Think of ‘nature’ and most of us think of the deep countryside – but the natural world can live side-by-side with us in cities, too. 82% of us now live in urban areas, and in this richly imagined journey through one day in a British city, novelist and nature writer Melissa Harrison will bring to life a world that most never know is there, and explore the social and ecological benefits of reimagining our relationship with our wild urban neighbours.

 

This lecture is part of a new annual series inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s radical lectures in Bristol in 1795. The 2015 series is run in association with Bristol Festival of Ideas, the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol and Bristol 2015. It is part of The Romantic Poets and Bristol programme, which celebrates the life of Thomas Chatterton, Hannah More, William Wordsworth, Coleridge and others in the city, and Bristol as the place where Romanticism was born with the first publication of the Lyrical Ballads. The programme focuses especially on nature and the emotions, place and the environment, and also looks at Bristol as a city for science, philosophy, ideas and political debate at the time of Coleridge and today. The 2015 theme is Radical Green. Future themes are: Utopias (2016); Revolution (2017) and Peace (2018).