This is Hampstead Green, a wildflower meadow just up the hill from Belsize Park station. It's fenced off to prevent public access but with low railings so all who pass by can admire. It looks fabulous at the moment with its carpet of spring bluebells, but is also very much under long-term threat from a variety of existential hazards.
Hampstead Green is the name given to a triangular patch of land at the top of Haverstock Hill. Go back far enough and this was part of a large area of manorial waste, later preserved as greenspace when the area started to be residentialised. Grand villas were built and also St Stephen's Church, designed by Samuel Teulon and consecrated in 1869. It hasn't always looked this good, for many years it was neglected and overgrown, but the local community cleared the area and transformed it into a natural open space. It's now planted with nine trees including cherry, sycamore and poplar and is principally cultivated as a wild flower meadow to encourage butterflies. But for how long?
Hampstead Green is managed by the Parks & Open Spaces team at Camden council. They aren't in dire financial straits at present but that could change, indeed every UK council has been under increasing strain since the austerity squeeze by the Coalition government. In Camden's latest budget document the allocation for Green Space management has thankfully risen to £3.85m but this has to cover a large number of sites, also it's only a 2.5% increase on last year and inflationary pressures instead suggest further tightening of belts. It's not inconceivable that the tending of a wildflower meadow could come to be seen as a discretionary extra, particularly when there are legal responsibilities to cover key services like bin collections and adult social care instead.
No such cutbacks are planned at present but the entire council's up for re-election next month, and indeed every four years hence, plus who's to say a future government won't squeeze council funding further. Imagine Eric Pickles on steroids taking up the post of Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government in a Reform government and cutting budgets to a rump 'to protect local taxpayers'. No space then for a namby pamby bio-diverse maintenance regime ("one third to be left uncut in rotation to allow later flowering species to seed"), far easier to just turf the whole thing and run a lawnmower over the lot occasionally. In a hypothetically brutal financial future, today's gorgeous bluebells could one day be history.
Hampstead Green is overlooked by the latest addition to the Royal Free Hospital, the Pears Building. This lowrise facility opened a few years ago and contains a world class Immunity and Transplantation institute with the capacity to accommodate 200 researchers, also the offices of the Royal Free Charity, also a 35-bed hotel for patients. It's a fine building but go back just 15 years ago and its footprint was instead grassland and an access road, because open space is always first to go when a hospital needs to expand. If the Royal Free needed to expand again then Hampstead Green is the last patch of open land locally and who's to say it wouldn't make a really nice medical facility? Technically this triangular patch is protected by a historic covenant signed by the council which restricts its use to "an enclosed open space", but there's always a way round these things if NHS priorities take precedence.
Britain's bluebells are also under considerable threat from climate change. They're blooming earlier due to milder springs, also being outgunned by competitive plants which start their leaf growth earlier in the year. A further threat comes from invasive Spanish and hybrid bluebells, these increasingly prevalent, and if temperatures rise too much then the suitable zone for bluebell growth may edge further north. You can't just replant bluebells, they take several years to establish themselves and grow to maturity, so this is not a loss it'd be easy to turn around. It might take decades but Hampstead Green could easily lose its Hampstead blue, so best enjoy them while they last.
Climate change brings further risks, not least the risk of the collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. Better known as the Gulf Stream, the AMOC speeds warm currents from the equator towards the poles, warming the climate of northwest Europe in particular. This helps explains why Britain has much milder winters than central Canada, despite being on the same latitude, dodging the snowbound winters and iced-up oceans that 52°N would normally bring. If the Gulf Stream failed we'd face noticeably colder winters ourselves, notionally only a 0.5°C drop per decade but after a century that'd be 5°C and we could expect lengthier freezes and icebergs off the Hebrides. What's more the mostrecent research suggests we're likely to be approaching an irreversible tipping point far faster than previously assumed, vastly reducing the UK's agricultural capability and broadening our seasons. It might only be your grandchildren that suffer as a result, living in a country whose climate would be unrecognisable to us today, but Hampstead Green's long term destiny is potentially as Hampstead White.
One of the inexorable consequences of climate change is a rise in sea levels. It's only a few millimetres a year at present but if tipping points are reached it could rise much faster and a coastal city like London could be under serious threat. Bluebells in lower lying spots like Kew Gardens would be first to be threatened, while it would take 15m of sea level rise to smother the glories of Chalet Wood in Wanstead Park. Hampstead Green's flowers are relatively safe being 80m above sea level, which is approximately the maximum height if all the planet's ice melted. But Hampstead-on-Sea is unlikely to be a charming seaside resort, more a brackish marshland in an abandoned city, so no gorgeous spring meadow will survive. We're talking very long term here because geological time waits for no man, but our current inaction may already have condemned substantial portions of the UK to an underwater future.
The swiftest way to permanently damage Hampstead Green would be sudden impact by a thermonuclear device. Usually this is unthinkable but only this week the US Treasury Secretary pondered out loud "I wonder what the hit to global GDP would be if a nuclear weapon hit London", referring to the potential capabilities of Iranian missiles. The fireball from a single 5 megaton intercontinental ballistic missile targeted on central London would only reach Regents Park but Hampstead would be uncomfortably inside the zone of 'moderate damage' where most residential buildings would collapse, injuries were universal and fatalities were widespread. We might well expect fires to burn out of control, also horrendous levels of fallout, and were it April the loss of most local bluebells. It's likely London would need to be evacuated, also that millions would suffer from radiation poisoning and that councillors would have far more pressing concerns than the maintenance of a lightly-mown nature reserve. And that'd be the end of Hampstead Green.
Looking further ahead, in around 5.4 billion years time our Sun will have burned out and shrunk to the size of a white dwarf. Earth will have become uninhabitable long before that, maybe around 2 billion years hence, as our star's expansion boils away the oceans. All kinds of global calamities could have occurred in the meantime, from a giant asteroid impact to man-made Armageddon to a ultra-fatal pandemic, even alien conquest. Everything on our planet has a finite lifespan, indeed if you look around yourself right now everything you see will one day be destroyed by irresistible forces, be that civilisational collapse, oceanic immersion, tectonic action or universal decay. Hampstead Green is ultimately doomed, of that we can be absolutely certain, so best admire the lovely bluebells in the wildflower meadow while you can.
