Paradise regained: how the world’s wastelands are regenerating

Ignoring the padlocked gate, my six-year-old son Nicholas and I climbed through a break in the metal fence and pushed into the mesh of undergrowth. This was the site of Ducker, the open-air swimming pool that once belonged to Harrow School. Here the young Winston Churchill romped (naked, since trunks were for prefects), as, in his day, did my dad. When I arrived at Harrow in the 1980s, the pool — far bigger than Tooting Bec Lido, which is now the UK’s largest — had just been abandoned. It was covered with graffiti, the haunt of skateboarders.

Returning in 2021, I looked for changes wrought by three decades of neglect. Google Maps showed a J-shaped artificial lake, 30m by 150m. But when I switched to ‘satellite view’, the photo was not of a lake but of a dark-green copse. The old pool was hard to find beneath the tangle of vegetation. It was filled with silt and swamp, out of which stretched thick trees, whose tops were home to the murmur and clatter of pigeons. Nicholas, who was sporting an eyepatch and carrying a plastic hook (which we later managed to lose among the brambles) wanted to play pirates. We did that. But the real reason we were there was because I had been inspired by Cal Flyn’s extraordinary Islands of Abandonment.

Just when you thought there was nowhere left to explore, along comes an author with a new category of terrain — not scenes where man has never trod, but places where he has been and gone. There is a special quality of loneliness in these fresh ruins. As well as an explorer, Flyn, who writes for Granta and the Guardian, is a psycho-geographer, attuned to the spirit of hopeless places — an ecologist, too, her theme being that these desolate spots are not, in fact, as hopeless as they seem.