Wet and wild

Where I used to live in London - Putney, on the riverside to the west of the centre - has lots of open public land around it, and the riverside towpath running for miles to the west. Once you leave the residential streets and pass some playing fields, you come to some forbidding railings and embankments which, in my childhood, looked mysterious and off-limits. And so they were, for these were reservoirs: we would see them on TV, once the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race started to get aerial coverage, but otherwise not at all. Since then, they have been converted into the London Wetlands Centre, a combination of educational facility and bird sanctuary.

Around two sides of the site, a succession of areas shows different sorts of wetland habitat and the birds that live in them.

Some of the birds obviously believe that the paths are theirs as well:



Here some red-breasted geese line up without any sign of concern at the people watching them:



But these are carefully managed spaces; with due acknowledgement to their relative artificiality, as well as the principles of recycling, there are sculptures made of scrap materials:



Other areas and buildings provide educational spaces (there are fairground games to explain the water cycle and the maintenance of wetland biodiversity, for example), but as you walk around, there are vistas of apparently isolated wildness:



Most of the site is left for non-human visitors. We humans can only look at them at a distance, from various hides:



Choose your viewing angle right, and you could be miles away on the marshes of the Thames Estuary:



But if you look up, you see not only herons, swans and Highland cattle in the water-meadows - you see the expensive apartments whose development helped provide all this:



And you remember it's all within half an hour of central London:

www.wwt.org.uk/visit-us/london