In todays world when we want to find something out, we inevitably turn to Google. And there are ways of seeing what people are searching for on Google. I did this today for two urban parks; one of them the New York Highline, opened in 2009, the other the Camden Highline, which is hoping to open in 2027.

For the New York Highline people ask: How long does it take to walk the High Line in NYC, is the High Line in NYC worth it, is the High Line free in NYC and why is the High Line so famous?

To answer those questions: as long as you want it to, YES, yes, and because it is such a beautiful, inspirational space.

For the Camden Highline the questions are: Is Camden Highline open, why is Camden Lock famous, which tube line is Camden on and Is Camden tube exit only?

This is clearly the difference 15 years makes to a Highline but it also illustrates how part of the challenge of projects like these is building awareness. After all for the first few years as you (in the case of the Camden Highline - a charity) raise the funds to develop the idea and put in the planning permission there is nothing to see. In fact plants which is the bit we as gardeners get excited about, are a long long way down the track.

What to listen for in this episode of the podcast

My walk in this episode takes you along the route of the proposed Highline via the roads, at street level, because you can’t get up onto the Highline…. yet. If you don’t know the geography of Camden but want to visualise the route as you listen - then take a look at the charities website where you can clearly see the proposed route.

My guide is Simon Pitkeathley the CEO of the Camden Highline. Born in Manchester, he grew up in Reading but has been a long term resident of Camden, he’s been the CEO of the Business Improvement District or BID – Camden Town Unlimited since 2007 and that has grown and developed along with the Camden Collective – providing free work space in vacant buildings and now the Camden Highline – all aiming to maintain and improve Camden Towns’s reputation as a place to work and visit. 

He admits he didn’t really know how in awe people are of Piet Oudolf till he posted a picture on Instagram of himself with Piet Oudolf doing the same walk as you are listening to now and then he REALISED! But what really comes out, I think, in our interview is how there are so many moving parts to making a proposition like this a reality and its complicated, Simon refers to it several times in the interview as ‘wading through the treacle’ and in a way you can’t even start to think about the plants till you have waded through that treacle and there is more detail on that in the episode.

Photographs from the walk

You can hear us walk through a passage way that allows you to ‘walk’ the width of what will in time be a Highline above you. So with each step you can imagine trees and plants, then a path and people and then more trees and planters as you reach the far side.

The second photograph is of the triangle of land that is an illustration of the treacle that you must wade through to make a project like this a reality, many people have an interest in this small patch of land and you must work and negotiate with all of them before you can start hauling plant pots onto the Highline.

As well as tenacity you need imagination. As you listen to this episode I think you can sense that Simon can already ‘see’ this Highline, he has already spent a long time working on it but the photograph is of the Dinosaur bridge - think Jurassic park - and if that doesn’t make sense to you yet just listen to the episode!

Seeing ‘trains in the wild’ - it’s where we leave Simon this time around but I really hope we can come back in a years time and hear about the progress of this Highline.

What can you do to support the Camden Highline?

Talk about it and sharing this podcast episode with friends is one way to do that!

Sign up to the Camden Highline newsletter so you can keep track of their progress.

Make a donation - this is a charity and they are fundraising to make this project a reality.

Download the free Bloomberg Connects app and you can download an audio guide narrated by Simon which takes you step by step on an audio tour of the route, so you could walk the route yourself if you happen to be in Camden. You’ll start at Camden Gardens, where our walk started and then there are stopping points at Prowse Place, Royal College Street, Randolph Street, St Pancras Way, Camley Street and York Way,

Further Reading and listening:

If you have enjoyed this episode then you might enjoy another audio walk along the Castlefield Viaduct in Manchester which is a National Trust project. You can find that episode here.

And perhaps take a look at the New York High Line to give a bit more of a vision of what we could one day have above Camden.

Transcript of podcast episode

00:01

Welcome to our plant stories and the second episode about highlines or urban parks in the sky, turning old railway tracks, fire ducts, bridges into spaces to garden and be close to nature. But it takes a lot of tenacity and imagination to make it happen.

00:24

The staircase reminds me of... Whenever I go up it, I'm reminded of a scene in one of the Jurassic Park films where they're being attacked by pterodactyls. Which is what always comes to my mind when I walk through this funny caged staircase.

00:43

and today's guest seemingly has both in abundance. In the previous episode, I was able to walk along the first section of the Castlefield Viaduct in Manchester. For this episode, we can only walk along the roads in Camden in London because the Camden High Line is a project in planning, as we'll discover. It will link Camden Town and Kings Cross via a 1.2-kilometre-long urban park.

01:09

The design team, led by James Corner at Field Operations, is the same team that worked on the New York High Line. My guide, as we dodged the traffic, crossing busy roads, admiring bridges, imagining new stairs and lifts up to the park, was the chief executive of the Camden High Line, Simon Pitkeathley. Simon has been the CEO of the Business Improvement District or BID Camden Town Unlimited since 2007 and that has grown and developed with the Camden Collective providing free workspace in vacant buildings and now the Camden High Line - all aiming to maintain and improve Camden Town's reputation as a place to work and visit. I hope you enjoy the walk.

01:54

So we are sitting here on an absolutely beautiful autumnal day in the heart of Camden, in this quiet spot in the heart of Camden, outside your offices which actually can you just describe your offices to me.

02:09

Well I think of it as a sort of weird little campus isn't it? There's a rather beaten up old auction rooms building here, there's some blue containers here which we use as an office, there's the old Hawley Infants School there and they're all part of our collective, we call it Camden Collective, our collective campus and it's great fun being here and there's lots of young people doing stuff.

So we're going to go and walk part of the route of the proposed Camden High Line. Tell us a little bit about it. Where does that idea for a highline come from?

Well I think highlines have been around since the Parisian one, 40 years ago? Anyway, quite a long time. But then of course the New York one really kind of lifted everyone's awareness of highlines and things like that. And it was an academic at UCL called Oliver O'Brien who loved the New York Highline and did a bit of an aerial study of places in London you could do it. And this one became the most obvious one to do and there was a local paper called the Kentish Towner they picked up on it and former board member of mine who was then living in Toronto who was former Kentish Towner was still getting the Kentish Towner publication and his wife spotted it and told him he should do it when he retired and moved back which he does he's now my chair and so there's been a sort of series of lots of people going oh this is a good idea you should do that and we went okay.

03:36

How tenacious do you have to be to get something like this off the ground? This is not something that you have an idea for and a couple of years later we're walking on the High Line, is it?

Sadly not, no. There is a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of treacle as we call it, to get through. Obviously you've got to raise the money and that's a big ask as well. But you know, we had to raise a million quid before we could get through the first stage of planning. So that just tells you, in a sense, the scope of what you've got to do. But in many ways, I think the hardest part, I think I will look back on this, is wading through all those internal procedures of the various bureaucracies that you have to interact with. As you can see, we're quite a fleet of foot small organization, and we butt up against these supertankers. And we have to, in a way, behave like them and think like them in order to manage our way through those processes. And that, I think that is, it develops quite an interesting skill set, I suspect.

We saw a kind of workshop going on with school children. Tell me what that, what is that about?

Well that is a particular project that we just started this year thanks to money from the Lottery Heritage Fund. So this is specifically about tracking the heritage around the High Line. So we've got I think 25 workshops with local schools coming. And then we've also got, but before that, we had, we'd done a thousand hours with local school kids prior to this. And they are, here they come past us now. They're actually, yeah. So they are trying to understand the heritage around the High Line. But I think it's not just about heritage, it's not just about trying to get young people interested, although all that matters. You know, generally this thing will go through communities and we want that to be part of the story. I think it did sort of happen to the New York High Line that they'd spent so long wading through treacle and raising the money that they actually found that they'd almost forgotten about the local community and they had to double back and kind of work on that and we've interacted with them a lot, the founders of the New York High Line, and you know tried to learn their lessons and so from early doors we thought you know let's try and get this bit right and of course it's very different engaging with people who own property in and around Kentish Town around the High Line than the people say at Maiden Lane, right at the other end. And getting your engagement right for both of those, not something I would ever claim that we've done perfectly at all. But, you know, recognising the difference is an important part of that. Over 2,000 people have been on the walk that we're doing today, at ground level. We've also had to, of course, develop relationships with the Mayor of London, with Camden Council, with TFL, with Network Rail, you know, and the GLA family more widely. You know, it is a process of, and we say wading through treacle and it's not to be too disparaging about the treacle, it's just that it moves at a slower pace. .

06:40

Brilliant, well look let's do the walk and we'll talk along the way and we'll get to plants as well, won't we? Because they're part of it, they're a big part too.

It's an interesting phenomenon when I was in New York, I went with a group of people from London recently and we were on the high line there and noticing how there really isn't graffiti or drug associated activity on the New York High Line and yet at ground level all around it there is evidence of it. It's just an interesting thing that these spaces, presumably because of the footfall and because they are curated and managed, they're not like a sort of council park. They just for some reason either push away or don't attract anti-social behaviour in the same way it would seem. That's interesting because I'm imagining that is a concern of some residents. Oh yeah, very much so, yeah. So yeah, I think it's... and we elected from the start to close it at sort of park hours.

07:29

So it's already a secure site because it's next to a live train. So you can't get up there anyway. And we will close it at dusk and open it at dawn in the same way that parks do. So, and that's partly because that's a better way to manage a space like that. But it's also recognizing people's concerns about antisocial behavior and things like that.

07:56

But that's a bit, as you say, operating a bit like parks do. Yeah. They open and close. Will there be people up there as well?

Very much so, yeah. I mean, a mixture of volunteers, gardeners, and security. You have to do, at closing time in a linear park, you have to close from the middle out. So you make sure that people aren't trapped up there. So it does require quite a lot of staffing and maintenance. And I think using the New York model, we recognise that there's no point trying to build this thing and then seeing if you can hand it over to the council to run. It just takes too much resource to do that. So we've taken on the responsibility of being the eternal provider, if you like, to make sure that it's not just amazing when it opens, but it stays amazing in perpetuity.

08:57

Tell me where we are and what we're looking at.

So we are looking over a part of Camden Lock, the sort of eastern part of it on Kentish Town Road, there's a double lock here, oh sorry, a lock and a weir, which is sort of more unusual in the canals, and to the right of us is the new Hawley Wharf development that's part of Camden Market, which is where that picture was taken from, looking down onto Camden Gardens over here, which we'll visit next. But you know, it's quite quintessentially Camden this, places to kind of visit and drink and eat over there, and office space, residential all overlooking this former transport hub.

09:45

So the High Line would start from the Camden Gardens Park here on our right. Okay. You can imagine walking up Camden High Street coming to the famous bridge turning right and then it'll take you into entrance one or four depending on which way you're coming. A little High Line just over here. And then so there'll be a stairs or lift? Yep well if we go over there I'll show you.

Simon where did you grow up? Well I was born in Manchester.

I grew up in a place called Reading. I left when I was 18 and then I moved to London and I've been in this part of London really ever since. So you really see yourself as a Londoner? Yeah, I think so. What does someone from Camden call themselves? Camdenite perhaps? But really steeped in this particular part? Yeah, and I've been doing this job, running the Business Improvement District for 17 years now. So we started as just a sort of small entity and we've grown into four organisations, one of which is the Camden High Line. So yeah, I kind of, I'd say I've grown up here. have grown up here because I grew up somewhere else.

10:53

Yeah, I mean there should be a new pedestrian crossing here. So, you know, unfortunately, Camden Gardens is home to quite a lot of antisocial behaviour. And I think one of the ways in which you deter that is having footfall. So the lift will go up here, the stairs will come up over here, return in the air, there'll be a parapet along here because you can't punch through the brick, and it will actually punch through the metal bridge there and then you'll be able to walk back and there'll be things like viewing platforms for the trains, because we love the trains, we want the trains to be very much part of people's experience when they're up there. And a concession on the end as well with a loo in it which I think would be helpful for the area and then this middle arch should be completely open still for people to move through.

Is it very much in your head now you've been with it for so long do you stand here and I'm obviously trying to visualize it but do you just see it?

Yeah forgive me if I just explain it as if I am looking at it.

I love that.

Yeah of course yeah we've been doing this for however long it is now so it will be of course.

How long, I know you're wading through treacle, how long do you think before we'll walk up that staircase?

Well I think it's, we are still on a timeline to get the first section which is this bit that we're under now to the second entrance. We are still on a timeline to have that open early 27. So...you know fair winds don't help you when you're stuck in treacle. I'm not sure how far I can push that analogy but anyway. But you know provided we can keep moving forward through the treacle, provided we can you know get a fair wind behind us, that's still perfectly doable. But that's only section one. And then you need to build the next two sections. But as with all these things, the proof of concept is when you've got section one open and then it becomes much easier. And I think we really learned that from Castlefield, looking at what they've done there. And I think we'll copy their idea of having a sort of glass window at the end of the first section, so you can really imagine what comes next. And it's been very helpful, in a sense, being able to have both New York and Castlefield as examples to talk with and to, and understand their issues. And they're different to us, but there's a lot of...And it's a very supportive network as well. It really doesn't feel competitive. It's nice for that.

Because everyone kind of knows what the treacle is like and you just have to get to the other end. So it's quite great to see someone who's done it and know actually that's going to be us.

Exactly right, yeah.

Can I take a photograph of you near where your lift is going to go up? Yeah. That would be great.

13:46

We're going under the arches at Camden Road overground station now, so we're beneath the platforms and you can hear the train above us. And in these arches are commercial spaces. And what you get a real sense of here is we're coming up to this funny little white tunnel which gives you a sense of the depth that we'll be playing with on those disused platforms. So you can see down here, this is all space up there is under the High Line which is difficult for audio I understand but you just get a real sense of how much space up there is in fact sat vacant.

Oh, so this is the... Okay, so this is... If we were to walk this passage, we're walking from one side of the High Line to the other. The width.

The width, yeah. Oh, okay. Exactly right. So I now... And what you don't realize, you can just quite nice echo in here. What you don't realize when you're on the, say eastbound platform at Cameron Road Overground Station, because there's a, what looks like a bit of bush and a rickety old fence behind you, is there used to be two more platforms there, which took up a lot of space on the viaduct.

14:56

So that's where...about 20 meters of space there, so this is all up here. We're looking up to the edge of... So the northern edge of what will be the High Line. This is all space that it's publicly owned but it's completely inaccessible and unused that will turn into a beautiful park. I love the way and I need to take some photographs of this. We've got Mexican Fleabane growing up around the arch and then we've got Buddleia

15:28

London Wildlife Trust did our environmental report for the planning application and I thought - my naivety about these things that after at least 35 years of neglect and...that this place would be very diverse and biodiverse. But of course it turns out that no, there's two species that have dominated everything. And it's very undiverse, and we can improve the biodiversity very easily with just a bit of curation. And it's one of those buddleia? Yeah, of course.

16:00

And of course, you do meet people who only see it from a very, very narrow perspective. You know, A, when can I get up there? When can I do some planting? Why is it near me? You know, and it's, whereas we have to constantly think about it in the round, you know, this won't work if we only think about one aspect. And that's just, again, part of that challenge.

16:29

Yeah, it's easy to kind of get excited about the planting aspect she says, from her own perspective. Thinking, you know, you've been on a beautiful High Line, you know how wonderful the grasses are, or you know how, so that walking through nature or looking down on the streets below. But I guess if you focus too long on there, you're not going to get to the actual process of how do you...

There is so much more to do before you get there. They really are the nice sort of finishing touches.

16:55

Have you also got challenges there about how you transport soil?

Yes, getting material up there. I mean, fortunately there's a very helpful group of network rail engineers in a depot just a bit further down who are really keen for this to happen, so they keep coming up with cute ways of getting soil up there. But yeah, it's a challenge. Let's just try and cross where we can. There isn't much you look at here that isn't a challenge.

17:32. Sound of a train crossing a bridge

I love that sound. Love that sound. And the interesting thing as well is that when, because obviously I've been up there, it's much louder under the trains than it is next to them. Yeah, in Castelfield you have the trams of course. Yes, yeah. But yeah. But actually we get even closer than they do in places which we can see later on. It's the live trains. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

17:56

Is it, you know, when you have a real vision for something, because you clearly do, how do you cope with the fact that perhaps sometimes not everybody along that High Line shares that same vision or has concerns about it? Is it, are you just, yeah?

Does it hurt? Kind of. It does a bit, it does a bit. I think it's to do with, erm, we have, I think we have a culture of NIMBYism in this country that is, I feel like has got a bit more angry in recent years. And of course everyone only thinks of their own backyard. But yes, it's sad when people don't see the vision. But frankly, it's just all part of the treacle. We do at least have democratic processes for dealing with this stuff. And almost the hardest bit is people feeling that...even though you're going through all the right processes and going above and beyond, they still accuse you of not doing that. And that's quite hard, but you know, you've got to have a bit of a thick skin as well. And you know, the beauty is that we get so much support and so many people wanting to... I mean, one of my big frustrations is the number of people, in fact I've got a chap who's very helpful to us, who...is in his late 80s and keeps saying, I want to be able to do my gardening up there. I want to go up there and prune, you know, when are you going to build it before I, when I still can, you know? And so, you know, there's, there's for every, there aren't that many moaners, there are a lot of heartwarming supportive comments. So yeah, it's nice.

Tell me a bit more about who's going to do the planting. Well Piet Oudolf is, I confess some ignorance here, I hadn't quite realised what a big deal Piet was until I did a walkabout with him, the same walk we're doing now, and posted a picture on my Instagram of him and me. Then suddenly realised that half the planting world is interested in everything he does. So, but I think his, you know, rewilding approach is very much in keeping what we'd like this space to be. And yeah, people know him as a sort of a demi-god, a guru of that world and so I think we're very lucky to have him as part of the design team.

20:36

Do you have a garden? I do, but a very small one, which I'm just having redone.

And did you grow up around plants? No, no, no. I sort of grew up mostly in sort of suburban-y places, where there are gardens, but mowing the grass at my mum's house was not my favourite job, but it tended to fall to me. So that sort of gardening I fell out of love with very early. So I'm much more interested in the sort of urban gardening that we will engage with on the High Line. We're obviously just passing Camden Garden Centre here, which is another interesting landmark. And we're just walking into Elm Village, which is one of the three big Camden estates that the High Line cuts through. And we're obviously on the south side of it now underneath and you know a very different part of the world to the you know rather houses in around Camden Road and Kentish Town but you know just as much part of Camden's landscape as everyone else you know.

It's interesting Camden's always had a big tourist footfall hasn't it? Yeah yeah, Camden Town has.

21:47

And I think there's an interesting thing that the High Line would do, actually, is that that visitor economy part of Camden Town and the visitor economy part of Kings Cross are sort of, in a way, helping to pull the centre of gravity of central London a bit north. And the High Line kind of joining them up is quite a neat way of representing that or delineating that. Yeah, more centralising of this bit of London, which is another interesting thing. The thing about projects like this is so many aspects you get involved in that you didn't realise you didn't realise. Give me some examples. Well, understanding the depth of love for Piet Oudolf or what biodiversity really meant.

22:40

We're about to head to the dinosaurs, oh, and the trains. But I just wanted to say that I hope you'll share the word about this proposed High Line. You could share this podcast episode. Maybe sign up to the Camden High Line newsletter so you'll know what's happening, because this is a charity that has got to raise the funds to make this happen. So spreading awareness of the project is key. I'll put all the links plus photographs of this walk on: www.ourplantstories.com

23:14

be the sort of second widest part here so you can see all that scrubland up there yeah the sort of grey box which I'm hoping we can get rid of that's all another very deep part of the High Line. Quite a lot of trees up there. Yeah quite a deep area. It is it is and of course what's nice about that is it's actually on plantable land right so a lot of the places you're going to have to put we're going to have to basically put bags up because, and you won't be able to plant trees or anything that's got too deep roots, because A, there's contamination in the soil that's there, which we're going to have to treat, or come, or barrier, and B, you just haven't got the depth. You know, you think of that bridge, you just won't be able to get a lot of depth.

So you'll take the soil up in bags and plant into the bags?

Exactly, and partly because we are effectively dealing with a temporary project, because we can only get...Network Rail will never give you a 100 year lease. They just can't think like that. So you have to act as if, okay, if they need to land back, then we can, you know, you have to do all your return and investment and everything based on the terms of the lease. So you can't think this is forever basically, you've got to know that, yeah, you know, hope it is but, you know, yeah. Exactly, and it's the way, and you saw meanwhile the spaces that we've been in before, we're kind of used to doing that. And it helps that we've got that background because it gives some reassurance to the landowners that, you know, we're not going to squat it and say you can't take it back, you know, we will be good citizens in that way.

24:43

For this here, this bit of land, which is called a triangle, doesn't look anything like a triangle. It's tiny. Is where we hope to have an additional entrance. So Camden have got an aspiration to include it within the development that will go up here and the other side of the bridge. Right. But, and I've sat in these meetings, and I may not get this entirely right, but it's something like it is owned, has controlling interests by the Department of Transport, Network Rail, the Arch Company, the GLA, high-speed one. I think there might be another one. Anyway you can imagine trying to get all those bureaucracies to in a sense take on that little patch of land we're talking about.

How many cars could you park on there if you parked them literally side by side? I don't know, 15 maybe 20? It goes under the arches, although they're gated off, you can't really see that. That staircase takes you up to the other one. We're going to go up there.

25:44

So this staircase sort of reminds me of...Whenever I go up it, I'm reminded of there's a scene in one of the Jurassic Park films where they're being attacked by pterodactyls. Which is what always comes to my mind when I walk through this funny caged staircase. Which is quite hard to describe actually. It is like a caged staircase that you might see in one of the Jurassic Park films surrounded by pterodactyls.

26:10

We were lucky dinosaurs, we avoided them. But what are we looking at? So it's basically storage. We're looking down on the pipes and tubes girders, circular girders that would have been one of the gas holders at King's Cross I assume, that are just piled up in a corner with a bit of Harris fencing around them. I guess where do you put them? When you take them down you've got to put them somewhere. Yeah, and I think the arches have got other bits of that sort of kit in.

26:39

behind here this will all be part of the red line that's the high line. You can see there's a lot of space there But this is presumably Linked to the Maiden Lane estate and we get quite conflicting signals from people within the estate. So some will say well look you're gonna have a lovely curated High Line space there and we're left with you know these unmanaged sort of areas right around it. Why don't you incorporate this so that it's less available for antisocial behaviour and more looked after and then other people saying you know no no this is important to us leave it alone so we just try and work with whatever we can.

What really strikes me as we walk do this walk is there are so many different pockets yes of space and land that you have got to negotiate with along this way yeah yeah no absolutely well the High Line itself is all network rail yeah um but it abuts lots of things, James Corner who leads the design team at Field Operations, he describes this as borrowed landscape, so it's not necessarily part of the High Line itself, but you could fence it off and never have anything to do with it, or you could incorporate it in some way so that at least people looked at it, or you could make it part of the maintenance, and there are associated costs with that and everything. Trying to kind of get clarity on what other people want and then coming to a view on what works for everyone is just another part of what you have to do really.

So we are now the closest that we can get to the High Line?

Yeah, when you're not actually on the High Line itself this is the closest you can get and you can see that this is a very narrow spot here so there'll be a fence right up where the trains are. We'll hopefully get a train in a minute and you'll be able to sort of hear the noise from it because they're not that loud.

28:33

But some people have said, oh what about the noise from people walking up there? Well, it's not going to be as much as a freight train coming down here. But equally they're not that loud. Here we go.

28:46. Sound of train passing

So we can talk over the top of that. You know, it's a... They're speed limited. It's not like being next to an intercity train. They only travel at... I think it's 20 miles an hour? I'm not sure. Obviously the freight trains are louder and longer. But yeah, there's been a concern that the High Line will generate lots of noise, but it seems slightly unlikely, complaint given where we're located. But there we are. It's rather lovely that you will be up where it's happening. It's a... I think there's several things. For me, A, these spaces that are always this sort of 8, 10 feet above everything else have a different feel to them. There's just a calmness, perhaps it's air quality. I don't know, but they just engender this sense of calmness, even when there's a train line trundling next to you, that you don't get at ground level and I think that's a really important part of it all, you know, any High Line has that. And I just think it's, yeah, that separation from the ground, that perspective on the city that you're just not quite used to. But also I just think they're places to to just lose yourself a little bit. That calmness is such an important part of it, I think. But you can also see it goes back a long way here, I'm going to be able to have some, you know, seating and...you know, classroom space. We've got some plans for some allotments. There won't be enough for everyone to have an allotment. But you know, some, as soon as you say that, someone says, I want an allotment, you know. It won't be like that. But you know, places that people can come and do planting. And look and feel the trains, you know. I think it's like seeing trains in the wild. Again, slightly naively, because you're used to seeing a train at a platform.

30:42. sound of train going past

And you'll see here now, you can see the wheels. It's quite nice, you know. They're bigger and taller than I expect them to be somehow. And it's, yeah, I like that.

30:56

And for now, that is where we will leave Simon, watching trains in the wild. But we will come back to this High Line. Perhaps we can do an annual visit to the Castlefield, Viaduct and the Camden High Line to see how they're progressing. I so admire the tenacity of the people who make it their job to, as Simon puts it, wade through the treacle, so that others of us in due course will be able to walk these High Lines and find those spaces of calm above the city.

31:25

Our Plant Stories is an independent podcast produced and presented by me, Sally Flammon.