Interest in the ecology of our towns and cities is relatively recent. Before the 1970s there seems to have been little concern for urban wildlife. Our perception was that nature belonged in the countryside, and that the urban environment was too smog-ridden and polluted to support wildlife.

The latter half of the 20th century has seen a dramatic decline in the wildlife of our countryside, fuelled by agricultural practices increasingly inimical to the natural world. Indirectly this has helped to change our perceptions of our urban environment. Pockets of trapped countryside in the midst of urban places were not threatened by intensive agriculture to the same degree as in the countryside. The urban environment has become cleaner as environmental legislation of the 70s and 80s has taken effect and the traditional dirty manufacturing industries have declined.

Society’s growing concern about the state of our environment has made us look more closely at our local environment. Since most of us live in towns and cities, the result has been a groundswell of public interest in urban wildlife, and a growing pressure on local authorities and other public bodies to protect and conserve it.

Typical urban habitats are: parks, gardens and allotments; railways, rivers and canals; disused quarries, spoil tips and brownfield land; and buildings and structures. The value of these places, to people as well as to wildlife, is now fully recognised. The best wildlife sites are protected in most urban development plans, and many councils manage a significant part of their public open space for wildlife.

All this means that people concerned with protecting and conserving the built environment in towns and cites will often cross paths with those concerned with the natural environment. Awareness of the potential value to wildlife of urban places and features can help to avoid conflict. Contact between the built and the natural can be mutually rewarding, as both parties understand more of the environment they seek to conserve.

There is a habitat that is often overlooked, by ecologists as well as the rest of us, but which defines towns and cities and is especially linked to the work of building conservationists. Walls, buildings and other man-made structures, whether of brick or stone, perform a secondary function as places for wildlife to live. Sometimes the plants and animals that depend on this habitat live nowhere else in the region, and their continued survival in a local context is entirely dependent on the structure. The ferns that have

colonised walls along railways and canals throughout Britain are an example. Other species, like bats, are in such serious decline that their continued survival depends on giving every single bat the highest level of protection possible. This includes protecting them when they have taken up residence in artificial habitats like buildings.

The natural habitats for many species of fern are cliffs and rocky outcrops, which have always been a scarce habitat in lowland Britain. It is pleasant to note, for a change, that man’s activities may have benefited some of these species. They have found an ideal alternative habitat in brick and stone walls, and have spread along man-made wildlife corridors like railways and canals from their natural range (mainly the north and west) throughout the country.

Ferns and other plants like mosses and liverworts like coolness and shade, at least at the root. Crevices in walls, bridge piers, abutments and other structures along canals, railways and rivers are ideal, and abound in towns and cities. A luxuriant growth of ferns is a special and very appealing feature of many walls in urban areas. Look up at the massive blue-brick walls as you enter the subterranean gloom of Birmingham’s New Street Station and you will see male fern, hart’s tongue, bracken and lady fern, along with other urban stalwarts like buddleia. In Leicester the former Great Central Railway structures are best for ferns. One bridge across the river is locally known as the Ferny Bridge because of its four species: black spleenwort, maidenhair spleenwort, wall-rue and hart’s tongue.

Ferns spread along the railways by their tiny spores, which wafted in and out of carriages when the train stopped, lodging in crevices and mortar courses of adjacent brick and stonework. Without going into the

Black Spleenwort on the

Ferny Bridge, former

Great Central Railway,

Leicester

CONTEXT 73 : MARCH 2002

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