The power of sunlight

By Christopher Woodward

Christopher Woodward is Director of The Garden Museum, Lambeth, which reopened after a prize-winning redevelopment in 2017. The Museum is currently working with Dan Pearson Studio on a 5.3 acre public realm project named Lambeth Green.

The power of sunlight is rarely discussed within the profession, but as the director of the Garden Museum explains, it needs our attention.

Sunlight is power. Ten years ago, I planted a fig tree in the park opposite the Garden Museum. Each year the fruits swell a tight green – and that’s it. The figs never ripen. The park is where William Blake’s garden was a fruitful and lush Eden in the early 19th century; two hundred years later, there is too little sunlight to release the energy within the fig by which it ripens into a sweet fruit.

I can buy figs from a shop, of course. But in East London, this sunlight deprivation has been a cause for the return of rickets in a new generation of children. Sir Sam Everington OBE, who leads an admired GP practice in Bow, estimates that 50% of the children at his surgery are deficient in Vitamin D. ‘It’s going back forty years’, he exclaims.

This is not a futuristic disaster movie in which the sun is vanishing from the earth. No. Very simply, London is selling off the sky above to developers. The London Skyline Campaign calculates that 525 tall buildings are in the development pipeline. Each tall building takes away a sliver of the sun. Forever.

We have begun a campaign to ask the Greater London Authority to guarantee a minimum of six hours of sunshine in London’s green public realm. The GLA’s proposed policy is that it is acceptable for a park to receive 2 hours of sunlight in 50% of its area, as measured on 21st March, the annual equinox. (This is a policy proposed in the Supplementary Planning Guidance “Good Quality Homes For All Londoners”, which is part of The New London Plan, and is about to be signed into law).

At a Lambeth Planning Committee, I spoke with our neighbours against a scheme by developer u+i to build three towers of luxury flats and overshadow the little park in which we work on community garden projects. But that objection was struck out: the Planning Officer explained that it is acceptable for a park to be in shadow – or in night – for twenty-two hours of the day on 21st March.

I didn’t believe it at first, but it is true. In 2011, Dr Paul Littlefair of the Buildings Research Establishment was asked to come up with a single number for sunlight hours for all outdoor amenity areas across Britain, from a tennis court in Tunbridge Wells to a parking space in Sunderland. (Dr Littlefair is one of the good guys: at our Inquiry he appeared on behalf of a community group called Lambeth Village against against a development worth half a billion pounds and consultancy fees to match). He didn’t know that the two-hour number would be used to remove one more impediment to urban overdevelopment.

At this level, sunflowers and figs will not bloom, bees will not buzz, and in winter the earth will be too cold for the chemical trigger by which a bulb bursts into spring. And children can’t play in the sunshine.

We are Curators, not lobbyists, but with a green alliance of everyone from the London Wildlife Trust to Friends of Burgess Park, we have begun a petition to ask The Mayor of London to consider the right measure of sunlight in a city park, playground, or wildlife reserve. Please sign, this could be our last chance. Do we want to be the city which sold off the sun?

Christopher Woodward is Director of The Garden Museum, Lambeth, which reopened after a prize-winning redevelopment in 2017. The Museum is currently working with Dan Pearson Studio on a 5.3 acre public realm project named Lambeth Green.

there is too little sunlight to release the energy within the fig by which it ripens into a sweet fruit

PETITION

Six hours’ sunlight for parks, playgrounds and wildlife. https://www.change.org/p/londonmayor-six-hours-sunlight-for-parksplaygrounds-and-wildlife

Aerial view of Old Paradise gardens, Lambeth, showing (left) the 24- and 26-storey high towers proposed by Fred Pilbrow Architects for u+i.

© Fred Pilbrow + partners