Want to improve your city? Buy a plant pot
You can use our mews as a cut through if you are on foot or a bicycle but a strategically placed bollard means that cars can’t. So, apart from the occasional van dropping off a delivery, it’s mostly car-free and echoes with a shifting tide of voices – young children being dropped off at the nearby primary school in the morning, a tipsy drinker from the neighbouring pub making an apologetic call home at 23.00. I love it all. This is life in the centre of the city. Though, it’s a little irksome when someone sits on my doorstep to smoke a spliff. Well, they never offer to share.
On Saturday afternoon my neighbour Frank spotted me and laughed at my appearance (an increasingly common occurrence these days). My hands were covered with soil and I had managed to smear compost across my face. On someone younger this might have been a bit of a marine-on-exercises look but, dressed as I was in an outfit of old, clashing gym gear, it was more Dad’s Army. “Shall I take a picture?” he asked. “I see all those nice ones of you on Instagram but I could show people the real Monocle editor in chief.”
My fetching appearance was the result of a day spent tending to the pots of plants that pack out the front of our house – and the three neighbouring ones that I had been given permission (I think) to help colonise. It’s the point in the year when irises are closing down their show and the agapanthuses are about to take to the stage. There’s also oleander, silver birches, grasses and lavender. As I moved things around and repotted shrubs that had outgrown their digs, a female blackbird would dart down to see if I had perhaps dislodged a snail. It’s not perfect by any means but people stop to smell a flower and run a hand over the leaves.
We’ve been running a series of talks at The Ned in the City of London thanks to a nice man there called Victor. On Monday he invited us – Josh, Carlota, Lex and me – to talk about our forthcoming Quality of Life Survey. The categories are pleasingly shaken up this year (just wait until you see our July/August double issue. And, hey, why not subscribe?). The audience had great questions, we talked about trust and about how a fear of crime risks curtailing your freedoms (in London you’d be a fool for taking your phone out on the street without first checking for muggers on e-bikes). And, I explained how, for me, some of this was eased into the background by focusing on the small acts of urban generosity that happen in a city such as London every day – the shopkeeper who puts out a bowl of water for a parched pooch or a bench for seniors keen to pause. Or people placing plants outside their homes. Tiny interventions that can, sometimes, humanise the city. Make you see that most people are good.
A short digression – we’ll be back on the main path in seconds, promise. I was recently interviewing a candidate for a role at Monocle and asked them to explain how their title was produced. They told me about their policy of “publish, then polish” – in short, whack copy up on the website and try to tidy it up in the days that followed. Then they said, “Do you think anyone cares about how things look these days?” Although my neighbour Frank might have some disquieting photographic evidence to the contrary, I do care, actually, and I do think that we all respond to moments of considered beauty.
And now here comes the bit where we can tie this column together and I can let you get on with your day.
For Thursday’s outing of our cities podcast The Urbanist, I interviewed David Godshall at the Californian landscape architecture firm Terremoto. The company makes amazing public spaces, including in Denver where it has engineered a piece of rewilding in the heart of downtown (you can also read an interview with Godshall here). It’s work that is underpinned by deep thinking and a radical manifesto for change in the landscape industry. But Terremoto is also a group of people who know that, yes, we respond to beauty, that plants have the power to transform our cities. And that communities, citizens and workers need to be pulled into this story. And blackbirds too.
PS If you care about cities, about doing things differently, come to this year’s Quality of Life Conference. It’s in Barcelona from 4 to 6 September. And I promise to put on my nice clothes.
