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The Groundwater Diaries: Trials, Tributaries and Tall Stories from Beneath the Streets of London
Tim Bradford
A flight of imagination back to a time when London was green meadows and rolling hills, dotted with babbling brooks. Join Tim Bradford as he explores the lost rivers of London.Over the last hundred and fifty years, most of the tributaries of the Thames have been buried under concrete and brick. Now Tim Bradford takes us on a series of walks along the routes of these forgotten rivers and shows us the oddities and delights that can be found along the way.He finds the chi in the Ching, explores the links between London’s football ground and freemasons, rediscovers the unbearable shiteness of being (in South London), enjoys the punk heritage of the Westbourne, and, of course, learns how to special-brew dowse. Here, then, is all of London life, but from a very different point of view.With a cast that includes the Viking superhero Hammer Smith, a jellied-eel fixated William Morris, a coprophiliac Samuel Johnson, Deep Purple and the Glaswegian deer of Richmond Park, and hundreds of cartoons, drawings and maps, ‘The Groundwater Diaries’ is a vastly entertaining (and sometimes frankly odd) tour through not-so-familiar terrain.
THE GROUNDWATER DIARIES
Trials, Tributaries and Tall Storiesfrom beneath the Streets of London
TIM BRADFORD
Dedication (#ulink_28caf28d-3676-5370-a3c1-0fcadf91275c)
To Cindy, Cathleen and Seán
Contents
Cover (#u6499860d-b4b5-5584-b8c5-b5bf9717e235)
Title Page (#u1f3446ea-123d-5330-bc40-8bcc93e82568)
Dedication (#ub9afdec2-823f-52ee-b669-86804b8f4413)
AUTUMN (#uc39c5e1e-0dea-5763-a354-38e9efa36cdc)
1.A Bloody Big River Runs Through It (#u9d906781-f004-5f71-ad0b-0647c3c848b1)
2.Special-Brew River Visions (No Boating, No Swimming, No Fishing, No Cycling) (#uc3fb6abb-e703-5747-a652-074fddcd4a30)
London Stories 1: The Dogpeople (#ulink_68e460b1-71f0-5201-b2d6-6fd95f722cfc)
WINTER (#ud6122a3f-d063-5d01-8008-29319fe251d3)
3.Football, the Masons and the Military-Industrial Complex (#u0bdf3e5a-0e33-5263-bef6-e0fbc19a0e92)
London Stories 2: A Young Person’s Guide to House Prices (#ulink_337c0c30-5333-5846-9992-759197847cb6)
4.From Eel to Eternity: William Morris and the Saxon-Viking Duopoly (#u2a76a5b9-0ffc-5294-b3bb-4bf6f764a8f7)
London Stories 3: Going to the Dogs (#ulink_c50d9cc8-d368-5425-97c9-531c7454d734)
5.Spa Wars (#u9a5c9b9d-8f4a-5d14-9ba0-e010ce3b5644)
London Stories 4: The Secret Policeman’s Bar (#litres_trial_promo)
6.Invisible Streams (#litres_trial_promo)
London Stories 5: Triumph of the Wilf
SPRING (#litres_trial_promo)
7.The Pot and the Pendulum (#litres_trial_promo)
London Stories 6: Catching Muggers, Starsky-and-Hutch Style (#litres_trial_promo)
8.Can You Feel the Force? (#litres_trial_promo)
London Stories 7: Our Man in a Panama Hat (#litres_trial_promo)
9.Danish Punk Explosion Dream (#litres_trial_promo)
London Stories 8: Suspicious Mind (#litres_trial_promo)
10.Big Sky Over Norton Folgate (#litres_trial_promo)
London Stories 9: Hidden Art Soundscapes in the Aura of Things (#litres_trial_promo)
11.River of Punk (#litres_trial_promo)
London Stories 10: The Secret Life of the Market Trader (#litres_trial_promo)
12.Fred the Cat and the River of the Dead (#litres_trial_promo)
SUMMER (#litres_trial_promo)
13.Acton Baby! (#litres_trial_promo)
London Stories 11: How to Fuck Your Knees Before You’re Fifty (#litres_trial_promo)
14.The Suburban River Goddess at the Brent Cross Shopping Centre (#litres_trial_promo)
London Stories 12: Swedish DIY Fascism (#litres_trial_promo)
15.The Unbearable Shiteness of Being (in South London) (#litres_trial_promo)
London Stories 13: 30 Love in the Time of Henmania (#litres_trial_promo)
16b.Sorry to Keep You (#litres_trial_promo)
17.The Tim Team (#litres_trial_promo)
18.Doing the Lambeth Walk (#litres_trial_promo)
London Stories 14: Welcome to Shakespeare Country – Britain’s Heritage Industry (#litres_trial_promo)
AUTUMN (#litres_trial_promo)
19.Bridge Over the River Peck (#litres_trial_promo)
London Stories 15: A Night Out at the Ministry of Sound (#litres_trial_promo)
20.The Black Wicked Witch Knife and Fork in Old Ed’s Dinertown (#litres_trial_promo)
London Stories 16: An Alternative Global Financial System Written on the Back of a Beermat (#litres_trial_promo)
22.Up Shit Creek (#litres_trial_promo)
London Stories 17: Dome Time (#litres_trial_promo)
23.The Tao of Essex (#litres_trial_promo)
London Stories 18: The Eighties Were Shit But Free Jazz Pool Was Great (#litres_trial_promo)
24.Smoke on the Water (#litres_trial_promo)
25.Black Sewer, Crimson Cloud, Silver Fountain (#litres_trial_promo)
Appendix (#litres_trial_promo)
Flow rate Chart
What is London? (#litres_trial_promo)
London Weather (#litres_trial_promo)
Some Top London Buskers
Bullshit Detector Detector (#litres_trial_promo)
Etymologists (#litres_trial_promo)
Further reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Credits (#litres_trial_promo)
Pubs that appear in the text (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Further praise for The Groundwater Diaries: (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
AUTUMN (#ulink_f611c5da-7bca-5e30-ad89-3ebceb6bef82)
1. A Bloody Big River Runs Through It (#ulink_a6b4b9c5-74fd-5acc-9b11-61207d973d30)
• London’s forgotten rivers
Dream of a big river – river obsession – Danish punk explosion – Samuel Johnson – London – electric windows – pissed-up Jamaican grandads – Hemingway – burning Edward Woodward – global warming – the underground rivers – old maps – lots of rain – roads flooded – blokes digging up the road
I have a recurring dream. I’m standing in the shallows of a silver-grey mile-wide river. My wife, in a blue forties-style polka-dot swimsuit, is next to me, with our daughter. We are picking bits of granary bread out of the river and putting them into black bin liners. On the shore stands a big wooden colonial-style house. I first had the dream before my daughter was conceived, in fact long before my wife and I even got together. Dream analysts might say I was crazy. But they are the crazy ones, thinking that punters will be fooled by fancy titles like ‘Dream Analyst’. I contacted a dream analyst, anyway, because I can’t help myself. It was one of those Internet ones with swirly New Ageish graphics which denote a certain amateur-cosmic badge of quality. You had to type in your dream, then your credit card details. I’m no mug, so I chose one that only cost sixty dollars. A few days later my dream analyst (whose name was Keith – I had expected something a little more along the lines of Lord Sun Ra Om Le Duke de Dream Chaos Universale) sent me an email.
It is a pleasant dream showing you the very positive feelings of the family. You are together, safe, gathering and storing food. We survive best in a family and ‘tribe’, and this very primitive dream stimulus prompts you to make the most of that. You are lucky, most of the dreams like this work the other way by having the unit threatened. You might see your daughter drowning, thus frightening you (the objective of the dream) into increased protection in life.
I like it! A good dream. You even had it before the event, stirring you on to make the union and reproduce the species.
But I wasn’t totally satisfied. Why did my wife’s swimsuit have polka dots? Did the bread have something to do with religion? From my description, would he say the wooden house was designed in an Arts-and-Crafts style? And why were we in a river? Dream Analyst had gone quiet. Except for a ghostly hand that reached out from my computer terminal with a note that said ‘60 dollars please’.
OK, I am obsessed with rivers. Especially dark ones, like the River Trent in the East Midlands, 20 miles from where I grew up. It’s deep and unfathomable. Like time, but with fish and old bikes at the bottom. My mum used to tell me a story about a local man whose daughter fell from a boat into the river. He jumped in and saved her, but was carried off by the tide. Is his body still there, in the river? Maybe. So how deep is it, then? Very deep, my parents would say, shaking their heads and sucking in their breath. Fantastic. I’d lie in bed thinking abut the river and what it must be like to drown. I couldn’t imagine the bottom. It was like visualizing a million people or the edge of the universe.
I remember everything in the town where I grew up being smaller than elsewhere in the world (the cars, the voices, the people) and this was especially true of our ‘river’, the Rase. At its highest near the mill pond, the Rase could be up to 2 feet deep, but it usually flowed at a more ankle-soaking 8 to 12 inches. In early 1981, the placid river burst its banks and many people, my aunt included, were flooded out of their homes (ironically, my new copy of Lubricate Your Living Room by the Fire Engines floated off past her sofa). A couple of months later my friend Plendy and I decided to try and placate the Rase by making a pagan sacrifice. It was important to give something that we both treasured, but in the end were too stingy and instead nailed down a copy of Bullshit Detector (an anarcho-punk compilation album I’d bought some months earlier) to a wooden board, placed it in the water and watched it head off downstream. We liked to think it eventually found its way to the North Sea then travelled the world, spreading its gospel of three-chord mayhem and anarchist politics.
The men with the powerHave pretty flowersThe men with the gunsHave robotic sons.
‘The Men with the Guns’
At the very least, most Scandinavian punk music must be down to us.
Scene 1: A farm in Denmark. A big-boned farmer finds a record nailed to a board on the shore near his house. He removes it then puts it on a record player. It’s good. He starts pogoing.
Scene 2: A few days later, in the farmer’s barn, a punk band is practising. The farmer is on lead vocals.
Scene 3: A tractor lies half-buried beneath long grass. There are cobwebs on the steering wheel.
Scene 4: A painting of the farmer and his wife in the style of Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews. The farmer has a mohican. The wife looks very, very angry.
Long before we were offering third-class punk records to the water spirits, rivers were worshipped as gods. Those red-haired party animals, the Celts, threw things they most valued – shields, swords, jewellery, and other anarcho-Celtpunk memorabilia – into them (a residue of this is our need to chuck loose change and crap jewellery into fountains). To different cultures across the globe, rivers have represented time, eternity, life and death. It is believed that our names for rivers are the oldest words in the language, some predating even the Celts. Many major settlements were located at healing springs sacred to the pre-Roman goddesses, and many rivers, such as the Danube, Boyne and Ganges, were named after goddesses. The Thames is one of these, its name apparently deriving from a pre-Indo-European tongue and referring to the Goddess Isis. Some posh Oxbridge rowing types still call it that. Well, we’ve got names for posh Oxbridge rowing types. Like ‘big-toothed aristo wanker’, etc.
London is beautiful. Samuel Johnson, in the only quote of his anyone can really remember, said, ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.’ He may have been a fat mad-as-a-hatter manic depressive in a wig, but there is something in his thesis. London’s got its fair share of nice parks and museums, but I love its underbelly, in fact its belly in general – the girls in their first strappy dresses of the summer, the smell of chips, the liquid orange skies of early evening, high-rise glass office palaces, the lost-looking old men still eating at their regular caffs even after they’ve been turned into Le Café Trendy or Cyber Bacon, the old shop fronts, the rotting pubs, the cacophony of peeling and damp Victorian residential streets, neoclassical shopping centres, buses that never arrive on time, incessant white noise fizz of gossip, little shops, big shops, late-night kebab shops with slowly turning cylinders of khaki fat and gristle in the window, the bitter caramel of car exhaust fumes, drivers spitting abuse at each other through the safety of tinted electric windows, hot and tightly packed tubes in summer, the roar of the crowd from Highbury or White Hart Lane, dog shit on the pavements, psychopathic drunken hard men who sit outside at North London pub tables. London has got inside me. I’ve tried to leave. But I always come back. It’s love, y’see.
As you can probably tell, I’m a sentimental country boy. No real self-respecting Londoner would love their city the way I do (and before you ask, Dr J. was from the Black Country).
My love affair started early. The first trip was in the late sixties. We went to the Tower of London and some museums while the streets were ‘aflame’ with the lame English version of the ‘68 riots (‘What do we want? Cheap cigarettes and decent central heating! When do we want it? How about Wednesday? I’m visiting my Auntie for a long weekend!’). Years later I visited an old college mate in a little flat in Finsbury Park. I slept on the floor and spent three days sitting in pubs where we were the only people without overgrown moustaches and some obscure connection to the Brinks Matt robbery. A drunken fat bloke with a moustache the size of Rutland showed me how to drink Guinness properly. Throughout these years it seemed that London was a place full of record shops, shouty Irish blokes, pissed-up Jamaican grandads and stoners. I’ve found it hard to shake off these early impressions.
In January 1988 I hit cold evening air at Highgate tube, north London, a heavy-duty iron forties typewriter (a prerequisite for the aspiring writer) strapped to my body with a mustard and maroon dressing-gown cord, guitar on my back, clutching a bag with a spare pair of jeans, a couple of T-shirts and a change of underwear.
I had arrived, like Hemingway in Paris, in a grand European capital where I would soon become a famous novelist and songwriter. OK, not like Hemingway at all. Unless his music has been kept quiet all these years.
(#ulink_6c219861-6771-5f0a-a66f-482fe56ff447) I had a simple plan. Within six months I’d have clinched a record deal and would be starting my second novel. I was here to scrape the gold off the London pavements and cart it back to Lincolnshire, to be held aloft in procession through the streets of my old home town, before sharing my booty with all and sundry in the market place.
And so twelve years on I’m still here. Pushing a pram around for an hour or so every day and watching too much kids’ TV.
