Tales from the Urban Forest: The double-edged legacy of Ada Salter
Tales from the Urban Forest: The double-edged legacy of Ada Salter
Paul Wood on how a quest for beautification led to an alien invasion
Tales from the Urban Forest is a quarterly column by the writer Paul Wood, which focuses on London’s flora, fauna and its landscapes.
Paul is the author of several books about trees in London including London is a Forest, a second edition of which has just been published, and the editor of the Great Trees of London Map published by Blue Crow Media (featured in this newsletter a few months ago).
His column deals with the city’s unregarded landmarks, the wild inhabitants who may have occupied the city for hundreds of years, the people, policies and ideas that have influenced the environment, and the precarious entanglement of humans and nature in this ever evolving city.
In this second instalment, Paul traces the evolution of Bermondsey from ones of the poorest, most overcrowded and polluted parts of London to the desirable neighbourhood it is today. He pinpoints the moment, exactly one hundred years ago, when a swathe of environmental initiatives were introduced by one pioneering woman, and uncovers the positive and negative elements of her legacy (via Lenin and Custard Creams biscuits).
The hundred year gentrification
Many parts of London have a distinctiveness that is acutely defined and fiercely defended by those who have a connection to the neighbourhood.
Bermondsey, the area of Thames-side south London that stretches from Tower Bridge to Rotherhithe, is one such place. Until the early twentieth century, Bermondsey was an area of industry, docks and teeming humanity, many living in dire conditions. Today, it has been completely transformed into a patchwork of interwar estates, modern riverside apartments and the gastro-hotspots of Maltby and Bermondsey Streets.
The transformation of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe into one of London’s trendiest locales all started 100 years ago, and traces of that revolution are still visible today.
A century ago saw the election to Bermondsey’s town hall of London’s first female mayor, Ada Salter, whose legacy is still revered in SE1 and SE16. The anniversary has been marked by the Salter Centenary celebrations, which have provided a chance to reassess the achievements of Ada, and her husband Alfred, who became the MP for Bermondsey in the same year.
Statues immortalise the Salter family on Bermondsey Wall East. The group also includes their daughter Joyce who tragically died of scarlet fever, contracted in the slums when she was just ten. This video produced by a local school looks at the Salter legacy through the eyes of Joyce.
The Salters were a political power couple who arrived in Bermondsey with a strongly held desire (rooted in Quakerism) to improve the lives and living conditions of the people who lived there. They were both involved in early Labour Party politics, which, in 1915, took Ada to the International Socialist Women's Conference in Switzerland where she defeated a motion by Lenin calling for armed struggle.
Back in Bermondsey, the Salters advocated for workers and women’s rights. They worked with big local employers including Peek Freans (inventor of Garibaldi, Bourbon and Custard Cream biscuits), and set up a forerunner of the NHS in Bermondsey. But it is Ada Salter’s quest to ‘beautify’ Bermondsey that resonates with our twenty-first century concerns and it is the work that her Beautification Committee started that still helps define this corner of London.
Bermondsey Garden City
The Beautification Committee was driven by Ada’s conviction that improving the environment was inextricably linked to improving people’s lives. She believed that raising citizens’ aesthetic appreciation of their neighbourhoods would engender a sense of personal wellbeing and civic pride. Her ambition for the Beautification Committee was to turn Bermondsey into nothing less than a garden city.
Ada Salter’s transformative vision can still be seen throughout the area. Although there is no longer a London Borough of Bermondsey (it was subsumed into the super-borough of Southwark in 1965), it is possible to discern the boundaries of the former borough by the buildings, green spaces and especially the trees planted on its streets during the Salter years.
As well as a plaque next to a tree in Bermondsey Spa Gardens (above) remembering the pioneering beautification initiatives, there is an Ada Salter Garden in Southwark Park, and a local group, Trees for Bermondsey, which is directly inspired by Ada’s legacy. Their mission is to ‘plant more trees and to protect, restore and increase tree canopy in Southwark, particularly, on the streets, estates and public areas of Bermondsey.’
Interwar housing estates often have central green courtyards and balconies that would once have been bedecked with window boxes. A hundred years ago, gardening was the defining activity of beautification, and the showier the better and two varieties of dahlia were developed, Bermondsey Gem and Rotherhithe Gem. Today we can only wonder if they were collarette, pompon or semi-cactus as they sadly seem to have disappeared from the shelves.
Had it not been for the Great Depression of the early 1930s, many more workers’ cottages with gardens like the model housing along Wilson Grove (above) and Janeway Street might have been built. Completed in 1928, these developments exemplify the kind of social housing with which Ada wanted to replace the unsanitary and overcrowded slums. Rows of neat, modernist garden-cottages were designed in consultation with the residents who would advise the architects on their practical requirements. Greenery was at the heart of the project: gardening was encouraged and the new streets were lined with trees.
Elsewhere, the legacy of over 7000 trees planted in just a few years are still much in evidence along Bermondsey’s bosky boulevards. Jamaica Road, Grange Road and St James’s Road are just some of the streets that were planted with London plane trees, while elsewhere, poplars were favoured. Both these species are fast growing, large trees that can cope with the rigours of industrial pollution. But the tree that has come to be most associated with Ada Salter is the wonderfully named Tree of Heaven.
From heaven to hell
It is a fine looking tree. Originating from China, Trees of Heaven were introduced to Britain in the 1700s and they have been in and out of fashion ever since. Originally regarded as attractive curiosities, they’re large trees with huge, almost palm-frond-like leaves and conspicuous reddish seeds that appear in the high canopies in late summer. In the early twentieth century, their pollution tolerance, rapid growth and easy propagation (remarkably, their seedlings and suckers can grow several metres in the first few years) made them good candidates for industrial cities so they were particularly recommended for planting in the ‘smokier districts’ of east and south London.
The Tree of Heaven appeared to be a wonder tree for a politician with a transformative vision, and after she encountered the species in Paris, Ada was apparently smitten. They appeared to be perfect for Bermondsey, and large examples from her era can still be seen today – Long Lane between Tower Bridge Road and Borough tube station is lined with fine, mature specimens. But while they are large and fast growing, Trees of Heaven are also short-lived – they’re over-mature at 70 – which means the Borough trees might only have a few years left. When their time comes, they’ll no doubt be replaced with a different species.
Since the mass planting days of the last century, Trees of Heaven have become invasive, springing up in front gardens, railway embankments, cracks in walls – anywhere they can find a niche. Back in 2006, The Guardian ran a story about the likelihood of their becoming a problem, and today they are evidence of London’s warming climate. The charity Plantlife, recommends they be added to the government’s list of harmful invasive species. Only a few decades ago they did not pose a problem, but today they are starting to appear on derelict land (not much of that in London), and are forming linear copses along railway lines. There’s a burgeoning patch at Clapham Junction, for instance.
Not far from Tower Bridge on Druid Street, opposite the railway arches, is the Alfred Salter Playground. Here, on a raised flowerbed between the swings and the flats of the Fair Street Estate (typical of Bermondsey’s low-rise interwar developments), a broad-crowned Tree of Heaven marks the vault where Alfred and Ada Salter’s ashes are interred (below). It’s between 20 and 30 years old, and one of just a handful deliberately planted in the city in recent years.
We can’t lay the blame for the liking Trees of Heaven have taken to London’s twenty-first century climate on Ada Salter, but no doubt her championing of the species in Bermondsey led to their popularity in other parts of London and, when the time – or rather the climate – was right, they opportunistically made their move.
Trees of Heaven show how just a degree or two’s rise in temperature – enough to ensure frosts are now very rare in central London – can start to have a significant impact on the environment. Another species, Buddleia (the bush with spikes of purple flowers which grows everywhere in London) was identified as invasive a hundred years ago having been introduced in the previous century. It spread along the rapidly expanding Victorian railway network and now grows from Scotland to Cornwall. In the future, Trees of Heaven might do something similar, and they have some unfortunate characteristics: they barely support other lifeforms, so their biodiversity value is low, and they have a way of poisoning other plants in order to ensure they can dominate.
In some parts of North America and Australia they have become such a problem, they are called Trees of Hell.
As inquisitive creatures with more than a little squirrel DNA in our genes, we humans have sought out new plants and animals to domesticate in order to beautify our lives, but while our motivations are good, we never learn from our mistakes. So what can we expect next, lemon trees going feral? Olives sprouting from railway embankments? Avocados growing in London gardens?
You can follow Paul on social media @thestreettree.
Buy a copy of Paul’s book, London is a Forest.
And you can pick up the Great Trees of London map here.