Reclaiming Place

Talia Woodin reflects on how their upbringing amidst an Oxford community’s reclamation of a green space, shaped the foundations of their creative practice and activism. The featured photographs comprise a collection captured by Talia in recent years, alongside those taken during the ages of 14 to 17.

I spend a great deal of my time taking photos of people on the streets of London, UK. As a documentary photographer focused on protest and social justice, among other things, one would be forgiven in thinking my natural habitat is running around Westminster surrounded by chanting, placard wielding protesters. In truth though, while I derive so much joy from this work, I’d rather be out in the woods any day. More to the point, I’d rather be taking photos of trees, or better still, humans among trees. My interest in human-nature connection is almost as old as my passion for photography and visual documentation - it goes back to my childhood.

When I tell people that I grew up in Oxford, their first and often only association with the city is the University. As one of the oldest in the world - and arguably most famous - this isn’t hugely surprising. If one were to take away the university with its picturesque spires, notable alumni and backdrop for countless blockbusters, the city itself wouldn’t differ greatly from any other southern English town. But there’s much to see and know of Oxford even without its most valuable player of an institution.

Throughout my childhood, my mother was, and still is, tirelessly involved with social and environmental justice organising in the city. As a result of this, from a young age, I was aware of the great disproportionality in access to land, property and housing - the latter manifesting in a critical affordable housing shortage, between the university and Oxford’s residents. It was against the backdrop of this that in 2010 my family became intimately involved with a community project to reclaim a plot of college-owned land on our doorstep.

Despite being a mere 10-minute walk from my childhood home, Hogacre Common only became known to me, and much of the local community, just over a decade ago. West Oxford Community Renewables (WOCoRe), a resident-owned organisation that oversees renewable energy schemes in the community, took over the 14-acre piece of land from Corpus Christi College. This disconnect between us locals and the place in which we live is a common story in Oxford, due to the aforementioned disproportionate land ownership by the University and resulting lack of access for anyone else. Until 2010, Hogacre existed as a maintained sports ground, used sparsely by students and more often by the occasional dog walker.

After going relatively unused for a few years, in an unusual move by the college, the land was leased to WOCoRe in exchange for a mere jar of honey a year, produced by Hogacre’s very own beehives. Within months of its acquisition by the local community, the now-renamed Hogacre Common Eco Park, became home to over a thousand saplings, including many fruit trees. The tennis courts had been transformed into communal allotments and said beehives had been introduced. Fast-forward to the present day and this once manicured sports ground has been transformed into an award-winning, biodiverse paradise.

As a former occupational therapist, my mum describes her early involvement as one of Hogacre’s community directors, as helping create a community intervention “on a piece of privately managed, damaged land, to enable nature to do what it does best and thrive in a multitude of ways, whilst learning and educating others and enabling them to thrive.” My earliest memories of the place are of being dragged along by her on Sunday afternoons to help tend to the allotments. Though done so begrudgingly aged nine, I now look back on those times fondly. Through a scheme called Oxgrow, local families were joined by students from the University, in transforming these former tennis courts into gardens providing a range of edible produce. The intergenerational aspect of this project was definitely part of its success. As a child especially, having the opportunity to hang out with young adults, not just your parents, made the prospect of an afternoon digging dirt a lot more appealing. The involvement of students was important too, I don’t doubt it gave them a greater connection to the wider Oxford community than they ever would have gained solely through the academic institution. Much like it helped to ground many of us in the local community with our surrounding environment, as well as with ourselves and each other.

“The commons was home for boy or bird but the Enclosures stoll the nests of both, reaved children of the site of their childhood”. When I first read this explanation of the enclosures, a movement for common land privatisation that began in England in the 12th century, by author Jay Griffiths in her 2013 book A Country Called Childhood, it immediately resonated, especially with access to land and the legalities of trespassing becoming pressing issues in recent years in the UK.

It reiterates the necessity of community-run and community-owned land in the face of governmental failings, and the loss of common land. Despite still being owned by Corpus Christi College, the leasing and management of Hogacre by the local community means that it is now fully open and accessible to the public. For myself, and many people to this day, it is a magical, liminal space, a home away from home where we can be free and safely explore our connections to the natural world and our place within it. This is something that children are increasingly deprived of nowadays.

On returning to Oxford for a brief period during the pandemic, I remember marvelling that there were once again children out on the street playing with chalk, an activity which I hadn’t seen done in the area for a decade or so despite it being a favourite of mine and other local kids during our childhoods. Replaced now with the ongoing increase in technology, modern-day childhoods are further from communal and nature-based practices than ever before. As an adult, Hogacre stands prominently in my mind, not only as a place in which myself and my peers were able to experience this essential part of growing up in the world, but also where children still do to this day. Even now, the space, with its meadow of varied grasses and wildflowers, a young rewilded woodland and squat little pavilion in the centre of it all, remains significant for the rambling and exploration of local children, hosting a forest school and regular day trips from the local nursery. On more recent visits, I’m always pleased if I manage to time my walk through the space with a forest school session. The sound of children playing in the background really does add something to one’s experience of nature.

It was at Hogacre that I had my first experience of traditional pagan festivals. Every year much of the community gathers there to observe the autumnal harvest festival and Wassail, the blessing of the orchards in the New Year. It is a place to participate in land work, share food and observe traditions like lighting bonfires and morris dancing, scything and hedgelaying. The traditions were rooted in the changing seasons and the harvesting of produce, rather than the perfunctory practices of my Church of England primary school. Although both experiences occurred within a short walking distance from each other, their impact on me couldn’t have been further apart.

During these celebrations, I began to delve into the practice of documenting human-nature connections through photography. Again, despite initially being roped in by my mother to capture the happenings at Hogacre for the website, my own interests were soon sparked, leading to a passion which would form the foundations for much of my activism and creative practice to this day. Hogacre has often felt like a nesting ground for these passions. In times when I’ve felt overwhelmed and burdened by the state of the world, it’s somewhere I can return to - to reconnect and reroot myself.

In the decade or so since I started tentatively snapping shots there, I have ventured from this relatively small plot of land in Oxford, to all corners of the country and even further afield (pun intended). I’ve been exploring and documenting communities that are challenging notions of ownership and control of the natural world, and reclaiming their place in it, often through equally inventive and unexpected collaborations. I’ve participated in trespasses with the Save Stonehenge campaign, dug vegetables at Europe’s only Jewish farm and occupied woodlands with communities resisting deforestation. All the while, my connection to that small piece of land in Oxford and deep appreciation for having had the privilege of access to such a space, has fuelled my desire to create a world in which everyone can be afforded such opportunities.