NLA Walking Tour: Urban Ecology and Parakeets

This walk will challenge ideas of “belonging” and what is “natural” through the travails of the Parakeet and our built environment. Parakeets are not a naturally occurring species in the British Isles, but ‘British Nature’ is not something that has occurred naturally. These birds dwell within human-influenced habitats – landscapes created through millennia of human manipulation. By creating parks and gardens, forests and farmland, successive generations living on the British Isles have rendered its ‘nature’ artificial. What counts as natural, or native, depends on when you start the story.

This walk will shift the goalposts of what counts as “nature”, exploring the ways that human actions have remade urban ecologies. Through traversing the city we will explore different chapters of human:parakeet entanglement, from Romans in Britain and the oldest known drawing of a Parakeet in Britain (Lime Street) to the globalisation of capitalism and the Parakeets who bore witness to empire (Lloyds Building). Across this we will also explore the religious, moral and poetical lives of Parakeets, their association with the saints (St Pauls) and their contemporary status as a “pest”.

Through the walk you will become a paracologist – a new emergent discipline that seeks to move beyond outdated ideas of nature, and forge new attitudes to living-with our fine feathered friends.

Please note that this walk is about parakeets, and they may join us, they may not - they are their own people and decide what they want to do!

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Host or Publisher New London Architecture