John Davidson

Autumnal London

In The Glasgow Herald, 21st October 1893.

It is only a few steps along the Regent's Park Road from Chalk Farm station to Primrose Hill, that most famous, most insignificant-looking and leftiest of London eminences. In the beginning of October I paid it my first visit. There were over a dozen people on its top, enjoying the fresh west wind and the great view of London...Albert Park, of which Primrose Hill is the centre, is a pendant to Regent's Park. It is a scraggy, doleful piece of ground, with only a few trees and a belt of rusty shrubbery. Through it and across the Albert Road I came to the canal which borders the north of Regent's Park. The stagnant olive green water was richly embroidered with an arabesque of leaves, golden, coppery, and crimson, and deep down lay purple patches of sky and fluttering odds and ends of white cloud.

'Leftiest' must allude to the Hill's popularity as a venue for radical demonstrations, most notably by the Chartists in 1856. Proposals for 'Albert Park,' a vast area which would have stretched north from Highbury Corner to Manor House, were first put forward in 1850. In the end only Finsbury Park was created, but the name persisted. Why the author thought that Primrose Hill, which was several miles away, was at its centre, is a mystery.

In Regent's Park the common poplars and the ashes were still as green as in June, but the plane trees, the limes, the black poplars, the elms, the chestnuts and the oaks were all deeply stained and tarnished, and, with the exception of the last, beginning to be stripped...A magnificent chestnut overhanging the lake caught the sunshine through a great rent in the cloudy curtain. Its lamps were all out long ago, but the broad sconces remained of bronze and gold, looking so natural, so inevitable, that it was impossible to resist the fancy of their having only been painted green in the summer. "Now," one felt, "the vulgar, stupid green has all been worn away, and we have the beautiful burnished metal"

The author subsequently made use of these nature notes in a poem.

Regent's Park

From November, 1905. Reprinted in Xavier Baron's London 1066-1914. Robertsbridge: Helm Information, 1997. 4 vols.

Poplars, ashes, flaunting wreaths of June,
Green among the tarnished oaks, outstayed
Lindens, plane-trees, chestnuts, elms, so soon
Ragged, draggle-tailed, or stripped and flayed.

Somnolent canal and urban world,
Lawn and lake with saffron leaves and red,
Crimson leaves and olive, brown and gold,
Bronze and topaz leaves engarlanded.
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