Wild London Review – Honestly, it doesn’t get any better than this | David Attenborough

TThe journey begins in a row of allotments two streets deep in north London. It’s 8.30pm, and David Attenborough – 99, wearing a blue short-sleeved shirt and chinos – is on the hunt for Tottenham’s most elusive resident. He settles into a camping chair. He waits. He lets out small gasps of excitement when the creature in question appears. It’s…a fox.

“It’s still very exciting to see one of these animals suddenly emerge from the bush,” he whispers to the camera about a swampy landscape that most Londoners don’t bother looking at from their phones. “An absolutely wild creature!” Attenborough extends his hand. “Hello,” he mumbles happily. The fox comes within inches of the greatest nature historian and broadcaster this country has ever produced, then slinks off into the night. What a meeting! And if you think that’s hilarious, wait until you see his reaction to a pigeon going up the tube.

For those going through a precarious phase of the holidays where heart compresses are in dire need, I present to you Wild London. A wonderfully exhilarating, beautifully produced, and unexpectedly poignant special filmed during Attenborough’s centenary, we hunt down the capital’s wildlife and discover that the secret to a good life isn’t actually a parasite cleanse or a vaginal facial – it’s an appreciation for what’s on your doorstep. In Attenborough’s case, it is a huge city with nine million people, 2.6 million cars, 607 square miles of concrete, asphalt and steel, and a larger number of wild animals than seems possible in such unnatural conditions. Plus, of course, the rare David Attenborough. “Throughout my life, I’ve had the good fortune to travel the world and witness many sights,” he says in a black cab home to Richmond. “But this is the place I always come back to.”

And so to Hammersmith station, by which Attenborough regularly commuted, his day “always brightened” by the sight of… Yes, I was thinking of a mouse too! But no. the bathroom. Hopping onto and off trains before the doors close, with Indiana Jones cheekily clutching his hat as passengers look on obliviously, Attenborough explains how pigeons typically use the sun and magnetic fields to find their way, but in urban areas they have learned to navigate using landmarks, roads, and even train lines. Honestly, does British television get any better than this?

Subsequently, peregrine falcons, which fans of Hamza Yassin will know, are now nesting in pairs all over London. When Attenborough moved to the capital in the 1950s, they were virtually extinct in the UK. today? “They thrive in London in greater numbers than in almost any other city in the world.” There are breathtaking shots of the fastest animal on Earth flying around the city, nesting in the Houses of Parliament, Charing Cross Hospital and factories on the Thames, which act as perfect substitutes for their natural habitats on the cliffs. “The concrete valleys of London,” Attenborough calls them. “Plenty of opportunities to make a killing in the city.” The writing, as always in his films – which he always insisted on refining and rewriting himself – is lyrical, mischievous and glorious.

There is much to inspire childlike wonder: “green flocks” of parrots, honeybees drinking fermented nectar, aesculapian snakes along the Regent’s Canal, imperial dragonflies breeding in the pond outside the Natural History Museum, and, most surprising of all, the return of wild beavers to London’s wetlands. A species that disappeared from the UK about 400 years ago. “If someone had told me when I had just moved here that one day I would see wild beavers in London, I would have thought they were crazy,” he says. “Imagine what could be achieved if we allowed nature back into our cities.”

It’s not just beavers that blow his mind. “What a beautiful thing,” says Attenborough, holding a four-week-old peregrine falcon chick. He marvels at a vixen hiding a chicken bone under a car’s windshield wipers. He is tickled by the “hedgehog highways” introduced by the owners of London’s four million private gardens, where they cut holes in fences to allow males to travel up to two miles each night in search of a mate. In Hyde Park, he witnesses a confrontation between some territorial coots and a frankly terrifying herring gull, whose taste for pigeon meat has given him “shiny feathers on the shores of the serpentine.” Without going into the horrific details, I found myself jumping up and shouting three words that I never thought would come out of this Londoner’s mouth: “Come on, dove!”

What’s even more poignant is seeing common urban scenes that the rest of us take for granted, or never see at all, elevated to the dizzying heights of an Attenborough documentary. Whether he’s watching a herd of fallow deer cross an east London street to feed on someone’s garden roses, or recounting the high-stakes drama of a mother trying to hide her fawn from an off-lead Dalmatian sniffing the bushes of his local garden, this endless capacity for wonder, on his doorstep and everywhere else, is most humbling. This humanoid animal has changed the way we see the natural world. What would we do without him?