Testing setup

In situ

‘Waterproofed’ server box

The Plastic Box

Inside The Box

Collaborators

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising given the extreme weather we have been having in London – the hottest year I have experienced in the UK in my lifetime, with endless weeks of sunshine and little or no rain – but my solar-powered web server has been running continuously since I set it up at the end of May. That’s 59 days on sun and battery power alone, at the time of writing.

For the vast majority of that time it has not been accessible to the web and has just been sitting there serving the nginx default page. It will be interesting to see how long it stays up for if traffic increases and the days get shorter and less sunny.

It may be that my solar panel is overspecified? (190W)

You can see the uptime stats here.

Who lives in The Garden?

A preliminary ecosystem list: to be expanded

• soil
• plantlife
• solar panel and web server
• humans // sometimes be-hammocked
• dog // patrols, sleeps
• foxes // take over the local garden spaces at night
• frogs
• snails
• birds // some regular, some occasional visitors from One Tree Hill
  • goldfinch
  • blue tit
  • great tit
  • parakeet
  • wood pigeon
  • feral pigeon
  • magpie // also enters the house to take dog food
  • robin
  • sparrow
  • dunnock
  • jackdaw
  • jay (occasional)
  • greater spotted woodpecker (occasional)
• insects
  • where to begin/end?
• mice
• rats
• cats // neighbours’

The site of The Garden was once common land, then farmland. In 1878 a small grid of roads was built on what had been farmer’s fields, adjoining the main road, and houses with gardens were built there. In 1890 the remains of the farm to the north were bought by the Camberwell Vestry, to expand the local common, and developed into Peckham Rye Park, which was opened four years later.

When The Garden was still a farmer’s field.
From GB/Ireland OS Six inch map, 1830s-1880s

Thus the site of The Garden is between Peckham Rye Park to the north and a wooded hill to the south, a remnant of the Great North Wood known as One Tree Hill.

The little estate of roads did not originally include the house with The Garden. The grid was expanded eastwards at some point, into what had been cricket grounds, to allow for further house building. Documents suggest that the house belonging to The Garden was built in the late 1920s, but the extended part of the road doesn’t appear on maps until later, in post-WW2 maps.

For viewing historical maps of the UK side-by-side, for comparison of different time periods, look at the wonderful National Library of Scotland website.