Tim Bradford - The Groundwater Diaries - Trials, Tributaries and Tall Stories from Beneath the Streets of London

For someone who finds rivers fascinating (‘Yes, would you like to see my gold-embossed collection of nineteenth-century etchings of the tributaries of the Tyne?’) underground rivers give me an extra thrill. As well as all that energy and … water … there’s the fact that you can’t see them. They’re erotic, mysterious and magical because they’re hidden and therefore may or may not really exist. In the early nineties when I lived near Ladbroke Grove I frequented a little second-hand bookstore at the northern stretch of Portobello Road run by a serious young Muslim with a goatee. His big gimmick was a job lot of poetry books by Reggie Kray, but my real find was a three-volume set called Wonderful London which he sold me for twenty quid. The volumes were published in 1926 – lots of pictures of London in the 1880s contrasted with the twenties with captions saying ‘Gosh chaps, look what a mess we’ve made of our city, eh what.’ If only they could have seen what was to come.

The books were brilliant – lots of highbrow columns, anecdotal journalism and chummy recollections, but by far the best was a chapter in Volume Two, ‘Some Lost Rivers of London’ by Alan Ivimey. He described in exquisitely bright purple prose the undulations to be experienced in Greater London – the geography and geology of the Thames Valley. London, said Alan, was an uneven plain, bordered north and south respectively by clay and chalk hills with a large river flowing through the middle of it, and in between the hills and the river were undulations of sand and gravel and clay. The once proud tributaries that flowed through this flood plain were now little more than ‘dirty drains beneath the bowels of the earth, trickling weakly along their old beds’.

There was a small map showing the main rivers that had disappeared around fourteen (though possibly more) including the Westbourne, the Tyebourne, Bridge Creek, Hammersmith Creek, the Wandle, the Effra, the Neckinger, Falcon Brook, the Holebourne (also known as the Fleet), the Walbrook and the New River. For hundreds of years people had been shitting and pissing and throwing their dead relatives into these rivers so that, by the start of the nineteenth century, most had become open sewers.

Travel back in time. Imagine I’ve a Public-Information-Broadcast-type voice:

(Swirly ethereal New Age synth music). Once upon a time London was full of vales with water meadows, woods and streams. Man first inhabited the area in Neolithic times, the Celts had a trading and fishing settlement near the Thames. Since then Romans, Saxons, Vikings and Normans invaded … blah blah Tudors and Stuarts … Georgians … lovely squares … Victorians – nice train stations … then Edwardians then wartime then the sixties, seventies … design nightmares … eighties … nineties … modern London, a teeming famed-piled post-modern high-tech metropolis where once was once rolling countryside.

I like to look at urban landscapes or, to be more specific, how urban landscapes would have looked before the industrial revolution. I can see the past, although it takes a lot of concentration. I walk down a street, look up at the old buildings then look down again at the winding lanes that once would have been filled with shit, rats and corpses. I’ve invented a special virtual reality gizmo that allows the user to input map co-ordinates then choose a year and the display will show the scene as it was then. So, for example, if I’m walking up Blackstock Road in Finsbury Park and I input 1760, it’d be a sandy lane leading from Stroud Green Farm to the heights of Highbury. A button would allow you to turn off all modern interference, such as cars or other people, but, of course, this would only be advisable in very safe conditions. Actually, by ‘invented’, I mean had an idea and talked to my wife about it. She smiled and asked, ‘Are the dreams still bad?’

After doing some research (half an hour on the Internet looking for ‘underground rivers’), I discovered that living above an underground river, or groundwater, is bad for your health and should be avoided. This is to do with radiation and ‘bad’ spirits – that’s why feng shui experts, hippies and mad country folk practise water divining. I’m always on the lookout for unified (and easy) theories of everything and it occurred to me that my insomnia, strange dreams and fragmented state of mind could be due to the fact that, since coming to London I had always lived above subterranean streams.

I got a surveyor to come round to investigate a little damp problem we had noticed and, as he was walking around with his damp detector, I tossed a casual question in his general direction:

‘Do you think the … er, damp … could be caused by … er … the lost underground rivers of London like the New River, Fleet, Westbourne, etc., ha ha, as it were?’

‘What a load of bullshit,’ said the surveyor. He moaned that people were always banging on about underground rivers. Were they? I said. I’m the only person I know who does – everyone else seems to be very bored with the whole concept already.

I live on a road with a watery name so thought that should be enough evidence, but decided to check out my theory on various old maps I’d picked up. Two Victorian maps showed the New River, which seemed to run along where our road is now. Then, during a visit to Stoke Newington library, I found an old leaflet about Clissold Park which showed that the raised avenue of trees was where the heavily banked river ran and continued past the brick shed at the park gate (actually an old pump house), then it went under Green Lanes and along our road before heading north. ‘My God,’ I thought to myself, slapping my forehead, ‘so the tai chi people, crap footballers, snoggers and dopeheads are perhaps in exorably drawn to the electro-magnetic currents of the river!’ I was so excited I got goose pimples and had to go for a shit immediately.

At the eastern end of my street, opposite Shampers Unisex Hair Salon (cut £3.50, blow dry £7.00), water is bubbling up through the cracks in the pavement in about six places. This little spring is clear and shiny in the morning sun and I want to reach down and drink from it, only it’s flowing over fag butts, withered banana skins, discarded ice cream wrappers and dog shit. It babbles and swirls for a few moments at the side of the road among a narrow band of cobbles, then pours along the kerb to a shallow trough in the road, where a pool is slowly forming. An empty can of Strongbow is already floating in it. As the water level in the pool increases, a group of middle-aged black people start to arrive at this end of the street. They are all impeccably dressed, the men in dark suits and blazers with ties, the women in dazzling summer dresses and hats. A tall man in specs issues instructions then they fan out, rapping fastidiously on doorsteps in twos, clutching their books and spreading the word.

‘Who is it?’

‘We want to talk to you about Paradise.’

‘Fuck off,’ says a bloke from an upstairs window.

‘The end of the world is coming.’

‘Who gives a fuck?’

It has been raining on and off for forty-eight hours, melancholy vertical summer holiday rain with an afterscent that’s like faint pipe tobacco mixed with petrol and oranges. Plump droplets hang from the trees. A quick sortie around the neighbourhood shows that many of the area’s drains are rebelling. In the network of streets to the north east of the Arsenal Tavern pub small lakes are forming in the roads. It’s as if the tarmac and concrete have been pushed down and the area is reverting to swampland.

By early evening, the pool of water stretches across to the other side of the road. It’s still flowing heavily from the same cracks and along underneath the iron railings. Half an hour later, four men are standing in the pool, one with a clipboard. They’re all looking down at the water.