Sod’s law: what can two turf swaps 40 years apart tell us about Britain’s biodiversity crisis?

In 1983, David Nash dug up a section of Kensington Gardens and swapped it with Welsh grassland.

Four decades later, Mike Perry’s reverse swap revealed a striking reversal in the fortunes of urban and rural nature In 1983, an open-topped truck unloaded an unusual cargo in Kensington Gardens: 83 hunks of turf cut from Cae’n y Coed, a wooded hillside in the Ffestiniog valley.

The ring of turf measuring eight metres in diameter that was removed from the park beside the Serpentine Gallery in west London to make space for the Welsh sods was then trucked from London to north Wales.

So began Sod Swap, a piece of sculptural defiance by David Nash , which has had an unexpected and epic afterlife.

More than 40 years later, photographic artist Mike Perry restaged the work as Reverse Sod Swap , exchanging exactly the same amount of turf between Springfield Park in Hackney, east London, and pastureland in Pembrokeshire, with strikingly different results.

With twin works acquiring new relevance in a time of extinction and climate crises, the sod swapping is now the subject of a new book.

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