SUE TIMMS

Caring for our other urban populations

Black and maidenhair spleenwort, wall-rue, hart’s tongue, bats and flying insects all demand

consideration when the built environment is conserved.

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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