{"id":7041105,"date":"2026-08-18T06:43:05","date_gmt":"2026-08-18T06:43:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/anthropology\/entangled-time-in-spa-fields-anthropolitan\/"},"modified":"2026-08-18T06:43:05","modified_gmt":"2026-08-18T06:43:05","slug":"entangled-time-in-spa-fields-anthropolitan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7041105","title":{"rendered":"Entangled Time in Spa Fields \u2013 Anthropolitan"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Rie Kimoto<\/strong> MSc\u00a0Anthropology and Professional Practice<\/em><\/p>\n\n
\u201cDead bodies are buried under the cherry trees! For how\u00a0can it\u00a0be believed that cherry blossoms bloom so brilliantly otherwise?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0Motojiro\u00a0Kajii,\u00a0Under the Cherry Trees\u00a0(1928)\u00a0<\/em> \u00a0<\/p>\n
After a long, dark winter, spring\u00a0has finally arrived in London. Observing the cherry blossoms at Spa Fields Park in Farringdon, I was struck by a sense of unease. This essay is a record of the shift in my\u00a0perception\u00a0of these trees, which only a year ago I viewed as mere objects of beauty. Through a multispecies ethnography of Spa Field\u2019s cherry trees, I explore how urban parks are not simply aesthetic green spaces of the present, but rather sites where the past, present, and future intertwine.\u00a0 \u00a0 What, then,\u00a0has changed since last year? The difference lies in my knowledge\u00a0regarding\u00a0this land\u2019s uncomfortable inheritance. In fact, between the 18th and 19th centuries, this park served as a severely overcrowded cemetery. Approximately 8,000 bodies were interred in a plot with a capacity for only 2,722. Older remains were disturbed, and corpses were illegally incinerated. The resulting smoke and pollution caused severe health\u00a0hazards until a public expos\u00e9 in 1845 led to its closure and eventual reorganisation into a community park.\u00a0Although\u00a0the remains of the past\u00a0have\u00a0presumably merged\u00a0into the present-day soil, the complete removal of headstones makes it difficult to recognise the site\u2019s former existence as a cemetery.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nThe transformation of Spa Fields: the burial ground in 1845 (Survey of London\u00a02008) and the view from the same location in 2026, bottom\u00a0photo by author.\u00a0<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
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From the perspective of urban planning, Spa Fields might appear to be a success story, a\u00a0hazardous cemetery transformed into a clean green space, decoupled from its history of pollution and death. However, as\u00a0Worpole\u00a0(2003, 157) warns, modern urban planning\u00a0has historically sought to\u00a0thoroughly and irreversibly exclude inconvenient corpses and the memories of the past\u00a0from the landscape. In doing so, this process creates \u201ccities that deny death and humanity\u201d by severing the historical continuity of dialogue between the living and the dead (ibid.<\/em>,\u00a031). At Spa Fields, manicured\u00a0lawns\u00a0and cherry blossoms veil the temporal connection to the site\u2019s history as a cemetery.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Cultural Perception: Deconstructing the Aesthetics of Cherry Blossoms and Death<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n
To pierce through this aesthetic veil and re-evaluate the landscape\u2019s hidden past, the figure who came to mind was the Japanese writer\u00a0Motojiro\u00a0Kajii\u00a0(1928). His famous opening line,\u00a0\u201cDead bodies are buried under the cherry trees!\u201d\u00a0is part of an influential short story that links the imagery of cherry blossoms with death in Japan. Within this narrative, the protagonist feels a profound dread at the uncanny perfection of the\u00a0blooming flowers, convincing himself by rationalising that such suspiciously brilliant beauty must be actively drawing nourishment from the rotting corpses buried beneath.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Before learning of its history, the cherry blossoms of Spa Fields were simply beautiful features. But the moment I became aware of the horrific history of the improperly processed\u00a0remains, my\u00a0perception\u00a0was reorganised through this\u00a0Kajii-esque\u00a0lens. My internalised cultural template inverted the role of the blossoms.\u00a0The trees shifted from being entities that severed the present from the history of death to ones\u00a0that actively bound them together. Initially, this felt like a success\u00a0\u2013\u00a0a shift from superficial consumption to a multi-layered temporal awareness of the soil\u2019s grim eighteenth-century inheritance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\u00a0<\/em>The base of the cherry tree showing various living beings such as mushrooms and moss, alongside traces of human presence, photos\u00a0by author.\u00a0<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
However, as my ethnography progressed, it became clear that even this inversion was itself a form of blindness. From the moment the cherry buds began to swell until the brown, shrivelled petals were finally subsumed into the soil, I made repeated visits to a small plot at the foot of a single cherry tree. This was my exercise in what Tsing (2015, 37) terms the\u00a0\u2018art of noticing,\u2019\u00a0a practice of temporarily setting aside human-centred frameworks of meaning to intentionally attune one\u2019s senses to the overlooked details of a reality where humans and non-humans entangle in unexpected ways.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Throughout the research period, I created\u00a0cyanotype\u00a0sun prints as a visual diary, using petals, feathers,\u00a0hair, and fragments of plastic gathered from beneath the cherry tree.\u00a0I chose the cyanotype because both the invention of this photographic technique and the burial crisis at Spa Fields unfolded during the same era in nineteenth\u2013\u00a0century Britain. While rapid industrialisation sparked the emergence of\u00a0new technologies\u00a0and\u00a0brilliant inventions like the cyanotype, it simultaneously drove the drastic densification of cities and the resulting pollution of overcrowded cemeteries.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nA small area beneath the cherry tree\u00a0where an unexpectedly diverse range of living beings were entangled,\u00a0sketch by author.\u00a0<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
The cherry blossoms I gathered during this process were not symbols of beauty as\u00a0Kajii\u00a0had depicted. Instead, they were\u00a0half-submerged in the soil, entangled with human\u00a0hair, feathers, and plastic. Touching them, I was struck by a profound sense of unease. Part of this was a lingering anxiety\u00a0regarding\u00a0the past, an imagination\u00a0haunted by the remnants of corpses resting beneath, yet it was simultaneously a more visceral, intuitive repulsion toward the immediate filth, an urgent desire to scrub away the grit trapped beneath my fingernails. Through this fieldwork, feeling both past and present anxieties at my fingertips, I realised that by being so consumed by the dark inheritance of disturbed corpses, I\u00a0had become blind to the complex entanglements of the present, a state in which the past is perpetually decomposed and metabolised into an unknown future.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I began to feel a sense of dissonance with the very\u00a0way cherry\u00a0blossoms are narrated in Japanese literature as objects of\u00a0\u2018pure, overwhelming beauty\u2019.\u00a0The blossoms I\u00a0encountered\u00a0were invariably\u00a0\u2018dirty,\u2019\u00a0caught within messy entanglements.\u00a0Had the protagonist of\u00a0Under the Cherry Trees<\/em>\u00a0directed his attention to the multispecies entanglements surrounding the trees, the overlapping temporalities where\u00a0remains\u00a0return to the earth to foster new life,\u00a0perhaps he\u00a0would never\u00a0have found himself trembling before the spectres of the blossoms.\u00a0<\/p>\n
From the Soil: Imagining the Future through the Past and Present<\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n
Throughout this fieldwork, my perspective\u00a0has undergone a gradual transformation. Initially, I enjoyed Spa Fields simply as a clean, beautiful space. Later, upon learning the history, I began to read the contemporary landscape as an inheritance of the past.\u00a0However, sifting through the entangled debris, I sensed a third temporality.\u00a0It is not a time where the past is silently preserved beneath the present, but one where it is constantly being decomposed, metabolised, and carried forward into the future through plants, microbes, and urban refuse.\u00a0At Spa Fields,\u00a0\u2018now\u2019\u00a0is not merely the consumable spring of 2026. It is an ongoing process in which the remnants of the dead from 1845, nineteenth-century chemicals, contemporary urban waste, and the cherry trees, moss, insects, plastics, and microbes are perpetually entwined, transforming one another into new forms.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the Anthropocene, the\u00a0\u2018art of noticing\u2019\u00a0(Tsing 2015, 37) may\u00a0perhaps be\u00a0the act of reconnecting the past, present, and future\u00a0\u2013\u00a0temporalities that the managed city seeks to decouple through our own bodily senses. Plunging my fingers into the mud and picking up soiled cherry blossoms was an act of receiving the weight of the land\u2019s inheritance with my own body. Simultaneously, it was a modest response, an inquiry into what kind of future we should carry this weight into.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What is buried under the cherry trees is not only corpses. Just as the withering petals and tiny fragments of debris left the same ghostly white outlines on the blue-scorched cyanotypes, what resides there is an endless question: the realisation that the past and present, human and non-human, life and death, the decomposable and the non-degradable are\u00a0handed down to the future, inextricably entwined.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\nA cyanotype made with withering cherry blossoms I collected, together with the pieces of rubbish that came attached to them.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
References<\/strong>\u00a0 \u00a0 Islington Local History Centre. 2005.\u202fEC1 Local History Trail<\/em>. London: Islington Council. Accessed April 2, 2026.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n
Kajii,\u00a0Motojir\u014d. 1928. \u201cSakura no ki no\u00a0shita\u00a0ni\u201d [\u201cUnder the Cherry Trees\u201d]. Accessed April 18, 2026.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n
Survey of London. 2008. \u201cExmouth Market Area.\u201d In\u202fSurvey of London: Volume 47, Northern Clerkenwell and Pentonville<\/em>. London: London County Council. Accessed April 24, 2026.\u202f\u00a0<\/p>\n
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015.\u202fThe Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins<\/em>. Princeton: Princeton University Press.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Worpole, Ken. 2003.\u202fLast Landscapes: The Architecture of the Cemetery in the West<\/em>. London:\u00a0Reaktion\u00a0ooks.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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