London Calling

Magpie, Bristol - photograph by Jo Sinclair

I want to go on safari. I want to see big wild beasts in close-up. But it's not the African Big Five I aspire to. I'm plotting a route across the greasy, diesel-smogged streets of London. This article in The Guardian is my inspiration. Street artist ATM paints British birds 3 metres high on brickwork, concrete or garage doors in an attempt to 'return the spirit of the bird to the place' it once belonged.

If I stared at a reedbed in a Cambridgeshire nature reserve for long enough I might, if lucky, eventually make out a reed-coloured bittern in strange camouflaging stance, holding its beak erect like a reed. Why would I want to see one grafittied on a wall in Bethnal Green? Street art reclaims the streets. It's a carnival procession trompe l'oeil in paint that reaches the parts planners and developers can't reach. Creativity and imagination mushroom overnight in dank corners. Street art redefines the places mapped out by A-Z or Street View.

I once photographed a mistle thrush visiting a burbling water feature behind Liverpool Street station. Lost in the marble-effect neo-classical post-modern features, the bird looked as though it had landed on the moon, but it was probably just as happy as the colony of sparrows I found cheeping among the vines and lunch-hour suits at Broadgate Arena nearby. Grey wagtails nested behind my window when I lived on Kingsland Road and I walked past roosting herons standing on the pavement in Hyde Park on my way home from work. They seemed like spirits of London's past, or a thread pulling me back to my rural roots, but perhaps they were the future. Maybe the formerly extinct great bustard, now re-introduced on Sailsbury Plain, will strut our streets and piazzas when we are long gone.