Reading The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes
Chapter Hare, Commons, carnival, space and rave
The Open Spaces Society was founded in 1865, initially as the Commons Preservation Society. This was expanded to ‘the Commons, Open Spaces and Footpaths Preservation Society’ before the current shortened title was adopted in 1982.
The chapter begins with cities: The city is a spell cast in steel, stone, tarmac and glass… a network of ideologies concreted into architecture and roads that direct our actions and organise our thoughts/’ He considers the nature of space. Where we play our lives out. Not just a backdrop but a protagonist. Foucault, spatial politics the inreraction of societies with the places they created was the central theme of modernity’
The birth of Epping
1864 William Whittaker Maitland, High Sheriff of Essex, inherited Woodford Hall and rights of 1,120 acres of Loughton including much of the common ground of Epping Forest. He had plans to develop, expand the farming, improve it. So up went fences. Commoners who had previously had rights to lop wood on the land were now excluded. Thomas Wilingale and two sons were caught arrested and convicted under the 1820 Malicious Trespass Act, sentenced to two months hard labour during which one son died. The case became a cause celebre among the champagne socialists among them John Ruskin, John Stuart Mills and WIlliam Morris. Octavia Hill, a central member of this group, championed space as a direct influence on the interior wellbeing of a person. She saw that provision of space in a hard working often dark life, could alleviate the pressures on the self. In 1865 she set up the Commons Preservation Society. They offered Thomas Wilingale their support and paid court case costs. Willingale died 4 years into the case, ostracised and unable to find work among a community who were Lord Maitland’s tenants. But his case was taken up by the Corporation of London and in 1879 Parliament finally passed the Epping forest Act, which stipulated that the forest would always remain ‘unenclosed and unbuilt on as an open space for the recreation and enjoyment of the people’. The Commons Preservation Society went on to save Hampstead Health from gravel extraction, Wimbledon Common from building development. As her crowning achievement, in 1895 Octavia Hill co-foundered the National Trust. (Trespass, by Nick Hayes)
Iris Murdoch – The Soverignity of Good: ‘I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but the kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.’
Sweet memories of walking part of Epping when Barry owned a house in Forest Gate.
Kaliwood 