surveilling place

Tachbrook Country Park

I'm starting a new project connected to my Silverhouses project from 2018-19 which grew from exploring housing development near my home in Whitnash, on the Southern edge of Leamington Spa. It's 2022 now, the 4,000 new houses promised have now mostly been built and, at last, a strip of low-lying land around the periphery will be handed over to the District Council and made into a country park called Tachbrook Country Park. Pretty plans for community gardens, paths, playgrounds and scattered orchards have been published and signs warning 'Private Land Do Not Enter Until Land Is Transferred' have been erected next to already worn footpaths.  

I'm interested in human impact on land, on changing land use, on sharing / not sharing land with non-human lives, territory, boundaries, entangled lives, waste, litter, traces of human inhabitation. Silverhouses was inspired by anger and incredulity over imposition of human global capitalism on green belt land, and of litter and construction waste infiltrating it, and in that light this new activity seems conciliatory and hopeful. I wonder what I will find over the next few years. 

I spent 2 hours wandering around. Orienting myself and getting a view of a space. The terrain currently varies between grass-land and bog by the spinny and stream. There are three soak-aways providing clay-banked ponds - one of which is large. As yet these seem to be the only areas that have experienced much intervention and planting. There are a couple of mainly hawthorne, elder and blackthorne copses that look ignored - I can tell this by the lack of litter. Overall, except from by the hedge between the houses and stream that catches litter in the wind and is on the main dog-walking stretch, there is little litter. By the copses the land is squashy, almost like a moor in parts, which shows it hasn't been trampled much. I hope pathways can help keep it this way as these parts are rich in diverse life.

The stream also is clean, and clear with collapsed mature willow trees that are creating pools I suspect these were originally planted for whithy growing. There are rodent holes in the muddy bank. I suspect these are rat holes but need to do more research to confirm that.

This is one of the first properly warm days of spring and therefore there are lots of newly hatched butterflies - I spotted brimstone, tortoiseshell and peacocks - and lots of bees.

I didn't come prepared to make a collection on this visit, instead I recorded all of my two hour walk - there is an excerpt on my Soundcloud - but I did rescue a 2m square bundle of HDPE caught in the hedge which may come in handy for a future work.

On my next visit I plan to carry out a square metre survey over a couple of different kinds of terrain.