Spending time in nature is good for our mental health and wellbeing. This might seem obvious, but it’s an idea now supported by reams of evidence-based research. I need to be in the green, but I also need culture and cities and grime and bustle. Is it possible to have both? 

It has been years since I roamed around London’s streets. Living within easy reach made them keystones of my life’s map and one more part of myself to peel away, like wet clothes in a hurry, when we left for a new life in the South West in 2016. Moving away would be no barrier, we said. But it was, and until now we hadn’t been back.

Nature in the city

At Val’s flat in Putney where we are staying for the weekend, trains rumble the other side of a narrow strip of trees shading the courtyard. We have slept in a high, metal-framed bed, like the grandparents’ bed in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It is spread with a crisp white eiderdown and topped with a patterned cover and makes the little room feel like a cottage. When we’d arrived, after a day of harrying, I’d gone out into the cool air of the courtyard garden to get my bearings. Two silver orbs shone on plinths amongst the foliage, a blackbird bobbed on a sycamore branch, watching me, an invader, coming into his space. The green felt grounding, but it was strange too, to see nature here in the city. Like a tiger in a cage, it felt off kilter. 

It’s taken us around seven million years to evolve to where we are today Prof Yoshifumi Miyazaki says in his book, ‘Walking in the Woods’, 99.9% of which time we’ve spent living in a natural environment. It’s what we, as human animals, have evolved to fit and respond to, what our skills and aptitudes are designed for. While cities aren’t intrinsically bad for us, he says, it’s going to take a while for our genes to catch up.

Close to culture

But already, only a few hours away from normal life and the soft green of Devon living I am loving being close to culture, to the feeling that ideas and art matter. Inside, the flat is filled with artful curations. The lounge has a wooden floor, a black sofa scattered with carefully chosen cushions, art magazines, a pile of books on the floor and a record player. As the lights come on, shadows throw reflections on to the walls conjuring new scenes. I sit on the chaise longue in the window and watch youngsters, headphones and backpacks on, looking a little drawn, coming home from offices at the end of a working week. So this was where life was hiding – the streets of London were still a magnet for adventure and opportunity seekers if you could find, and afford, a living space. On the other side of the road, a young woman stops to look up at a flaming red acer stretching its arms across the face of a house like a Renaissance woman raising a fan. On the pavement an upstairs tenant has chained her bicycle to the lamp post, its handlebars hung with a string of faded plastic flowers.

Venturing out, we find that Friday night and Putney High street are a shining stream of cars, bikes and buses, and hovering above it a cacophony of sirens and horns. The rules of the road were different here; food delivery cyclists jockey us on the pavements, pass through red lights, and cycle up one way streets the wrong way; it pays to keep your wits about you. But although the air is more charged, it is just Crediton High Street with more of everything; more variety, people, money, urgency and competition. A poster pinned to a noticeboard advertises a self-defence class, ‘Protect yourself against knife crime’, it urges. 

Ghost ships in the streets

Walking back from the river after dinner I notice the way the roots of a London Plane have ruptured the tarmac, making varicose veins of the smooth skin of the city. I look for signs of wildlife in its canopy, half afraid to find anything living there. I imagine the trees, like ghost ships, sailing on uncrewed, though in truth, if I’d peeled back the bark I would have found life.

Recently I learned by talking with Alex, a writer living in Jakarta in Indonesia, that there are no green spaces in her city. Until she travelled to Europe, she told me, she hadn’t encountered the idea of city parks. In Jakarta, she says, all the land has been developed, the result of need, greed and corruption. To find green spaces you have to travel miles out of the city up into the mountains. Researching the trees in the neighbourhood of where we are staying I find that until 1889 Putney was part of leafy Surrey, a longstanding green respite for city dwellers. It and neighbouring Wimbledon have heath and commons that, ‘boast around 170 hectares of beautiful secondary woodland’, which conservationists and committed residents are working hard to preserve.

City under my fingernails

The next morning I leave my weekend flatmates behind and head into town on the train. Arriving at Waterloo, as I have done so many times before, I look, instinctively, for Dad on the platform, half expecting to see him amongst the crowds, heading off to work or waiting to meet me from the train. London is full of memories; I am 17, laughing uncontrollably with Em on the tube, 15 and hanging out with school friends in Covent Garden, 10 and clutching a Wham! record at Dad’s office party, 26 and drinking beer in sticky pubs with a boyfriend, 36 and going to poetry launches, galleries and plays with family and friends. I like the green and calm of Devon living, but there’s a bit of city under my fingernails and skin too.

At the Southbank Centre I climb the hushed stairs, once-more-for-luck, feeling the soft cushionedness of them, towards the Poetry Library on the top floor, thinking of Em pushing me, quaking, through the door for my first poetry reading. Downstairs the BFI film festival is in full swing and I browse the catalogue, toying with the idea of going to the director talk with Dennis Villneuve starting in half an hour – because this is the kind of possibility open to you in London on a wet Saturday lunchtime. In Crediton the shops close at 1pm.

Sensing life’s shape

Walking over Hungerford Bridge, I stop to look at the Thames and the skyline, noticing the flock of long necked cranes stretching up into the October sky – St Paul’s almost holding its nose amongst the showiness of the new – at all the buildings wrapped up like surprises. It’s quiet on the bridge – where have all the buskers and street people gone? I walk up Charing Cross Road and look for Nat, an old university friend, in her bookshop, but both are gone. I browse the antiquarian bookshops, hovering at doors like an uninvited guest. In Waterstones I pick up Kathleen Jamie’s Cairn. Her writing is so sharp and unsparing, about the environment and ageing and where we are, that it makes me weep as I leaf through its pages in the brightly lit shop. It goes straight to the heart of everything I’m feeling. Reflecting, at 60, on her life, she says in the prologue, ‘… the shape of my life’s arc is becoming visible, as it were. It is no longer beyond the horizon. Unless there is a sudden curtailment, I can sense the shape of my life pinned against the longer spans and cycles of the natural world I was born into.’ 

I emerge into the rain looking for Monmouth Coffee, on recommendation, in Seven Dials. Seven Dials is chi chi, and the coffee shop when I find it, even more so. It’s a tiny little whip of a cafe, people squeezed in a tight queue at the entrance and out of the door. I peer over their heads to see a line of bar stools filled with Saturday morning coffee-drinkers. A few people are sitting at the wooden tables on the pavement in the drizzle, but it’s not for me. I move on, passing The Breakfast Club, World Famous locally written in white cursive on the window, people queuing for brunch under umbrellas in that easy, we-have-all-the-time-in-the-world kind of way of the truly hip. I duck around glossy youngsters posing for photos with just-made purchases outside swanky shops as if it’s a professional shoot.

The city is about movement, hustle, progress, activity. There is a pace, a rhythm, a sound level to keep up with. You have to shout to be heard. As I am swept along on the tide of movement and possibility and eateries – so many eateries – it strikes me that we are nature, we are the wildlife and the animals; like so many bison grazing and moving on in search of new pasture.

A moment of stillness

I find a moment of stillness in the National Portrait Gallery sitting on a bench in a room filled with vast portraits of Stuart dignitaries. I can feel the underground rumbling below. Jewels shimmer, threaded into clothes, hair and fabrics, the plunder of the earth raised above ground. I am haunted by two paintings I have just seen. The first is Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, 1649-1734, with an unknown girl, by Pierre Mignard. The child, the information plate reads, ‘is probably an enslaved African girl working either for the Duchess or the painter. Her inclusion in the portrait, holding corals and pearls, was intended to illustrate the Duchess’s wealth and status and probably also to highlight the whiteness of the Duchess’s skin.’

So much acquisition of, and entitlement over, people’s lives and being.

Louise, an attendant to Charles II’s queen, the plate tells us, was encouraged by the French government, as a useful political asset, to become his mistress. The second painting is Nell Gwynne, 1651?-1687, by Simon Verelst. A self-made woman of celebrated talent and wit, she was painted bare-breasted to articulate her otherness, to place her, the boot of patriarchy firmly on her head, outside of society’s conventions and acceptability.

I burn with rage for all these women, these people, this land.

A drag queen stalks into the room followed by a gaggle of wide-eyed tourists. She is seven feet tall in staggeringly high heels, a string of pearls swinging around her neck. She moves between paintings, pointing at them with a cigarette holder as she enacts, in a stage voice, witty and dramatic take downs of the exploitation behind the images; the racism, homophobia and misogyny. We, her quiet audience, smile gleefully at her deft articulation of what we are thinking.

Coming home

By the end of the day I have walked 12 miles. My hips ache and my knee is starting to complain, but I am tired in the best way. I feel fed by the sights, sounds and smells, the people, culture and architecture of central London. Fed by Fleet Street with its history palpable but gone, by the pigheaded dignity of the Royal Courts of Justice, by Somerset House lit up and grand like a Paris nightscape on the Strand, by the bright lights of Chinatown and Theatreland, by the old-masters-pink-and-gold-glow lighting the buildings along the Thames. I have pressed my nose up against the history that has brought us to where we are, to the knowing, that things can, must change.

And I have come home to a part of me that I had left behind, the knowing that I, and probably all of us, need a bit of both, a bit of city and a bit of green. How to make that happen?