You don’t really get a sense of how green London is until you see it from the air.
If you fly into London, you’re confronted with one of London’s best-kept secrets – just how much of it is parkland.
Nearly one-fifth of this city of 10 million people is parkland. There are thought to be more than 3,000 parks and grassed spaces across the city, and there are plans to increase it even more. As former industrial sites are reclaimed, even more of London could be green and pleasant land.
The best-known of London’s many, many parks are the Royal Parks. There are eight of them spread across the capital, and they includes St James’s Park and Hyde Park, surrounding the royal residence at Buckingham Palace; Primrose Hill, which offers stunning views from North London across the city; and Richmond Park, a vast woodland of nearly 1,000 hectares in South West London, complete with herds of wild deer.
I’m lucky enough to live near another of the Royal Parks – Greenwich Park in South East London. It’s less than a 10th of the size of Richmond Park but no less impressive. Like most of the Royal Parks, it was once a royal hunting ground – you can grab a coffee and sit where once Henry VIII chased boar and deer through wild woodland.
Think that St Paul’s Cathedral’s vaulted Christopher-Wren-designed dome is impressive? Head to Greenwich Park. It has two of them a stone’s throw apart, the centrepiece of the Naval College which trained generations of naval captains, seafarers and explorers.
Greenwich Park is split by a road which leads from the top of the park (where another huge green expanse, Blackheath, sits) down to Greenwich’s historic centre. Until 2020, you used to be able to drive a car down it but now it’s closed to traffic; it’s now a throughfare for cyclists, skateboarders and runners.
On a summer evening I don’t think there’s a better spot in London, the Naval College and Maritime Museum in the distance as you descend towards Greenwich Town, the masts of the famous tea clipper Cutty Sark rising over the roofs of the Georgian buildings.
I snapped this as summer slid into autumn last year, on one of many trips to test cameras for Cameraburo. The camera in question was the kind of cheap compact I would have once walked past without a second glance – a Panasonic C-420AF.
The C-420AF is the kind of no-nonsense 35mm compact churned out in the many millions in the 1990s and 2000s. Made in South Korea, it’s a few-frills autofocus compact with a 34mm f/3.8 lens. The camera has a three-element lens, a handful of shutter speeds and the ability to read only 100 and 400-ISO film. Nothing special, I’m sure you agree, but sometimes you just don’t need the bells and whistles.
These cyclists were heading up the hill, and I had just enough time to capture them, lit with fading sunlight, amid the green.
I'm a New Zealander who has been living in London since the mid-1990s, shooting film seriously since the year 2000. Kosmo Foto was launched in 2012 and has since become a film brand, with the release of my first films Kosmo Foto Mono 35mm (2017) and Kosmo Foto Mono 120 (2019).
I’m doing everything I can to promote film photography in the 21st Century, and help it survive and thrive. If you want to write something for Kosmo Foto, please drop me a line at foto.dowling@gmail.com.
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