The other evening I went for a walk along the Holloway Road near where I live in London. It is a journey I have made many times and for many reasons. Recently, that reason has often been to photograph the trees that line it. Rather fancifully, I imagine it as a “Holloway”, a sunken track through an ancient wood.
It will never be a proper wood. Even so there are still trees.
The Holloway Road is a major road, a part of the A1; it is busy with traffic and people almost all the time. All the trees have been carefully planted and managed, and they all probably exist in a spreadsheet somewhere. When the leaves fall, they do not lie on the ground adding to the understorey but are collected up into big bags and taken away. And when the trees die, they will not lie where they have fallen; they will be chopped up, chipped and composted. A speeded up version of their natural afterlife.
Even so, they are still trees. Something else that lives amongst us. They are the past, the present and the future The older trees have lived through a past we have not seen. The younger trees, with care, have a future we will not know. The trees flow through time around us.
And they are egalitarian. They are for all of us should we find a moment to pause and look up. They are not in private woodland fenced off with barbed wire. They are on a public highway with a right to roam. We can enjoy them at any time. Their stark beauty in winter, their soft colours in spring, their sheer extravagance in high summer and their firework display come the autumn. Or if we reach out to touch them – beyond their textures, their smooth, crinkled and crevassed surfaces – we can feel the life of the tree itself. These experiences are all available to us any time we walk down the Holloway Road.
I always felt there was something magical about woods.
I began photographing the trees in lockdown when we were not free to go far. I was working from home and it was so easy to allow the moments of everyday to blur into one another so, to split my personal life from my working life, I would head out for a short walk at the end or beginning of each day. As a keen photographer, I always carried my camera with me. Within a shrunken world I began to explore my own neighbourhood in greater depth. And I became aware of the sheer amount of trees in the area around and along the Holloway Road.
It reminded me of my earlier life before I moved to London. I grew up on the edge of the countryside and in our garden there were several mature trees. I have kept memories of three of them. A lopsided Beech tree (it was too close to the neighbour’s house so one half had been chopped away); an Elm that I only really knew as a tagged stump standing forlornly in a distant corner after it had succumbed to Dutch Elm disease.
Best of all though was a horse chestnut. This grew at the edge of the garden where it dropped down towards a brook and it was our playground. In the autumn she provided us with a harvest of conkers to do battle with. All year road there was a swing consisting of a rope and a stick hanging from one of the branches. We would swing out over the drop, the rope creaking above us as it twisted on the branch.
We also used to climb through her branches; I have strong memories of reaching the canopy of leaves at the top (my feet would tingle with the space between them and the grown far below). Here I could look out beyond our house to the houses beyond.
Further afield, there was a wood. It was not very big although it seemed so at the time. We would explore it regularly and each visit uncovered new pathways. One week we would build a den and somehow we could not remember where we had created it when we came back; it was almost as if this tiny piece of woodland was magically changing shape on every visit.
When I moved to London it never really became my home.
It was too noisy and too big. Elsewhere I have written of my attempts to escape it, to slip out of its grasps and keep on going to somewhere quieter, where the roads came to an end. As a result, I guess I never really saw the trees for the traffic, the buildings and all the people. There were some small patches of woodland nearby – Highgate and Queens Woods – which I would regularly retreat to but, of the trees on the streets I barely noticed them.
It was a lot later that I began to see the trees. Funnily enough it was somebody from Paris who drew my attention to them. I never met them but she had written a comment about the Holloway Road at an exhibition. In the comment she said she had been drawn to this part of London because it reminded her of the boulevards of her home city. Around the same time I also learnt there were enough trees in London to describe it as a forest. So I began to look at the trees across London and on the Holloway Road in a different light.
When I walk the Holloway Road now, camera in hand, photographing them, touching them, looking up through the leaves I am reaching back through my own life. This project is as much an exploration of myself as it is of the trees of the Holloway Road.
For more on the project check out the gallery page here.
Discover more from Stephen Taylor Photography
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.