Thank you Side View at http://viewfromtheside.wordpress.com/ for another stunning weekend challenge: this time, not a theme, but a photograph…

We are not accustomed to vast open spaces here in England.

There is a well-worn feeling, even, to our national parks. The tracks are well trodden by affable English people out on well-organised hikes, and the advent of mountain bikes means our deer must share their wild meandering runs with blokes sporting helmets crashing through the undergrowth on wheeled things.

The Lakes and the Peaks and the Moors are all well mapped and over-visited. For we are on an island, and when the land stops the sea starts.

Anyone knows you cannot build on sea. We have 50,000 square miles, and that’s our lot. We must use our land and reserve the tamed wild spaces which still remain to us.

Before our kids, there were computer games, and Phil loved one above all others. It is called ‘Civilisation’, conceived by a gentleman called Sid Meier. And in it, you play God.

Consider: an Englishman’s greatest dream. Acres upon acres of undeveloped cyberwilderness, waiting for a civilising influence.

Phil, Reader, was that influence.

He would start in 4000 BC. Gradually he would use the game to build small primitive hamlets into huge cities: every now and then an alert would pop up saying something like: “You have discovered fire”. He might be offered the alphabet, or the wheel, or pottery.

Sometimes other civilisations would interfere and compete: and if he was good enough, Phil could bring his cyberempire right up to the present day, discovering nuclear fission and space flight.

He loved to take land from wilderness to metropolis.

Me, I love that ‘used and worn’ feeling that goes with an over-used piece of ground. The antithesis of wilderness. Perhaps, Reader, that is why I fell in love with the city of New York.

I have only spent five days of my two-score-years-and-some on the island of Manhattan. And what riveted my attention, right from the start, was the journey this little island had taken from those days, back in 1640, when it was largely an arable landscape.

Eric Homberger’s Historical Atlas of New York City tells the story of a civilisation through a series of carefully researched maps.

As I browsed the shelves in a New York bookstore, I found in its pages the beginnings of the settlement of New Amsterdam.

In 1625 Johan De Laet described what was there: “The land is excellent and agreeable, full of noble forest trees and grape vines, and nothing is wanting but the labour and industry of man to render it one of the finest and most fruitful lands in that part of the world…”

The book contains a modern map created from sources of the time of land use in 1664. Oh, the charm: a city wall and a tiny settlement with a tavern; land parcelled into small pockets belonging to people with names like Cornelius Aertzen and Abraham Verplanck.

There is a common abutting the Dutch West India Company’s farm and way uptown a “Kalck” or collect pond. There is a windmill. And in between, Reader, there is land: green, green space waiting for history to happen.

What happened to the comparative wilderness between then and now is as well trodden a path as the New York streets themselves. This island sat in a unique location, and wharves and docks sprang up on the East River, named after the merchants who built them: Cruger’s, Hunter’s, Burnet’s and Lyons’, Schermerhorns, Livingstone’s and Ellison’s.

By 1769 the streets west of Broadway were laid out. New York weathered the American Revolution badly: one native returning in 1789 called the city: “a neglected place built chiefly of wood, and in a state of prostration and decay…”

But the wharves defined the city. Business and commercial interests were never down for long. Wall Street and Broadway were given a facelift as the city became a key financial centre.

And in 1806 came the death knell to wilderness. A four-year commission laid out a simple grid of rectangular lines to modernise and extend the city, in line with plans formulated by the city’s surveyor, Casimir Goerck.

The grid was all-powerful. It obliterated forever the old paths, farms, waterways, marshes and houses. The metropolis, whatever one has to say about how well its design was planned, was here to stay.

Of course, all civilisation can falter, as Rome showed us so effectively.

There are many literary pictures of dystopia: the degeneration of a civilisation. But a very English vision is contained amongst the pages of PD James’s The Children Of Men.

It’s an ingenious plot: infertility rises until one day, there arrives a final generation: the Omegas. The country’s functions: law and order, social care and legislation- become shrunk until they are draconian and inhuman.

I remember one scene above all others: like Orwell, James says most when she is observing the detail of downfall.

It is in a beautiful old church where a Vicar is struggling to keep a semblance of routine. A deer has found its way into the place of God: and it runs around, the Vicar ineffectually trying to expel it.

But the wilderness is returning. And what a powerful image James chooses. It is not threatening; not cruel.

Wilderness is simply the next logical step in a time-honoured cycle.