One Tree Hill to Peckham Rye Common: A South London Landscape History

One Tree Hill to Peckham Rye Common: A South London Landscape History

The Commonplace series of zines details how, taken together, the commons provide the key to the landscape. This third zine in the series mixes history, ecology, psychogeography, architecture, poetry and memoir to explore a closely linked pair of open spaces, an ancient common and a wild nature reserve in the heart of suburban South London.

Written by landscape historian John Gray and featuring photographs by Woolwich-based photographer Sam Walton. The stunning cover is a cut-out from a single sheet of paper, made by Lewisham-based artist Tennessee Williams. The whole edition was Risograph-printed by the legends at Page Masters.

64pp., A5.

CONTENTS: The history of the Rye and the history of the Hill are intertwined—“contour was all”—how to trace a Victorian brickworks—The Laurels and The Beeches—slow-motion tectonic cataclysm—a seabed became a hill—“a new landscape imposed on a deep topography”—bounded by ancient commons—local people disenfranchised and the landscape outraged—where geography ends and landscape begins—jam-makers clutching tupperwares— “The little fervent underground / Rivers of London”—the One Tree—mythbusting—the Peckham massif—disorderly multitudes—“that grand historic rush / That won us One Tree Hill!”—a terrible doom—"Recommoning is a different way of looking at our collective relationship with land”—how the drovers made the Rye—how the Victorians remade the Rye—common vs. park—"these dirty big speakers”—Peckham radicals on the Triangle—the spectral return of the Peck—Blake’s hawthorn angels—a tiny forest—Anglo-Saxon swineherds and Victorian grandees, the drovers and the ravers—all of us trying to imagine what a true common could feel like.