Ada’s Trees.

In 1922 Ada Salter, as Mayor of Bermondsey and the local Labour administration, set up the Bermondsey Beautification Committee, which she was a chair of for the next eleven years.

‘This innocuous sounding task force was driven by the compulsion that improving the environment was part and parcel of improving people’s lives, and that by raising aesthetic appreciation of their neighbourhoods, a sense of personal wellbeing and civic pride would be engendered.’

By the beginning of the 1930s, the Committee had planted over seven thousand trees around the borough’s new estates and streets. Salter’s goal was to transform Bermondsey into essentially a garden city and her ambition can still be seen around the borough.

To pay homage to Ada Salter’s transformative work I took it upon myself to document how it had changed in the time since the founding of the Beautification Committee. Focusing on the different relationships that those trees take up with the built environment, this series of photographs illustrates the never-ending negotiation between nature and the man-made. These range from symbiotic to parasitic, from friendly to antagonistic, each bringing with it an understanding of its past and present form.