If your dream of a pastoral idyll extends as far as enjoying greenery as long as you’re still within touching distance of amazing art – The National Gallery we’re looking at you – and a Mega Greggs, then a special event taking place in Trafalgar Square might be of interest to you.
At sunrise today (Wednesday April 27) London’s most famous square, site of numerous NYE and victory celebrations, rallies and protests, went back to its roots and became green once more. A rewilding transformed the iconic space to help Londoners imagine what their capital looked like pre-urbanisation. In an ambitious move which could potentially make the installation of the Chelsea Flower Show look like the potting of a single window box, trees, meadow flowers and plants combined to create an oasis in the heart of the city. The aim of the event is to inspire Londoners to get back to nature and encourage them to get involved in rewilding their own spaces.
While London, relatively speaking, is a green city – nearly half of Greater London is categorised as ‘green’ as a third of the capital is made up of parks and natural habitats such as common land, heaths and woods, and about 15 percent consists of private gardens – all those trees and plants are having to work some serious overtime to help us breathe, as London is also a very polluted city, regularly reaching high alert levels of contaminated air. That’s why rewilding is so important for us city-dwellers.
Rewilding is the principle that, given the right tools, nature has the power to heal itself and, by extension, us too. The aim is to restore ecosystems to the point where nature can take care of itself, and re-establish our relationship with the natural world as nurturing rather than destructive. Beyond the plants and nice spaces to relax in, rewilding helps create cleaner air, foster more biodiversity and tackle climate change. All great reasons to bowl down the Strand to see what’s occurring.
More details and images of the transformed space will emerge throughout the day, but our prediction is that it might be a bit greener than last year’s Trafalgar Square Christmas tree.
In other London tree news, here’s one for the Queen’s Jubilee.
101 Best things to do in London.
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