by Dave Goulson
I spent half an hour or so trying to get good photographs of the brown-banded carders, and then headed further along the fence. At the westernmost corner, where the fence made an abrupt right-angle turn and headed inland, someone had been kind enough to smash a goodly sized hole. There was a burnt-out Yamaha off-road motorcycle wedged in the gap – it looked a little as if someone had made the hole by ramming the fence with the bike, though if so that would seem like a near-suicidal strategy. However it had happened, I was grateful, and I climbed through, scrambled across a muddy ditch full of shiny, dancing Dolichopodid flies, and pushed my way through a reed bed to emerge into the birch carr woodland beyond. Since I clearly wasn’t really supposed to be there, and there was an outside chance of being attacked by vicious guard dogs, it was all starting to feel like a proper adventure.
To be honest, it wasn’t quite what I’d expected. There was a well-worn dirt-bike track through the trees, so clearly bikers came in regularly to race around, presumably also without permission. Their wheels had worn deep ruts in the soft ground, revealing a dark greyish sand that I assumed was the fuel ash. Alongside the track I stumbled across a bizarre memorial, a nicely made wooden cross bearing the inscription ‘Andrew Darvill, rest in peace’, surrounded by a neat array of several hundred Foster’s beer cans. It seemed an unlikely burial place – perhaps it was to commemorate the demise of the biker that had rammed his Yamaha into the fence?fn2 I followed the trail northwards through the woods: it was pleasant enough, but the accolade of ‘England’s rainforest’ was seeming a little far-fetched, if I’m honest. I could tell that there was a large open area to my right, towards the centre of the fenced area, but whenever I tried to push my way through the scrub to get to it I came to the banks of a long, reed-filled lagoon that I could not easily cross.
After half a kilometre or so it seemed as if I was nearing the northern limit of the site, for I could hear heavy machinery manoeuvring not far ahead, and could see glimpses of rusting shipping containers through the trees. I turned right once more, and found that the lagoon here was shallow and narrow. By pushing through the reeds and clambering across an old plank that had thoughtfully been left there, I suddenly found myself waist-deep in a sea of flowers. I had emerged into an open area of perhaps ten acres in extent, dominated by the frothy pink and white flowers of goat’s rue, a shrub-sized legume that clearly thrived in the grey ash. It was interspersed with chrome-yellow splashes of St John’s wort, the rich purple drooping spikes of buddleia and dense mauve stands of creeping thistle. Botanically, it was not especially rich, and many of the plants such as the goat’s rue are non-natives, but the plants were laying on a splendid banquet for a host of bees, hoverflies and other insects. I was pleased to see several Volucella zonaria, Britain’s biggest hoverfly, which attempts to overcome the fact that it is a large, tasty and defenceless morsel for birds by mimicking our far-from-harmless native hornet.
The whole lot was alive with insects – mainly bumblebees by the thousand – and I spent the rest of the afternoon wading through the flowers, photographing anything noteworthy that I spotted, and trying to find some of the very rare species that live here. I would have loved to have found the distinguished jumping spider, but try as I might it did not reveal itself. This is one of West Thurrock Lagoons’ specialities – a creature known only from two sites in the whole of the UK, the other being the Swanscombe Peninsula on the other side of the Thames in Kent. Both are brown-field sites, although Swanscombe will soon be a huge Paramount theme park, intended to rival Disneyland in Paris as one of Europe’s biggest tourist attractions – bad news, of course, for the spider, which probably won’t appreciate the water flumes and rollercoasters. It is a very handsome spider, furry and patterned in delicate shades of grey, with two pairs of oversized, forward-pointing black eyes with which it eyes up the distance to its prey. Although I could not find a distinguished jumping spider, I did find several five-banded weevil wasps drinking nectar on the thistles, a species not quite as spectacularly rare as the jumping spider but uncommon enough to get excited about. These are pretty little solitary wasps with, oddly enough, four rather than five clear yellow bands on their abdomen. As the name suggests, they are specialist hunters of weevils,fn3 paralysing them and storing them in piles in underground tunnels dug in sandy soil, where the hapless weevils are slowly consumed alive by the wasp grub. I’ve always been fond of weevils, but I managed to avoid holding their gruesome lifestyle against the rather lovely wasps.
It was baking hot as I hunted about, with the sun now at full strength and the dark ashy soil absorbing its heat, becoming almost too hot to touch. Herein may lie one of the secrets of West Thurrock Lagoons, perhaps one reason why there are so many insects here. Many insects are at the northern edge of their range in Britain, struggling to get through their life cycle each year in our damp and temperate climate. For this reason there are many British insects which tend to be found mainly on south-facing slopes, or in heathlands and sand dunes where patches of bare sandy soil become unusually warm in the summer sun. The grey-black ash provides just such a warm microclimate, radiating heat – it may not be a rainforest, but it felt almost tropically warm.
Amongst the flowers were areas of shallow water, with dark sandy banks that reminded me of the volcanic black-sand beaches of Tenerife. The water was bath-temperature and so I kicked off my shoes, rolled up my trousers and had a paddle, though given the past industrial nature of the site I resisted the temptation to actually have a swim. With the afternoon sun beginning to dip, I sat on a sandbank, my feet in the water, and soaked up the peculiar atmosphere. It was strangely idyllic – that somewhere this pleasant and so rich in wildlife could have been created entirely by accident from dumping industrial waste was mind-boggling. This entire community had sprung out of nowhere in just twenty years, in the middle of a heavily industrialised landscape, with no help whatsoever from man. Presumably most or all of these creatures must also survive in other small scraps of undisturbed or abandoned land not too far away, often perhaps ones that conservationists have yet to discover. In March 2008, for instance, the conservation organisation Buglife had attempted an inventory of no less than 576 brownfield sites in London and the Thames Gateway. Over half of these sites were found to have significant biodiversity potential, though they did not have the manpower to survey them. Nonetheless, it is clear there is likely to be a network of other wildlife-rich sites right in the middle of the biggest city in Britain, though many of them may be hard to find and may not be accessible to the public. Sadly, the Buglife study also estimated that all would be built on by 2028 at the current rate of development.
A few weeks later in mid-August I came back to West Thurrock Lagoons on an authorised visit. I was keen to explore the site again with someone who knew it well, and also to find out more about its history, so I had arranged to meet Sarah Henshall, Buglife’s ‘Brownfield Officer’, at the official site entrance, tucked away behind a huge printworks. Sarah turned out to be one of those rare people who has a bubbly, infectious enthusiasm for her job, and for all things insect-related, and as we rambled around the site pointing out interesting beasties to each other she related the recent history of the site and the battle to save it. On my previous illicit visit I had, it turned out, managed to discover only the most southerly of three sections to the site, albeit the largest, and each section has had a different fate. Sarah’s story began in 2005, when an entomologist named Peter Harvey was asked to survey the site to find out what was there, presumably because the owners were thinking of developing it. At the time, the southern part of the site was known to support important populations of some unusual birds, including nesting reed warblers, sedge warblers and bearded tits, and on this basis it had been granted the status of Site of Special Scientific Interest (often known as an SSSI). Little was known about the insects that lived there, although there had been some perfunctory surveys done in 1996 and 2003. What Peter discovered must have left him both flabbered and gasted in equ
al proportions. In a few visits through the year he notched up 939 species of invertebrate, which when combined with some previous records brought the site total up to no less than 1,243. This included thirty-five ‘Red Data Book’ species – those on a register of the most highly endangered species that is maintained by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature – plus 116 ‘Nationally Scarce’ and 352 ‘Nationally Local’ species. Amongst the many bees, Peter of course found the brown-banded carders along with red-shanked carders and the rare sea aster bee (Colletes halophilus) that likes to dig its burrows in sandy banks in salt marshes, and seems perfectly able to nest and survive in places below the spring high-tide mark, presumably by sealing up the nest entrance so that it is trapped in a pocket of air. Despite this clever trick, this bee has suffered enormously from reclamation of these marshes over recent decades, removing both nesting sites and the sea aster on which it heavily depends for food.
Peter made all sorts of other unexpected finds, including the salt marsh short-spur beetle (Anisodactylus poeciloides), the humpbacked red ant (Myrmica bessarabica) and the fancy-legged fly (Campsicnemus magius). There was even a tiny fly that lives in reed beds, Homalura tarsata, which had never been recorded in Britain before. Of course these are all spectacularly obscure species – almost nobody has ever heard of them, and we know next to nothing about what these creatures do in their daily lives – but it is rather wonderful that they exist nonetheless.
The long and the short of it is that Peter found a truly remarkable number of creatures, especially when you consider that the entire site covers just thirty acres, roughly the same as a single average-sized arable field. And that was without counting the numerous plants, mammals, birds and amphibians, or doing a thorough moth survey with light traps, which would be sure to add a couple of hundred more. This was what triggered the claim that this was Britain’s rainforest, in the sense that true rainforests are famous for the huge numbers of species that they contain. The West Thurrock Lagoons was the nearest we had, a treasure trove of weird and wonderful insects and spiders.
As fate would have it, just after the extraordinary value of this site was discovered, the Royal Mail submitted a planning application for a vast warehouse and lorry park which would obliterate all of this diversity. Naturally enough, Buglife took the decision to oppose the development. Their first port of call was Natural England, the government body responsible for protecting biodiversity. Buglife appealed to Natural England, making the persuasive argument that if the most species-rich site in Britain could not be protected by our environmental legislation then nothing was safe. They asked for the whole site to be declared an SSSI, which would have given the area some protection, but Natural England refused to do so. Instead, after some negotiations they accepted a compromise plan whereby the site would be chopped in half. The northerly section would be developed and the southern section, the bit that I had previously explored, would be protected, along with improving a small patch of wetland for the rare birds by digging it up and inserting a pond-liner to retain water. So far as conserving insects was concerned this was a pretty disastrous proposal, for the northernmost section contained the best insect habitat in the form of a fantastic meadow rich in clovers and vetches, where most of the brown-banded carders were to be found.
Buglife launched a petition, which received 2,500 signatures and led to a motion being tabled in the House of Commons. They even managed to get a meeting with the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, but to no avail. Buglife then launched a prolonged and expensive legal challenge to the development, which went through various courts and ended up in the highest court of them all, the House of Lords, where it was rejected. It seems that development needs were regarded as more important than conserving rare species – the nation’s need for another lorry park and warehouse, part of our endless race to grow our economy more quickly, took priority over the distinguished jumping spider, the fancy-legged fly and the brown-banded carder bumblebee.
Just when all seemed lost, the Royal Mail scored a spectacular own goal by releasing a pack of commemorative stamps depicting the UK’s rarest insects. The wonderful irony was not lost on the campaigners, and Buglife swiftly released their own set of spoof stamps depicting the very insect species that would soon be destroyed by the Royal Mail warehouse. One imagines that there was considerable embarrassment behind the scenes at Royal Mail, and that one or two heads may have rolled. Shortly afterwards they withdrew from the development. Their distribution centre has since been built on another site just a few yards away, one that had no biodiversity value. One might wonder why this solution to everyone’s problems could not have been arrived at sooner and with less cost to all concerned.
Sadly, this wasn’t the end of it for the site still wasn’t protected. Another company moved in and built the huge printworks on top of the northern, and most flower-rich, section of the site. If you read the Daily Mail, it was probably printed here. I hadn’t known it, but the printworks car park where Sarah and I had met had once, not so long ago, been a sea of flowers and buzzing insects.
Walking south from the car park, we entered what had previously been the central section of the site, an area which now looks like it would be an ideal setting for a post-apocalyptic movie or perhaps an episode of Dr Who. Much of the vegetation has been stripped away by motorbikes, leaving acres of bare dark sandy ash, loomed over by rusting electricity pylons; Mad Max would have felt at home. The bike trails I had seen in the woods on the southern section of the site were nothing compared to this. Sarah explained that local dirt-bike riders hold unofficial race meetings here at weekends, even somehow getting a burger van in, and that many hundreds turn up. I’m sure they have a lot of fun – I used to have a dirt bike myself, and know how exciting it is to rip the throttle open and slide the bike through a turn, spraying sand behind you – but they’ve made a spectacular mess of the plant life. Apparently the security firm have pretty much abandoned attempts to remove the bikers, as they persistently smash down fences to get in, and in any case there is nothing of financial value to protect so it is easier to just let them get on with it.
Even with all this disturbance, this area had a lot of flowers in the parts where the bikers didn’t go. Fly ash is quite alkaline, and so it supports flowers that one might normally find on chalky soils – the lacy umbels of wild carrot, spikes of yellow melilot, and the delicate pink stars of centaury. Sarah explained that the distinguished jumping spiders were commonly found here, and that they love to hide under pieces of clinker (bubbly, misshapen lumps of rock, another by-product of the power station furnaces). Clinker has little holes, in which the spiders often hibernate. We spent ages turning bits over, but to my disappointment found no jumping spiders, distinguished or otherwise.
Much of this central section of the site is now owned by the National Grid, who plan to build two new pylons on it. This will no doubt be staggeringly ugly, but given that there are already pylons and chemical plants on view in all directions it hardly matters from an aesthetic point of view. It may ultimately not be such a terrible thing for the wildlife, for it will ensure that no other development can take place, and once the pylons have been built one imagines that the National Grid might take measures to prevent the bikers from racing about beneath them, which would pose obvious safety issues. If so, the land beneath the pylons will probably recover and provide a quiet place where flowers and bees may once again thrive, and perhaps where the distinguished jumping spider can continue to lurk.
In exchange for these sacrifices, the southernmost section of the site is now safe from development. Despite the huge number of rare insects, Natural England still seem more interested in the wading birds that visit the site, and much effort has gone in to clearing the encroaching birches and installing an expensive tidal exchange system to help retain open areas of water. The lagoon area where I had been paddling earlier in the summer was of course not intended for errant entomologists. Although safe from development, it still poses cha
llenges in the future. The trees will need to be kept under control if the sunny, flower-filled meadow areas where most of the insects reside are to be retained. The goat’s rue is threatening to squeeze out all of the native plants, and perhaps will need controlling in some way. Occasional visits by bikers to this section may actually do good by creating bare patches and a bit of disturbance, but if the bikers are evicted from the central section by the National Grid then they may turn up en masse, and that would be a disaster. Buglife would love to see this area open to the public, so that families could come to see the wonderful flowers and insect life, but motorbikes and frolicking children seem like a bad combination. The future is far from certain, but at least for the moment this site seems to be more or less safe.
In 2009 Buglife received the Observer ‘Ethical Award’ for its efforts to save the West Thurrock Lagoons site, and their battle through the courts certainly helped to raise awareness as to how weak our environmental legislation is, particularly when it comes to rare insects. Yet the whole affair can hardly be seen as a resounding success for conservation, for a big chunk of the original site has been destroyed, and having now driven around West Thurrock rather more than I would have liked there would seem to be plenty of other derelict industrial sites that could have been developed instead. Fortunately there is at least one brownfield site conservation story that did end pretty well, just a few miles east along the Thames on Canvey Island and it was here that Sarah and I went next.
Canvey Island is an odd place; just a stone’s throw east of London, yet it feels remote, bleak and windswept. It comprises about eighteen square kilometres of former salt marsh, none of it more than a metre or two above sea level, and separated from the rest of Essex by just a few narrow creeks which weakly justify its island status. The south-eastern end of the island became a popular seaside holiday destination in the early twentieth century, but as with almost all British seaside towns the tourists dried up when cheap holidays abroad became popular, and now the beach-front amusement arcades, nightclubs and caravan parks look rather tired. Canvey Wickfn4 lies on the west of the island, and though just a mile or so from this urban sprawl, and in sight of an out-of-town Morrisons supermarket and drive-through McDonald’s, it feels like another world.
