Ground Work by Tim Dee

Ground Work Reviews

• 
  Paul

  Over the past thirty years, Common Ground has sought to link the places to the people that live in them. Formed by Sue Clifford, Angela King and the late writer Roger Deakin, with the intention of bringing together arts and environmental interests and engaging local responses to those places on a daily basis. They have instigated events like Apple Days and been the driving force for those creating community woodlands. They are a brilliant charity that deserves more recognition, and the batten, or should I say hazel pole, has been passed to the safe hands of Adrian Cooper and Gracie Burnett of the fantastic Little Toller.
  
  In Ground Work, Tim Dee has collated the thoughts and observations of thirty-one of the finest landscape and natural history writers around. This poetic and literary collection is the response to the threat that is being posed by the 'soft-skinned, warm-blooded, short-lived, pedestrian species' that has turned our present day into a new epoch; the Anthropocene. This new era is already causing chaotic changes to our weather systems, there is the steady creep upwards in average temperature across the globe as well as significant and it some cases catastrophic changes to our environments.
  
  The authors that have contributed to this collection include some of my favourites, Paul Farley, Fiona Sampson, Mark Cocker, Helen MacDonald, Adam Nicolson and Richard Mabey to name but a few. There are others that I have read a little of like John Burnside and a number that I have never come across before, such as Julia Blackburn and Sean Borodale. They were free to write about anything they chose, so not only do we have an amazing vein of prose from some of the best nature and landscape writers around, but they have given us a raft of different perspectives from places all around the world that are significant to them. The subjects are diverse too, there are musings on art, bridges, bees, sculpture, memories of childhood, fossils and the rapidly declining cuckoo. We travel from the high Arctic to an English woodland, allotments and summer meadows, post-industrial beaches to a desert road.
  
  Rooted deep in the principles of Common Ground, this is a celebration of our how own local area can define us as much as our DNA and education, themes that are picked up in the fantastic 21st Century Yokel by Tom Cox. All the way through the various essays, you feel the comforting presence of Roger Deakin encouraging us to discover and explore our local patch regardless of whether it is an SSSI, a local park or an eerie holloway. This book goes a long way to addressing the way that some people consider that scouring their local area of anything natural makes them more human; it doesn’t, it makes us all less human. This is a fine companion volume to Arboreal, which is another Common Ground inspired work as a tribute to Oliver Rackman and the vital part that woodlands play in our well being. A truly excellent book.
• 
  Rebecca

  This nature writing anthology is devoted to the spirit of place – even if the specific places written about are diminished, urban or manmade. It was inspired by the charity Common Ground. As editor Tim Dee explains, “Common Ground gave Britain the concept of local distinctiveness, and this book is … for the organisation that has worked since the 1980s to revive, preserve and celebrate the diverse, local and intimate connections that people and communities have had, and might yet have, with the landscape that surrounds them.” Though it may seem “twentieth-century life has sent place-writing adrift,” Dee remarks, these 31 essays and poems, a few of them illustrated, prove that place-writing is still alive and well.
  
  Some contributors write about the place they call home; others write about far-flung travels. In the former camp are Barbara Bender on recording elderly residents’ stories in Branscombe, East Devon; Richard Holmes discussing drought and water restrictions in his garden in the Cévennes; Richard Mabey recalling his purchase and stewardship of Hardings Wood; and Patrick McGuiness on Bristol’s Clifton Suspension Bridge. Among the latter are Hugh Brody mapping Inuit lands in the Arctic and John Burnside exploring the Gila Desert in Arizona.
  
  Then there are the in-between accounts – ones that involve a journey to somewhere not completely unfamiliar. Julia Blackburn meets a beachcomber while researching a book on Doggerland and is invited back to his house to see his treasure hoard, which includes gold coins, flints and fossils. Mark Cocker braves the wind on a trip to County Durham to see spring gentians. Birdwatching at Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire, Nick Davies ponders cuckoo behaviour and observes a starling roost.
  
  As is common with anthologies, there are some narratives and authorial styles that resonate more than others. Readers’ interest may well ebb and flow at various points. For me, though, it was worth the price of entry for just three of the pieces. One is “A City Pastoral” by novelist Tessa Hadley, who moved from Wales to London in her mid-fifties, in a reversal of the usual pre-retirement retreat to the provinces. She notices nature more than ever, she notes, thanks to London’s preserved garden spaces and urban wildlife. “I feel as if I belong here in this place, at this rich intersection between the made world and the found world, culture and nature: trying and failing to catch it in my language,” she concludes.
  
  But the two overall best essays are by Helen Macdonald and Adam Nicolson, who have written top-class memoirs with nature themes. Macdonald’s is an elegy to the meadow on the walled estate where she grew up in Camberley. It’s where she first exercised her freedom to roam. Now, every time she passes it on the motorway, she sees the destroyed meadow and worries for our environmental future. Nicolson’s is similarly nostalgic, pondering the changes he’s made to Perch Hill, Sussex in the quarter-century he’s lived there. Would a sixteenth-century peasant still recognize the place? he wonders. There’s a middle ground to be found between leaving land to wildness and managing it responsibly, he believes – a message that surfaces in much of the book: we must do all we can to preserve the places that we cherish.
  
  Originally published at
  Nudge.
• 
  Mary Monro

  This is a tantalising book. It sets out to explore the relationship between people and places, driven by the urgency to reconnect with place in the anthropocene. I suppose that multi-authored books are always going to be variable in style and quality, but they also miss the opportunity to develop an argument and draw meaning out of observation. I found myself frustrated that interesting ideas about the authors’ relationship with place never advanced into deeper interpretation. A love for a particular place, or an appreciation of the effect of repetition on the understanding of a place never led to a greater generalisation or an insight into wider meaning. I feel this is a missed opportunity, when we really need to reset our relationship with the environment and its inhabitants. On the other hand, it has introduced me to several wonderful writers that I didn’t know!
• 
  Jennifer

  I was so keen to read this collection of place-writing and perhaps that was part of why I felt so disappointed. I felt very out of sorts with the first few pieces which seemed not so much commissioned as dragged out of the authors who seemed better placed in some kind of Grumpy Old Person forum. This was even whilst acknowledging the quality of the writing. Either my mood or the book picked up about half way through and I started to feel "Yes, this is what should be here, this is saying something", although I can't say I found it a smooth or compelling read even then. It all felt too random rather than a variety of perspectives. However, in the end the nuggets within won me over.
• 
  Xenia Tran

  This is a collection of commissioned pieces on people and places that I have been dipping in and out of over time. Tim Dee, the editor, appears to have commissioned authors and poets with similar ethnic and cultural backgrounds which is why, to me at least, the contributions lack in cultural diversity. Having said that, there are some gems in here, especially those essays penned by Sean Borodale, Hugh Brody, Peter Davidson, Paul Farley, Andrew McNeillie and Michael Viney and I look forward to reading more in-depth pieces from those authors that resonated the most.
• 
  Ruth Brumby

  A collection of excellent and varied pieces on people and places. A really useful investigation into what 'place' is.
• 
  Tina

  A great read, hope to see more anthologies like this in the future.
• 
  Aziff

  Ground Work is an interesting book, but I suspect that it will also have a select audience. It's essentially a book about place and memory, which initially led me to believe that perhaps the compiled essays would be similar in the spirit of
  Walter Benjamin's interrogative essays about Naples, Moscow and his well-known
  The Arcades Project - albeit with less theoretical expositions. Unfortunately, I finished the book only having enjoyed a handful of essays. Was it because I had expectations? Perhaps.
  
  Ground Work is a compilation of essays and a smattering of poems describing the writers' childhood memories formed and influenced by their locality. Much of it is almost formulaic in that either all or some of these elements: a place that used to be a childhood escape, strong community, times have changed, development has sullied the locality. Many of these essays too, focused on the outdoors and nature; the writers lovingly describing the abundance of flora and fauna they have encountered in their childhood. While it makes for an interesting read, it can certainly become repetitive.
  
  Essentially, while Ground Work is a commendable anthropology-memory project, the essays never left me feeling as though I had caught the character of the location. Which is a bit of shame, since I would have loved to know more about the places written. I really wanted to be invested, but I couldn't simply because it wasn't written as so. This could be because many of the essays were almost indistinguishable in its own way when describing their childhood woodlands.