Landscape is sky
Listen to the podcast by Jo Birch, or read the full transcript below.
I very rarely go back to the landscapes of my childhood & youth. May be it’s only once every couple of years that I revisit friends who remained in or returned to the Norfolk and Suffolk villages of my childhood. I now live on the outskirts of a Northern City. You couldn’t for one moment call the area where I live urban. Suburban may be, peri urban almost rural or what some call ‘rurban’. I arrived here because this city with its adjoining hilly, rocky, wooded and moorland landscapes is where I met my husband and after a little time away, he had a yearn to return. It felt right for me too.
The journey here was via a series of midland cities and towns and one in the North east, plus a brief time in very rural Derbyshire. Sheffield is quite different from the landscapes I grew up with, but the nineteen sixties semidetached house where I live provides me with a constant in my life…a great deal of sky.
The landscapes of my youth were dominated by sky, something East Anglia is well known for. I never took to the excessively skyful landscapes of the Fens where the land seemed to be insufficiently varied and offered no hiding places. But in what my folks jokingly called the Norfolk Alps, above the ever so slightly undulating ground, sky views and sounds were always present. I remember skylarks on ex-WW2 airfields.
And then there were skies of the Suffolk and Essex estuaries and where I also spent a great deal of time. Mud smell. Curlew call. Perhaps those landscapes stayed with me because what I frequently seek in any landscape experience now is sky and light.
When I say landscape, I mean what is seen from a window of a house or a workplace or office. But I also mean the stuff I see, hear and smell when I go outside. I also mean what I want to surround me if I travel or go on holiday. And now during this time of pandemic, when I say landscape, I still mean what I remember or imagine in other countries, other cities. It’s broad definition. But landscape always includes and often focusses on sky.
I can picture two immediate landscapes that comforted me when I lived in dark houses I didn’t not like, in urban streets that did not feel enough like home. Those landscapes were just views from windows. The first was from a grotty student house in Coventry. My window on the side of the Victorian terraced villa looked out on very scruffy backyards, unloved, abandoned non-spaces of which I ended up taking plenty of black and white photographs. From my student room window, the rooftops, the sky and the one tree always drew my eye. During a phase of contemplation and some sorrow, I painted a melancholy little picture of that window view, trying very hard to capture the hues of a twilight sky and the silhouette of the tree. The painting is no great work of art but I still have it now and looking at it returns me to the colours and textures of that sky, and the atmosphere of the gloaming not just within that city but other twilights too. This was a landscape with a little pocket of sky and light that nourished me.
Another landscape of solace was experienced within another rented urban terraced house – another place with a tiny yard and too many steps, bricks and crumbling pieces of concrete which then seemed a less than ideal physical landscape for our crawling babies at the time. The mental and physical landscape I sought was seen through an attic skylight, a roof window that when laying on the attic bed gave a view of ONLY the sky. It was to this view I would go when my twin babies had their micro naps, and I would lie down often joined by my cat. I was desperate for rest. That sky view offered a feeling of quiet, escape, spaciousness. It was boundless and asked very little of me. It helped my mental wellbeing during one of the most frazzled years of my life.
It turns out that it’s not just me who includes sky as part of landscape. As researcher at the University of Sheffield I’ve been working on a project all about Improving Wellbeing through Urban nature. During conversations with urban residents, many from under resourced parts of the city, from multi-ethnic and multi-cultural communities, I heard many times how people spoke of sky-noticings within the city. And this matters, because my often rural, my white, privileged background experience of the landscape remains too strong a voice within landscape narratives.
How do others experience urban landscapes, especially in the context of wellbeing? We found that trees and water played starring roles, but sky was important too. Both through my time hearing from urban residents and through colleagues’ use of a nature noticing Smart Phone App – we found that skies were a much valued aspect of the urban landscape when it comes to mental health and wellbeing.
Sheffield being a hilly city, affords great views and the noticing of dramatic skies, sunsets, clouds, weather was an everyday nature experience offering wellbeing benefits. This feels like such an important message for cities to keep old cherished views and open out new ones. It cautions us about building up and obliterating well-loved scenes and skyscapes. Jacob (not his real name) says his mum always comments on the beauty of the sky and helps him notice it. Nafisa drives up a local hill to an industrial area what she describes as ‘garages and stuff, but it's like uphill so you can park your car and then you can just see the actual hill and everything and the sunset and it's a really nice place’. Kalifa notices the sunlight and often pulls out her phone to take a picture; it makes her feel like, she says, ‘part of a nice area’ and that the scenery might be out of a movie.
The skyscapes, especially the clouds and rain noticed by Binita, Hadil, Idin fascinate them as they experience skyscapes quite different from those in home countries of India, Sudan and Iran. Mina, born in London and new to Sheffield told me of how she can imagine she has the ground to ground her and the sky to inspire her and thinking of that forms what she names security and recognising the cycles of life and death. That was part of her soulful reflection of a riverside walk. Back home, Mina also notices the stars and moon because her room has no blinds. Bassam, a Sudanese migrant includes the stars and moon as part of urban nature and Emil from Romania is reminded of home if he (very occasionally he thinks) sees a clear blue sky adding what he says is a bit of magic to the day.
I finish thinking of the skyscape in the city with words that remind me of Hulme’s Embankment poem where he talks of the ‘old star-eaten blanket of the sky, That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie’ For Amy, with long term complex mental health difficulties, she told me that night time is when she can’t sleep and she looks out of the window of her flat; she counts the stars and notices that the moon has the same face wherever she is in the world. The moon she feels has kept her safe at night she says in her own words: ‘blowing kisses at her to reassure and comfort’.
So I wonder, if landscape is sky, what if urban planning, buildings, streets and housing were reconsidered to include sky views, sunset or moonrise viewpoints? What if schools, homes, workplaces, shops and entertainment centres (remember all those?) what if they were to offer a little skyscape?
What changes when we see that landscape is sky?
