On Harlow, memory, nature and the past

Beginning to explore the confluence of outdoor spaces, modernist utopias and the way stories of 'rough areas' are framed

The copse has always seemed like a grand name for the narrow stretch of woodland that separates my parents’ estate from the next one. About 50 metres wide and a quarter of a mile long, it runs along a deep ditch which in summer fills with pools of water, discarded energy drink cans and the occasional shopping trolley from the local Lidl. Mature sycamore, horse chestnut and ash once blocked the view between our home on those on the far side. Today, ash dieback and the depredations of increasingly fierce winter storms mean that you can spy into neighbouring living rooms throughout the year, squirrel drays and the empty nests of magpies visible in the high branches in the depths of winer.

My mum christened it the copse when we moved into the empty, dilapidated house in Willowfield, a standard issue estate in the south of Harlow, Essex in the summer of 1988. It’s been called that ever since. My children and my nieces know it as such and share a deep fascination with the trees that lie beyond the fence at the end of the garden. When we moved in, the garden itself had a wild, untamed edge which seemed to extend from the copse all the way to the vast patio windows that looked down its 100 foot expanse. Back then, the fence had collapsed and the grass stood as high as my six year old shoulders. There was a sense of wild excitement as my dad pulled the starter on the hired strimmer a week after we arrived and worked his way across the lawn, taking things back to a number one all over.

Once we caught a clear sight of the far end of this huge new play area, my sister and I were immediately drawn to the towering ash that abuts the copse, captured within the boundaries of our new home. A split trunk made it easy to gain a foothold and climb ten feet or so into its branches, offering a glimpse of the promised land beyond. A huge bank of nettles separated the far side of the fence from the overgrown footpath which followed a winding route from the nearest main road into a dip behind a set of garages, close to Passmores House, a Georgian manor which at the time was home to the Harlow Museum. It acted as a reminder that parts of where we lived were anything but ‘new’ despite the epithet which was always leant to the town we called home.

As we grew older and the reins of childhood were loosened, my friends or my extended network of cousins and I would venture along the path and down into the ditch on our bikes. Deep within its walls the world above and around us seemed impossibly distant and yet here we were in a town that was home to more than 80,000 people, a place created and developed with the express purpose of rehousing those who had been displaced by Luftwaffe bombs and those who had come from other shores to help build it. A Utopian, post-war vision where council housing was not seen as a byword for ghettoisation, but rather a paragon of social and human progress after a time of great strife. Of course, we weren’t aware of this as kids under the age of ten. This was home and weren’t all homes like this?

It’s only as time has passed that I have grown to appreciate the egalitarian and idealistic plan to which the place almost all of my family stills calls home is built. The wide green spaces which separate large swathes of the town; the tangle of cycle lanes, set away from the main roads, which make use of the one time country tracks which connected the seven villages around which architect Frederick Gibberd based his futuristic New Town; the sporadic placement of pioneering sculptures by icons of 20^th century art, from Henry Moore to August Rodin to Barbara Hepworth; the long, wide back gardens, replete with brick built sheds, perfect for large beds of scarlet geraniums and the rich scent of glowing French marigolds in summer, the ultimate space for growing families to play in; the vast, award winning landscaped Town Park, home to wild concerts in the 1970s ; and the community focused ‘hatches’ with convenience shops and pubs, built to bring newcomers together.

This is, of course, just the start of the story, one which encompasses great deprivation, a loss of confidence, the excitement and ultimate failure of Right To Buy, and a wider going inward indicative of our individualistic and fearful age. But ride those cycles lanes, explore those fields and woods, listen to the sound of the brooks passing beneath footbridges that lead to the still busy town centre, and there is a hum here, a sound of the past saying this must be the place. Look hard enough, and you can still sense hope.

I was pushing my daughter on the swing my dad had strung up on the stout branch of the epic leyllandii tree which stands next to recently coppiced ash when I heard the shout from the far side of the fence. It was one of joy. I left E swinging to and fro and climbed into my favourite old tree, each foot placement a muscle memory and looked over to see my son, M, and my dad waving back, M riding high on his shoulders. The nettles are long gone, the path now almost against the border between home and the copse. His excitement was infectious, a new perspective on a familiar place gained, a sense of newness that felt at once purely his but also very much mine. I was his age when my parents got the keys to their home, keen to see what lay beyond the confines of our garden, unaware that not everywhere is this green, this verdant or, in places, so brutally left to its own devices. His wonder imbued me with a need to go back, to search for a way to see this place now as I had seen it then and to show to others that Harlow wasn’t just a punchline on an election campaign news piece about Brexit, poverty and the need to ‘level up’. Utopia could be found here, and I needed to go and find it.