Save our Scrubs

circa 1978: The entrance to Wormwood Scrubs prison in west London. Photo by Evening Standard/Getty Images.

Wormwood Scrubs is a huge neighbourhood-sized oasis in West London unbuilt on since ancient times. HS2 recently announced plans to destroy a portion of it, a move met with fury and indignation by local residents. 

It’s nice to have a place you can go to clear your head. Some people call this their ‘happy place’, I call it my second home. They say home is where the heart is; well, a piece of my heart will always be out walking on Wormwood Scrubs. 

If you haven’t been to the Scrubs, what have you been doing? But also, thank you. This wild, unkempt corner of London is charming largely because it is wild, unkempt, and often empty. Until 1879, it was used by the army as a training ground near the centre of power. 

A parliamentary act of that year designated it for the people’s perpetual recreation, when the cavalry weren’t using it. Much has changed since then. Not least its engulfment by the city. Wormwood means ‘snake wood’ in Old English. Today, the serpents are surrounded on all sides. 

And yet, the Scrubs still retains its wilderness, and its snakes! Its western and northern edges teem with unusual life: serpents, but also hedgehogs, voles, lizards and toads. All scamper around beneath the biggest skies in West London. 

At night, it actually contains stars, and two different types of bat: the common and Soprano Pipistrelle. In the day, up to 100 different species of bird flock and flit, alongside homemade flying devices made by amateur enthusiasts. Not even the most extra-terrestrial of these can compete with the thousands of green parakeets that use the Scrubs as their roost. 

Rose-ringed Parakeets roost in a copse in Wormwood Scrubs Park, Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images

These tropical birds mostly descend on a circular patch of forest on the park’s highest ground. Surrounded on all sides by open field, this dense thicket gives off a sinister vibe. As a child, I was too afraid to penetrate its evergreen walls. And, back then, I wouldn’t ever walk the Scrubs alone. 

Strange things happen here at night. The car park on its south eastern side is said to be one of London’s premier dogging spots. A few years back, schweff outfitter Johnnie Boden discovered a dead body in the woods while walking his Jack Russell, Sprout. 

On the Acton side, rows of neat redbrick houses mark the beginning of the interwar Old Oak Estate, and suburbia. Here, in 1966, the brutal killing of three policemen, later known as the Massacre of Braybrook Street, led to a nationwide manhunt, and calls for the reimposition of the recently abolished death penalty. 

An inmate with a pet bird at Wormwood Scrubs prison in London, 15th June 1978. Photo by John Minihan/Evening Standard/Getty Images

The killers didn’t see the hangman’s noose, nor were they forced to gaze out at the Scrubs from its eponymous prison. Over the past century or so, the foreboding HMP Wormwood Scrubs has hosted some of Her Majesty’s most infamous subjects: Dennis Nilsen, Ian Brady, Charles Bronson, Pete Doherty. As a kid, I strained to see the souls of those contained therein, but I never looked for too long. 

Next to the prison is Hammersmith Hospital, where people enter and leave the world. Do their souls stroll out onto the common? I wouldn’t be surprised. A little farther on is the athletics stadium formerly known as The Linford Christie—after a local boy turned gold-medal sprinter whose god-like speed presaged his Olympian fall from grace. 

If you keep running, through the trees, soon you will find neat rows of two and three-storey Portakabins. Two years ago, for nine months, these housed pupils from Kensington Aldridge Academy, displaced by the Grenfell Tower fire. You can see its giant grey body bag from most of the Scrubs.

Singer Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards of British rock group the Rolling Stones leaving Wormwood Scrubs prison. Photo by Powell/Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Soon another tragedy, far smaller by comparison, but not insignificant, might befall these parts. It seems ridiculous, given the lack of travel currently taking place, but the HS2 project continues ploughing up fields and felling trees unabated. 

An act of parliament gives the project’s holding company the ability to essentially do what it wants with any land in its way. This includes the diversion of a large sewer and utility cables through some of the Scrubs’ most biodiverse land. 

Both the council and a very vocal group of residents oppose the plans, but it’s unclear whether there’s a way to stop it. HS2 is like a massive boulder: now it’s begun rolling, it’s hard to know how it can be stopped. 

Members of the ‘Gary Owen’ Gaelic Football Club during a practice match at the GLC playing field at Wormwood Scrubs, London. Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images.

Claiming the Scrubs should be protected from its bulldozers but turning a blind eye to their destruction of land elsewhere in the country, seems like a heavy case of London-centric nimbyism.

Then again, the Scrubs is different, purely because it’s so rare to have this kind of space so close to the centre of any city. 

Unkempt urban parks, such as Hampstead Heath, the Tiergarten or the Bois de Boulogne, hark back to a time when green space was needed in rapidly industrialising cities to protect people’s physical health.

Now the toxic fumes have mostly subsided, somewhere to roam is equally as important for our mental health. During lockdown, its sanctuary was sought by more people than ever. 

Whenever I feel low, a walk athwart its rugged plain always succeeds in assuaging my gloom. If the past few months have taught us anything it’s the importance of having somewhere those without a garden can go to breathe. 

The 1879 act was supposed to protect the Scrubs in perpetuity, but perpetuity can’t contest with the ruthless commodification of London land. Prospective developers have been trying to put a price on the Scrubs for decades, hopefully they will realise it’s priceless before it’s too late.