#England should’ve been designed to look ugly as shit

[elabelll]

I’m gonna be real with you guys; as much as I love the design of Alfred F Jones and think he’s adorable and 1000% peak…

I do think he should’ve been designed differently

[thewritinglist]

Thoughts on the Pigeons of Nottingham

I never realised how large and invasive the pigeon population of Nottingham is until I decided to watch them. They are everywhere. Dominating the Old Market Square, yes, but also nesting on hidden ledges and balconies you can only see from upper floors of the taller buildings. They walk their staccato strut, waiting for us to throw them our scraps. The way the pigeon reclaimed the city was like a long con, a slow burn of adaptation, a subtle pushback against urbanisation.

Pigeons and, to a lesser extent, seagulls, domesticated us, and they didn’t let us know it was happening until it was too late. These brilliant creatures have accomplished this task by letting other animals do the real hard work, then taking advantage. They were the ones who conned – or convinced – us into taking wild animals into our homes, giving them nourishment and shelter and only asking for affection in return. Objectively, this is an imbalanced relationship.

Cats and dogs softened us up. Our instinctive aversion to animals with claws and sharp teeth has dampened. Now, even lions and tigers are cute, adorable animals to be cuddled and played with. Pigeons saw this change in the relationship, and seized their chance. They’re not vermin: No, they’re foxes of the sky. Foxes are typically said to be cunning and strategic, but foxes are yet to migrate away from their natural habitat. The occasional story of a fox sneaking into a suburban back garden pales in comparison to the pigeons making home of city centres. Seagulls sit in-between these two –  adapting to humanity like pigeons, and sometimes nesting in the concrete jungle, but they spend most of their time on the coast, scavenging with less subtlety.

Pigeons took a risk with this plan. The urban environment is not safe for them. Some people hate pigeons, shooing them away in frustration or anger. The threat of culls hangs over their heads. This is a shame. Pigeons do no meaningful damage. Who cares if their shit does damage to car paint – that is the most aesthetic damage they could inflict. I’ve seen the dangers of their new lifestyle. An image that will stay with me perhaps indefinitely is the sight of a pigeon on a pavement, head removed from its body and nowhere to be seen. I looked around, but was running late, and couldn’t see the head of attacker. Its spine protruded from its neck awfully, a savage reminder that the rural dangers of the food chain were replaced by the urban dangers of the car bumper.

To the seagull. Whilst pigeons have learned patience and urban survival, seagulls have seen the people come to them, and haven’t learned to get food from humans with optimal efficiency. They expect the generosity of humans, and will steal if it takes too long. I’ve seen a seagull snatch a near-whole pasty, fly off with it and promptly drop it straight into the sea. This ruined the pasty, and theft like this sums up their flawed appeal. Seagulls need to learn the value of patience, for cast off chips and scraps of pasty. Otherwise, seagulls will become an irritating side-effect of a trip to the seaside, even if it is just animal nature.

You wouldn’t imagine Nottingham to be home to many seagulls, and sadly you’d be wrong. They’re everywhere. I can only imagine they’re trying to find a train to Skeggy, or Skegness as the rest of the country calls it. Seagulls are to pigeons what Skeggy is to Brighton. There is much less charm there. Rougher around the edges.

Coming home by train from the west and I’m rewarded with a view of its history. Face forward, as all good travellers do, and I spot the castle on the left. The train lines run under Carrington Street, so I pass through a mini tunnel before emerging out into the platforms. Up the stairs, through the barriers and out the lobby brings you onto Carrington. I exit to the right of the station, onto Station Street, which has been slowly pedestrianised, with a slow cull of the taxis who pooled there.

Slowly, Nottingham has improved its image, updating streets and neighbourhoods. Nottingham was a city born, like most of England’s cities, on a river, the Trent. The city sits just next to the river, a sign on Trent Bridge marking the city limits. The city divides Nottingham Forest (county) and Notts County (city). Confusing, I agree. The city is gentrifying itself and a hipster generation is encroaching on a traditionally working class midlands area. Hockley and the Lace Market are full of the type of establishments that put peaches on a pizza, presumably for the rhyme and not the taste. Despite this absolute scandal, I’m enjoying these changes. They’re so superficial, such surface level changes to the city, but they’re pretty, like a tattoo over a surgery scar. They’re now places to buy indie music and stock up on clothes from trendy second hand shops.

Walking up Carrington, the pigeons are congregating outside Gregg’s and the other food places. The road also passes over the canal, which runs through the city like a vein, carrying cheery old people in houseboats instead of blood cells, and clots with fly fishers. Pigeons love the canal, particularly the dark corner tunnel, where they can hide in the rafters and peer down, ready to put the fear of shit into me. Something about this tunnel has a strange intimidating effect on me. Everytime I enter the darkness, I assume a cyclist will come around the corner and knock me down into the canal. That or a pigeon will shit on me.

Carrington leads to Broadmarsh, a stubbornly ugly area that refuses to gentrify. The shopping centre is ugly. The car park is ugly. The bus station is ugly. The more I type it, the uglier the word ugly appears. In 2014, the city council decided to split the city into quarters. This should’ve been the ugly quarter. There is no beautifying here, no gentrifying these buildings. Their greyness fits the stereotype of the pigeon. The pigeon is a dirty, grey animal, a feral, flying rat. Some people still avoid the street pigeon, imagining that close-ish contact will pass over waves of disease. This attitude would’ve been helped during the era of the Plague, but it’s less necessary with the QMC.

Doves get the glory. Doves are sent by Noah to find land, to seek out the hope of a new life. They’re white, animal symbols for hope and peace. This, even though they are biologically close. They form the bird family Columbidae. Pigeon is French and derives from Latin, ‘pipio’, which meant a chirping bird. Dove is Germanic, and refers to its flight. The greatest glory a pigeon can hope for is posthumous, after being sent to die in a human’s war as they deliver small messages. A scarcely imaginable two-hundred thousand pigeons were provided to the British army in World War Two.

Humanity’s need to personify speaks to our anthropocentric worldview. We need to understand the world around us, beyond the relatively simple theory of food chains and animal instincts. No, they must be savvy, clever, cunning, or cruel, cowardly, vicious. We evolved beyond our base needs, for food, shelter, and pro-creation. Our needs are much more complicated and unnecessary. I don’t need to watch the latest season of the sitcom Silicon Valley, but it would make me happy. I don’t need to write, but it makes me happy. We have ascended Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and can’t imagine animals are yet to climb.

The Broadmarsh is Nottingham’s designated bad shopping centre. For some reason, towns require A) more than one and B) for one of them to be significantly worse than the other. The Broadmarsh managed, a few years ago, to swallow up the good music shop, Fopp, which gave it a little credibility, but it still feels cheaper than the Victoria Centre, with its regal name and fancy fountain. The Broadmarsh contains posters that promise an exciting redevelopment, but I struggle to become enthused.  

Stanford Street is one of Nottingham’s streets that attracts street performers. On any given day, you can be treated to some millennial busker, dressed scruffily and strumming a guitar as they sing Oasis. Stanford, like a decent amount of Nottingham’s city centre, is pedestrianised. This is a natural effect of being so old. Nottingham, named in Celtic Britain as Tigguo Cobauc, or City of Caves. Cities that predate cars naturally resist them. They’re built for the meandering routes that humans take. Old cities wind and bend in a way cars don’t want to. If you ever walk off the Market Square, past the statue of Brian Clough, you’ll see King Street slope down towards you, then make a hairpin turn to Queen Street, and slope up. It is the kind of truly pointless and convoluted piece of town planning that cars require.

Stanford leads towards the Old Market Square, the city’s heart and hub for pigeons and humans alike. This is where you get the clearest view of the human-pigeon relationship, and how one sided it is. Pigeons are like poachers, the goal-hangers of the food chain, not interested in the build-up play of seeking out and killing their prey. Here, the pigeons stalk the concrete, their little heads bobbing back and forth, and avoid the fountains. We feed them our leftovers, individuals serving as scouts for the huddled masses to follow, quickly overwhelming your feet if you don’t throw your bread far enough.

The Market Square, which only occasionally houses a market, serves as the centre to the city, home to the lion statues and council house. I’ve become fascinated by the reaction to pigeons. It disheartens me to see children running at them, trying to intimidate. But there is affection too. Feeding them is an act of affection, implicitly agreeing to their scheme. Feeding any animal as a human, as a dominant species, is a generous donation. We ordain ourselves as the masters, and allow lesser beings to feed on our scraps.

The city is the clearest example of humanity’s need to take dominion and domination over animals. The Broadmarsh centre is named for the area, which was historically boggy. But now you cannot picture in your mind how a boggy marsh could have existed where pale-grey concrete now carpets the ground. The history here is hidden away. The castle here holds within it all the folklore surrounding Robin Hood, history’s first and greatest socialist, but the city doesn’t promote the Hood mythos. There’s a few streets around the castle area: Maid Marian Way, Friar Lane, both roads where my father has worked, but that’s it. Torvill and Dean have a housing estate, there’s a banner near the train station for Byron, Stilitoe and D.H Lawrence. Some history is literally hidden – beyond a concreted over marsh, but caves, networked under the city.

Caves – they scream history. The ones that snake under Nottingham take you into the city’s medieval era, and there’s more than five-hundred in total. They’re so common that a new cave was found in March. They’re the kind of historical feature that instinctively grab a young boy’s imagination, for whom the Vikings were not raping, pillaging invaders but awesome, cool-helmeted heroes.   Caves, by definition, have to be old, have to have been put to use centuries ago, had to have been a necessity in some way. Some of Nottingham’s caves were used as pub basements, where the barrels were kept. Clearly, a significant necessity.

I’m headed home. Where I live – middle class, fairly affluent, tennis club – we don’t have pigeons, let alone seagulls. It’s the kind of suburb that attracts foxes, but I’m yet to see one. We don’t see many pigeons because it’s not their home anymore. The pigeon has evolved to get its food from thrown away scraps and nibbling at weeds and worms that have found homes in miniature edgelands breaking through the concrete. My home is, in a surreal sense, more rural than a pigeon’s.

Maybe pigeons need a rebrand, a marketing campaign. Pigeons are not at home in the suburbs as cats, dogs and smaller, cuter birds are, but maybe that should be their next move, the next step in their evolution from street rat to domesticated pet. They do have a curious history with being owned as pets: seeing someone with a pet pigeon casts them as eccentric, off-kilter, slightly abnormal. Domestication may be crucial to the pigeon’s long-term survival. Animals, sadly, need either humanity’s hunger or affection, ideally both, to survive. Anne Matthews defined the moment animals lose this as when "humans stop saying 'Aww' and start calling 911." The cultural carrying capacity has kept cats and dogs warm in our homes, and pigs and chickens plump and juicy.

The lack of pigeons in my suburb, which has fields and the Trent beyond them, is a curious testament to their own urbanisation. Eric Simms, in ‘The Secret Life of the Street Pigeon’, describes seeing a pigeon board the London Underground at Kilburn, go two stops and exit at Finchley Road. I love this story because I love evolution and adaptation. It’s fascinating to me to see a winged creature take the tube, presumably without paying. It’s a sad necessity that humanity has forced upon wild animals, but they’re finding ways around our development.

The Industrial Revolution, the historical nail in the coffin for pastoral life, gave Nottingham its textile industry, but also slums. This is the folly of urbanisation and capitalism – there is always a loser. They are, respectively, the environment, and the worker. The two combine when we decide that nature, systems much greater than ourselves, are either financially advantageous or problematic. Forests can be destroyed until the consumers decide they can’t, and then pictures of executives holding spades and young trees start appearing. Capitalism cannot allow for such trivialities like saving the planet, or supporting the worker. Look at the Market Square: Why does it have to be so concrete? Why can’t grass grow in Nottingham’s centre? Plant turf, plant trees, litter the ground with seeds and let us all breathe a little easier!

I think I’m attached to my hometown, when a song comes on, and it makes me question my affections. The song – You Don’t Know My Name, The Kinks, 1972 – takes me away. I’m on a train in London, it’s dark, and I’ve just been to visit my godmother. This is a vivid image in my mind, looking out at dark London from Blackfriars, happy after a fun visit. But I don’t have an image like this in my mind for Nottingham. Perhaps, after nearly twenty-two years, it’s all melted together in my memory, which is admittedly poor. Maybe I should move away if I want to create memories that have a song tied into them. Maybe, like the pigeon, I need to adapt to my surroundings. They surpassed edgelands to fully take the city. If edgelands represent nature and man’s struggle, pigeons are the envoys, ambassadors from nature to our lands. We cannot allow ourselves to war with nature anymore – it is one we will both lose. Instead, let’s take in pigeons, marvel at their adaptability, and find the path to peaceful co-existence.