The open spaces of the East district, which (excepting those distant spaces situated on the borders of Epping Forest) are all near together and form a large circular group, are Hackney Downs, London Fields, Victoria Park with Hackney Common, and Hackney Marsh with South and North Mill Fields—about 730 acres in all. These grounds, as we have seen, are too distant to be of much benefit to the larger part of the population, and, it may be added, they have not the same value as breathing spaces as the parks and commons in other London districts. Victoria Park does not refresh a man like Hampstead Heath, nor even like Hyde Park. The atmosphere is not the same. You are not there out of the smoke and smells and gloom of East London. The atmosphere of Hackney Marsh is better, but the distance is greater, and the Marsh is not a place where women and children can rest in the shade, since shade there is none.
To begin with the spaces nearest to the boundary line of North London: we have the two isolated not large spaces of Hackney Downs (41 acres) and London Fields (26 acres). These are green recreation grounds with few trees or shrubs, where birds cannot breed and do not live. Hackney Downs is, however, used as a feeding ground by a few thrushes and other birds that inhabit some of the adjacent private gardens where there are trees and shrubs.
Victoria Park contains 244 acres, to which may be added the 20 acres of Hackney Common, and is rather more than two-thirds as large as Hyde Park. Having been in existence for upwards of twenty years, it is one of the oldest of our new parks, and is important on account of its large size, also because it is the only park in the most populous metropolitan district.
If it were possible to view it with the East-enders’ eyes—eyes accustomed to prospects so circumscribed and to so unlovely an aspect of things—it might seem like a paradise, with its wide green spaces, its groves and shrubberies, and lakes and wooded islands. To the dwellers in West and South-west London it has a somewhat depressing appearance, a something almost of gloom, as if Nature herself in straying into such a region had put off her brilliance and freshness to be more in tune with her human children. The air is always more or less smoke-laden in that part. That forest of innumerable chimneys, stretching away miles and miles over all that desolate overcrowded district to the river, and the vast parishes of Rotherhithe, Bermondsey, and Deptford beyond it, to the City and Islington and Kingsland on the north side, dims the atmosphere with an everlasting cloud of smoke; and Victoria Park is on most days under it. On account of this smokiness of the air the trees, although of over twenty years’ growth, are not large—not nearly so large as the much younger trees in Battersea Park. Trees and shrubs have a somewhat grimy appearance, and even the grass is not so green as in other places.
Among the recent bird-colonists of London, we find that the moorhen and ringdove have established themselves here, but in very small numbers. There are two good-sized lakes (besides a bathing-pond), and the islands might be made very attractive to birds, both land and water. They are planted with trees, the best grown in the park, but have no proper cover for species that nest on the ground and in low bushes, and no rushes or other aquatic plants on their edges. It is a wonder that even the moorhens are able to rear any young. The lakes are much used for boating, and this is said to be in the way of providing the birds with proper refuges in and round the islands; but there is no lake in London more used for boating exercise than that of Battersea, yet it has there been found possible to give proper accommodation and protection to the water-birds in the breeding season.
It is melancholy to find that the songsters have been decreasing in this park for some years past. Birds are perhaps of more value here than in any other metropolitan open space. Thrushes, blackbirds, and chaffinches are still not uncommon. The robin, titmouse, and dunnock are becoming rare. The greenfinch and (I believe) the wren have vanished. The decrease of the chaffinch is most regretted by the East-enders, who have an extraordinary admiration for that bird. Bird fanciers are very numerous in the East, and the gay chaffinch is to them the first of the feathered race; in fact, it may be said that he is first and the others nowhere. Now the value of the chaffinch to the bird fancier depends on his song—on the bird’s readiness to sing when his music is wanted, and the qualities of his notes, their strength, spirit, and wildness. In the captive state the song deteriorates unless the captive is frequently made to hear and sing against a wild bird. At these musical contests the caged bird catches and retains something of the fine passion and brilliancy of his wild antagonist, and the more often he is given such a lesson the better will it be for its owner, who may get twenty to fifty shillings, and sometimes much more, for a good singer. Victoria Park was the only accessible place to most of the East-enders who keep chaffinches for singing-matches and for profit, to which their birds could be taken to get the necessary practice. To this park they were accustomed to come in considerable numbers, especially on Sunday mornings in spring and summer. Even now, when the wild birds are so greatly reduced in numbers, many chaffinch fanciers may be met with; even on working days I have met as many as a dozen men slouching about among the shrubberies, each with a small cage covered with a cotton handkerchief or rag, in quest of a wild bird for his favourite to challenge and sing against. They do not always succeed in finding their wild bird, and when found he may not be a first-rate singer, or may become alarmed and fly away; and as it is a far cry to Epping Forest and the country, most of the men being very poor and having some occupation which takes up most of their time, the decline of Victoria Park as a training ground for their birds is a great loss to them.
I have tried, but without success, to believe that there was something more than the sporting or gambling spirit in the East-ender’s passion for the chaffinch. Is it not probable, I have asked myself, that this short swift lyric, the musical cry of a heart overflowing with gladness, yet with a ring of defiance in it, a challenge to every other chaffinch within hearing, has some quality in it which stirs a human hearer too, even an East-ender, more than any other bird sound, and suddenly wakes that ancient wild nature that sleeps in us, the vanished sensations of gladness and liberty? I am reluctantly compelled to answer that I think not. The East-ender admires the chaffinch because he is a sporting bird—a bird that affords good sport; just as the man who has been accustomed to shoot starlings from traps has a peculiar fondness for that species, and as the cock-fighter admires the gamecock above all feathered creatures. Deprive the cock-fighter of his sport—the law has not quite succeeded in taking it away yet—and the bird ceases to attract him; its brilliant courage, the beauty of its shape, its scarlet comb, shining red hackles and green sickle plumes, and its clarion voice that proclaims in the dark silent hours that another day has dawned, all go for nothing.
It is unhappily necessary to say even more in derogation of the East-end chaffinch fancier, who strikes one as nothing worse than a very quiet inoffensive person, down on his luck, as he goes softly about among the shrubberies with the little tied-up cage under his arm. He is not always looking out for a wild chaffinch solely for the purpose of affording his pet a little practice in the art of singing; he not unfrequently carries a dummy chaffinch and a little bird-lime concealed about his person, and is quick and cunning at setting up his wooden bird and limed twigs when a wild bird appears and the park constable is out of sight.
In some of the parks, where the wild birds are cared for, the men who are found skulking about the shrubberies with cages in their hands are very sharply ordered out. It is not so in Victoria Park, and this may be the reason of the decrease in its wild bird life.