William Blake Estate – Urban Ecology, Slow Walk Tree Explorations

Event Information

Residents of William Blake Estate in the City of London are invited to join us for this unique Urban Tree Festival event, funded by City of London. Join Walk Leaders Charlie Fox ‘InspiralLondon' and artist Rachel Gomme  on a gentle Urban Ecology and Tree Walk with slow walking meditation.

The walk explores the vital role trees play within the urban environment. We will celebrate street trees and specimen trees found within the William Blake Estate, along the adjacent streets, and in Archbishop's Park with a brief visit to the Garden Museum near the Thames.

During this gentle evening walk we will have some time to stop to examine certain trees, marvel at the undergrowth, at tree respiration and investigate urban ecology habitats.

The walk will also offer an interlude of slow walking where we take time to sense into and savour the delicate details of our own movement, and the beings, substances and flows around us. It offers insights into the benefits of walking the city particularly through interaction with urban ecology and urban trees. At the finish there will be time to share in refreshments and conversation.

A walk for William Blake Estate Community, but all Londoners welcome to explore this Green Oasis close to Waterloo, generously supported by The Urban Tree Festival and City of London Corporation.

Contributors

InspiralLondon

Is an ambitious artist-led metropolitan trail, a collective on the ground mapping, co-creating a new walk trail winding in and out of London. This initial mapping was finished in 2015. In 2025 Re/Walk Festival – Excavate, Explore, Exchange – Celebrates the 10th Anniversary of InspiralLondon Trail with a festival of seven plus seven, unique walks as participatory experiences. The festival walks will take you to other hidden and less well-known parts of the city; detouring from the trail, in exploring underexplored, buried aspects of the city or walking together by night. 

At over 300-miles of pathway, the trail is divided into 36 segments all easily accessible by public transport, allowing the public – walkers, urban explorers and ecologists, excursionists, citizens – to re/experience the city and its environs as one vast landscape in which to re-imagine the built and natural environment.

Rachel Gomme

Is a London-based artist working across performance, installation and drawing. Trained as a dancer, her practice centres on exploration of our embodied relationship with one another and with the world around us, Through site-specific performance, installation, one-to-one interactions, group walks, drawing and found-material sculpture, she explores how time and memory manifest in the body, the experience of shared embodiment, and how nature in the city (including humans) inhabits, survives and subverts the urban infrastructure. Her recent practice centres on urban trees and has included the Street Tree Twinning Project, the large-scale street tree map Forest of SE15, and upcoming exhibition Forest Lisburn: A Celebration of Trees, at R-Space Gallery in Lisburn, Co. Antrim (26 April-24 May). Rachel has performed, presented and exhibited work, and taught throughout the UK and internationally.

Location of event

Location:

Meet Point: Pineapple Pub, 53 Hercules Road, London SE1 7DZ and corner of Cosser Street. By the NE exit William Blake Estate

Short circular evening walk from edge of William Blake Estate through Archbishop's Park, to the Thames and back to the centre of Estate.

Walk length: Approx 1.5 - 2 miles (accessible to all)

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Ends: Centre of William Blake Estate