The Hoxton Chronicle. 062 - Wild Hoxton.

There is an inner world of backyards, courts and industrial sheds concealed behind the building terraces that line the streets of Hoxton. The street facades are formally designed with ordered windows and carefully considered brick and stone ornament. These backyards are havens of neglected informality and rough and ready utility. The yard is filled with dozens of planted pots; some are carefully tended. Others are abandoned, sprouting tough weeds that thrive despite rain, shine, drought and lack of attention. A bricky backyard ecology has emerged, changing with the cycle of the seasons, exploiting every crack and defect where a tenacious root can discover a connection to earth and water.

This urban pattern of formal street frontages and informal backs facing into private compounds and yards was strongly disapproved of by modernist planners and architects. They equated the formal front and informal back of buildings as an inauthentic form of architecture in which formal street façades disguised or hid the ‘honest’ function within. They imagined a new city comprised of buildings as objects standing in open space, with every façade openly proclaiming its function and purpose. Concealment and privacy were regarded as unnecessary pretensions of the pre-modern world. Many parts of Hoxton were designed and built according to these radical modernist planning ideas. Walking through these experimental places now, it seems that, without the conventional structure of public fronts and private backyards, the city becomes hard to navigate and confusing to inhibit.

My Haberdasher Street studio window faces into a quiet urban sanctuary. I rarely see people in this haven except during the warm summer days. I never tire of looking at this jumbled landscape of walls, windows, balconies, and roofs. Although it is an entirely human-made architectural landscape it is abundantly alive.

Under every plant pot, you will discover a knot of squirming worms, woodlice, and beetles squeezed together in the tiny space between the tarmac yard and the pot. How and why they choose this constricted home is a mystery, but they are there under every pot, somehow making a living.

Many insects live in the climbing creeper that covers the yard wall and sheds. Some fly together in dancing clouds; others dash from place to place as if hunting for something. Spiders prey on the insects and the birds prey on the spiders. The creeper also shelters a vast colony of snails who live out their quiet lives, laying trails across every surface.

A flock of sparrows come chirping and fighting into the yard to feast at the bird feeders we leave for them each day. They are generally accompanied by a pair of slow-moving pigeons who are too large and lumbering to use the hanging feeders and instead feed on the seeds dropped by the argumentative sparrows.

Dogs and cats also use the yard, but these domesticated creatures have had the wilderness bred out of them becoming docile home accessories to be pampered and served by their loving owners. They seem less urgently alive than the hungry sparrows.

Last week, a sudden hush came to the yard. Our regular gang of Hoxton sparrows had scarpered.

I looked out to find a magnificent Sparrow Hawk surveying the yard with a sharp eye for any birds willing to take chances with this ferocious hunter. The presence of the great bird felt like a good omen or sacred visitation.

Conventional planning considers the city as a monoculture of humankind and the green belt as a constraining natural sanctuary. In Hoxton, the teaming wildlife in the backyards, the foxes that patrol the streets by night, and the roofs in the yard by day suggest that the city shelters a complex alternative ecology and another type of nature.