hammer and give it a name, this refuse become bedrock: shitspar perhaps?

The Common itself is part landfill. The small humpy hills rise from old gravel pits that spent some time as wetlands before being heaped and packed with Second World War rubble. This is nature as veneer, as patina. Walk the Common and you tread a green veil draped over the legacy of sustained aerial bombardment.

Fly tip

The endless battle with trash grinds on, although now it is ejecta from cars, fly-tipping, angler’s trash – the big fish have been removed because fishermen were turning the ponds rank with ground bait, old line snared anything that moved and waterfowl were grinding split lead in their crops.

Nowadays there’s usually a handful of fishermen, bulky guys from the former Soviet Union drinking cans of Lech, smoking and staring into the distance – they probably know a thing or two about broken country.

Back in the day it was all common ground south to Croydon and beyond, thin soil over Thames gravel, lean pickings useless for agriculture and begrudged to the commoners: furze country. Now it is prized habitat: ‘lowland acid grassland.’

Local historians of the Common talk of long struggle: against urban encroachment; London’s trash; feral nature; lack of funding. And it shows. This is ragged, unfinished, untended land, too little money to smooth it out. It is almost no-man’s-land, held in place by the exhaustion of opposing forces. During the uneasy truce, nature re-insinuates, self-seeds, colonises.

And yet. And yet. The shit from countless dogs brings nutrients, warping the balance, so here and there the soil is scraped back to innutrient thinness. The advancing trees are also pushed back – stasis here is managed, diversity is protected, fought for.

For all its challenges, it has manna, this tatty bit of land, a slightly wonky, down-at-heel charisma.

Merton is not the loveliest borough – flat and featureless, a bit makeshift and hard on its luck. Come here to the Common and your sightlines change. Slip through and perimeter trees hide the urban choke. The growl of traffic steps back. Sandy paths wander through scrub. The sky opens out. The air smells freer, dare-you-say-it fresher. Birds flicker and dodge. Rabbits, burrows scrabbled from sandy soil, flash their scuts.

The land rises and falls. There are big lakes in some of the hollows. Trees press the banks – close one eye and it is almost pastoral, although the oaks are stunted by the thin soil, tap roots striking gravel or rubble. They don’t go to town on the names here: one island pond, seven island pond.

Stunted Oak – photo courtesy of @welshandyfreeman

Climb the rises and the city opens out – south to Saffron Tower in Croydon (pictured at the top of this article), splashed red and blue, for all the world a can of Red Bull on the horizon; east to the transmitters of Crystal Palace, north to the metropolis.

Of the green places in London I know, Mitcham Common is the loneliest and tattiest. The Conservators – I imagine Edwardian men in a panelled dining room – do their best to look after the place, but dereliction never feels far away. Lift a green corner, scrape hard enough with your boot and you’re back to gravel pit and landfill. But that is partly why I come out here – away from the claustrophobia of tended parks, of nudging signs and trimmed lakes, playing fields and ordered walks. Nature gets a slightly freer hand here, and I feel all the freer for it.

Julian Sheather

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