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

Trials, Tributaries and Tall Storiesfrom beneath the Streets of London

To Cindy, Cathleen and Seán

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

AUTUMN

1. A Bloody Big River Runs Through It

2. Special-Brew River Visions (No Boating, No Swimming, No Fishing, No Cycling)

London Stories 1: The Dogpeople

WINTER

3. Football, the Masons and the Military-Industrial Complex

London Stories 2: A Young Person’s Guide to House Prices

4. From Eel to Eternity: William Morris and the Saxon-Viking Duopoly

London Stories 3: Going to the Dogs

5. Spa Wars

London Stories 4: The Secret Policeman’s Bar

6. Invisible Streams

London Stories 5: Triumph of the Wilf

SPRING

7. The Pot and the Pendulum

London Stories 6: Catching Muggers, Starsky-and-Hutch Style

8. Can You Feel the Force?

London Stories 7: Our Man in a Panama Hat

9. Danish Punk Explosion Dream

London Stories 8: Suspicious Mind

10. Big Sky Over Norton Folgate

London Stories 9: Hidden Art Soundscapes in the Aura of Things

11. River of Punk

London Stories 10: The Secret Life of the Market Trader

12. Fred the Cat and the River of the Dead

SUMMER

13. Acton Baby!

London Stories 11: How to Fuck Your Knees Before You’re Fifty

14. The Suburban River Goddess at the Brent Cross Shopping Centre

London Stories 12: Swedish DIY Fascism

15. The Unbearable Shiteness of Being (in South London)

London Stories 13: 30 Love in the Time of Henmania

16b. Sorry to Keep You

17. The Tim Team

18. Doing the Lambeth Walk

London Stories 14: Welcome to Shakespeare Country – Britain’s Heritage Industry

AUTUMN

19. Bridge Over the River Peck

London Stories 15: A Night Out at the Ministry of Sound

20. The Black Wicked Witch Knife and Fork in Old Ed’s Dinertown

London Stories 16: An Alternative Global Financial System Written on the Back of a Beermat

22. Up Shit Creek

London Stories 17: Dome Time

23. The Tao of Essex

London Stories 18: The Eighties Were Shit But Free Jazz Pool Was Great

24. Smoke on the Water

25. Black Sewer, Crimson Cloud, Silver Fountain

Appendix

Flow rate Chart

What is London?

London Weather

Some Top London Buskers

Bullshit Detector Detector

Etymologists

Further reading

Credits

Pubs that appear in the text

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Further praise for The Groundwater Diaries:

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

• 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.