I live in a rented house share in Zone 4, West London, about a 30 minute train ride from the city. Being Zone 4 my friends who sell organs to live in Zone 2 claim that I’m not really living in London at all, and think of me as some kind of country bumpkin. That’s fine with me, because this morning I discovered that myself, and residents like me in Greenford are quietly, gradually saving the planet.

I’ve lived in Greenford for nearly 6 years now, and in that time the population has changed significantly. When I arrived it was predominantly Asian, but with Poland joining the EU a few years back there has been a dramatic shift in the number of our Eastern European cousins living in here and in surrounding areas. When I first moved to the street I’m currently in, the Costcutter at the end of the road sold the usual British corner shop fare of Pot Noodles and baked beans; they had a couple of shelves of Polish pickles and those suspicious looking sausages the Poles are so fond of, but not much else. Now the balance of groceries has swung completely the other way with pretty much the entire shop being dedicated to weird Polski Sklep and the Pot Noodles squeezed in between the marmite and the toilet rolls. Now of course your average Eastern European immigrant can’t afford to come over here and buy a house. Come to think of it, your average UK resident can’t afford to buy a house in London, but anyway, my point is that they mostly rent in house shares, as do I.

The thing with renting in house shares is it always seems a very temporary arrangement. I’ve been down here 6 years and, for a variety of reasons (one being an imprisoned Chinese landlady) I’m on my third house. Now the thing about temporary rented accommodation is that you don’t tend to be very house proud. Obviously you clean the place and try not to live like a student, but other parts of the house get neglected to a certain extent. The first thing to go is the garden. All three houses I’ve lived in in the suburban wilderness that is Greenford have had fairly large gardens. These houses were thrown up in the early to mid 1900s when space wasn’t so much of an issue and your average bowler-hatted office worker wanted a bit of land to potter around in at the weekend, so they’ve all got gardens. And there are thousands of them. And many of them are rented.

Essentially what I’m saying here is that I suspect that many of the gardens in Greenford now look much like ours. I ventured into our garden this morning to hang out some washing. It’s not something I do very often. Not washing, I’m not unhygienic or anything, I mean I usually dry my washing in the house, but all the driers were occupied and the weather forecast was good so I took the risk and stepped out the back door. Such a step is not to be taken likely. Our garden backs onto an allotment, and is very long and narrow. I don’t think anybody’s actually reached the bottom of our garden for many years, or if they have they never came back. It had rained during the night and the grass soaked my hair as I walked through its waving fronds, slashing with a machete towards where I last heard the washing line had been sighted. A howler monkey called from the trees above, or it could have been a magpie, the canopy above blocked out much of the sunlight so it was hard to tell. Unsighted creatures scuttled among the undergrowth and the low morning sun gave the place an eerie, dangerous air. On finding the clothes line I quickly cleared the areas as best I could, vainly hoping that the choking humidity would clear enough to allow my undies to dry during the day. As I pegged the last sock onto the line and struggled to find my bearings, eventually using the ping of the microwave to guide me back to civilisation, it occurred to me that Greenford is saving the planet. While the seas are polluted and rainforests cleared it seems that everywhere humanity encroaches on the natural world, destroying everything in its path. But here, here in this quiet corner of West London nature is fighting back. Here in the back garden of one of the world’s largest cities a pristine wilderness flourishes, a place where man rarely treads, where the hateful hootings of homo sapiens are seldom heard. Here amongst these patches of green, lawnmowers will do no good, strimmers will surely fail. Here lies hope.