Artists Spare Room | Nadia Mehdi
A Common Treasury for All
The first time I visited the Lake District, I googled, “wild swimming, lake district”.
I was met with pages and pages of results - “13 best spots for Wild Swimming in the Lakes,” “20 Magical Places to Swim!,” “Our Favourite Lakeside Swims.”
Armed with an OS map and a local bus timetable, I plotted out a range of dips in tarns, fairy pools and meres that I could easily drag my cousin to from our accommodation at YHA Ambleside - she’s not a big fan of the water, but I’m the older cousin by 8 crucial months, and there’s always the scenery to look at as well…
For weeks, I looked forward to what I had begun calling our “wet holiday,” whilst also feeling ever so slightly apprehensive that the local bus network might let me down, and - God forbid - stop me swimming all together…
Now, Lake District savvy readers might have foreseen my delight, but it is genuinely hard to overstate my shock. Directly in front of the hostel was a small jetty, with a ladder, and more importantly, tens of people queuing up for their turn to dive straight into Lake Windermere…
As the clouds began to part above our heads, it slowly began to dawn on me… This was the Lake District! And perhaps we could swim almost anywhere we pleased… (NB: the buses were perfect and didn’t let us down).
Tea on the jetty at YHA Ambleside, 2021
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Since that fateful day, I’ve been lucky to return to the Lake District a handful of times, and swim in its many bodies of water, large and small - pools, tarns, lakes, rivers, estuaries.
Very quickly, it’s become the place that I feel most free. Amongst the mountains, fells and tarns, I feel genderless, unraced. A living, breathing being accepting invitations from the landscape to scramble and swim.
I think more interesting than the feeling itself though, is why this feeling arises here… Why was I so stunned at the prospect of being able to swim in a place that is literally named after something you can swim in?
I grew up in London, with one of the most cosmopolitan mother’s you can imagine. But for the past eight years, I’ve made my home in south-western corner of Sheffield, bordering the Peak District. Here freedoms, let alone the feeling of freedoms, are far more limited; the area is sometimes - unflatteringly- referred to as “glorified farmland,” and a quasi civil war is being waged between the companies that manage the reservoirs, and those of us that want to swim in them…
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During my residency at Eden Arts, my plan was to undertake some development work for a podcast series I am making: MANIFESTO.
Manifestos are written when a set of circumstances inspire someone to say: something must be done about this. The written documents that remain stand as entryways into a moment. They are a chance to tell a story about a particular time and place, about what will make the world a better place, and about standing up for what we believe in.
I already had a vague idea of the six manifestos that I planned to examine in the first series of the podcast. But in Penrith, just a stone's throw away from Ullswater where I went on the bus for afternoon dips, one stood out to me more than the others: Gerard Winstanley’s “A Common Treasury for All”.
Main pic to right: Afternoon swim in Ullswater, 2024
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Starting in the 12th century, and picking up pace between 1450 and 1640, the British aristocracy enclosed the commons, parcels of land that regular folk relied on for food, fuel, and other essential resources. They began to charge excessive rents for commoners to use this enclosed land and many were forced out of farming.
But in 1643, new farmer Gerrard Winstanley couldn't make sense of this system. He had recently moved to Cobham, Sussex, after his cloth merchant business folded due to Civil War disruption. Drawing from biblical passages, he started to speak to other people locally; if God had made the world as a common treasury for all, then why were the landless living as peasants, whilst landlords grew fat from the rents they received for doing little to no work?
Winstanley began to develop a vision for a society based on common ownership, equality, and direct action. He articulated his ideas in several pamphlets and writings, advocating for the abolition of private property and the establishment of communal farming.
And one day, he decided to take action. On April 1st 1649, Winstanley led a group of poor men and women to dig the earth at St George’s Hill in Surrey. It was early April - the perfect time to sow cabbages, peas, carrots. They plan to cultivate the land and distribute food without charge to any who would join them in the work.
Winstanley didn’t ask for permission to be there that day. The way I see it, he accepted an invitation from the land. With this decisive simple action Winstanley was attempting to re-establish the right to farm the commons, a right removed by enclosure. By cultivating St Georges Hill, without permission, Winstanley and his diggers challenged the very fabric of English society, questioning the system of land access and ownership and class which had existed for centuries.
The group defied the landlords, the Army and the law for over a year. And other colonies sprung up too - across central and southern England. But in 1650, a violent attack on Winstanley’s camp at Little Heath meant they were forcibly evicted from their settlement. Their utopian dream was over.
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In an homage to Winstanley, I planted some seeds - peas and carrots - around the Eden Arts Centre. I didn’t think they would amount to much without cultivation. But I hoped they would.
Across the years, Winstanley’s vision has resurfaced time and time again. Syrian refugees grow flowers in the Domiz refugee camp; Rio favela residents are gardening their way out of hunger; in the Upper Calder Valley, you’ll find self-seeded pak choi peeking out of pavement cracks thanks to a group taking over unused or unattractive bits of public land to plant food to feed the community…
But I think groups like the Right to Roam campaign are part of his legacy too, campaigning for millions more people to have easy access to open space, and the physical, mental and spiritual health benefits that it brings. Sometimes those benefits have to be felt to be believed, but in my experience they are life-changing.
Watch Nadia's brief interview about her residency here.
