On the last day of April, I take my camping chair out to the canal where it runs alongside the square and settle into an unseasonably warm evening. The sun descends gold, orange and blue. Aeroplanes orbit runways on the city’s fringes. A gang of gulls glide overhead and black bugs bounce in vertical loops.
The surface of the canal is stilled to a tremor until a dinghy motors upriver, parting the reflections into psychedelic ripples. A light easterly flickers like a flame across my arms, depending on its direction, alternating between a freshness, frying onions, and fox scat.
The colony of house martins descends from weaving loops round a centrepoint high over the neighbourhood down to map the contours of the square. The moss and lichened rooftops become their peaks, the London brick walls their valleys. Unpredictable shimmies and turns track the jitters of their prey. In turn, tracing a microcosm of turbulence and torrents in the atmosphere transitioning to night.
The noise of the neighbourhood makes it difficult to stay focused on the house martins for long. When the temperature creeps past twenty in London, the whole place comes alive. A thumping bassline and chatter carry up from the bars a few hundred metres down the canal. A cyclist freewheels on the towpath with a speaker strapped to their bike. Dogs bark, coots holler, and kids scream in delight. The engines of an aeroplane snarl through a downshift banking a cabin-full of passengers into a view of London on their descent to City Airport, a few miles south.
A trio of house martins streaming overheard draws my attention back to the sky, where a lilac-lavender glow is settling on the horizon. The new moon gives a tilted Chesire cat smile. I clock one of my neighbours leaning against the railing of their juliet balcony smoking a cigarette. I get the sense they’ve been watching me watch the birds. I try sharing a look of knowing. It is unusual, I agree.
I can’t fathom what other people in the square might think of the house martins, filling the air with noise and scattering droppings from their nests in the eaves above the doors.
When it’s dark enough to feel concealed, but still light enough to see, I walk round the square and count the house martins’ nests. They’re all settled in for the night. It takes two laps of the square to match a count of twenty, which could mean up to a hundred house martins all filled. I also spot some muddy O’s imprinted in the eaves, the outlines of previous nests chiselled off or weathered away. I worry it’s the former. Metal-wire cages block some of the eaves on the longer side blocks.
On my third lap of the square, my body starts following the sun and the birds. I count the apartments: ninety to a hundred. Maybe 300-500 people, possibly more. On my way in the communal front door, I look up at the three martin nests stuck in the eaves, count myself lucky, and wonder how they sleep through all the noise.
A revised version of a previous piece written in 2025.