During the early 1970s Richard Mabey set about mapping his unofficial countryside. He walked crumbling city docks and overgrown bomb sites, navigating inner city canals and car parks, exploring sewage works, gravel pits, rubbish tips. What he discovered runs deeper than a natural history of our suburbs and cities. The Unofficial Countryside prescribes another way of seeing, another way of experiencing nature in our daily lives. Wild flowers glimpsed from a commuter train. A kestrel hawking above a public park. Enchanter's nightshade growing through pavement cracks. Fox cubs playing on a motorway's scrubby fringe. There is a scarcely a nook in our urban landscape incapable of supporting life. It is an inspiration to find this abundance, to discover how plants, birds, mammals and insects flourish against the odds in the most obscure and surprising places.
- ISBN10 0722157096
- ISBN13 9780722157091
- Publish Date 23 March 1978 (first published October 1973)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 18 October 2003
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
- Imprint Sphere
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback
- Pages 176
- Language English