THE GROUNDWATER DIARIES

Trials, Tributaries and Tall Storiesfrom beneath the Streets of London

TIM BRADFORD

Dedication

To Cindy, Cathleen and Seán

Contents

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

AUTUMN

1. A Bloody Big River Runs Through It

• 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.¹ 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.

I love London in late summer/early autumn. Hot weather. Then it’s cold. Then it’s cold-but-hot cold. Cold days have warm miasmic breezes. Hot days have brittle, icy winds that hide behind hedges and garden walls. Then it’ll piss down. The weather’s going crazy. You always start your books with stuff about weather, said one (pedantic) mate. What do you mean always? I’ve only written one. Yeah but you started that with weather and now you’re starting this the same way.

But weather is important. People on these islands have always been obsessed with it. The Celtic people worshipped the weather gods. The seasons. Agriculture. Sacrifice. Dancing naked around standing stones. Burning Edward Woodward in The Wicker Man. Listening to ambient techno while off their faces on magic mushrooms. The British Isles can have wind, sun, rain and snow all in one day. My mate agreed and pointed out that he lived here too so also knew these things. But now it’s changing more and more, What With Global Warming And That. The east of England could be underwater in a few decades. I want to write a book about Lincolnshire some day. But Lincolnshire may not be around for much longer.² London too. The climate will get wetter rather than hot and dry. It could also get colder in winter if the Gulf Stream gets clobbered by cold water from the melting ice caps flowing into the North Atlantic, pushing the warmer water further south. More importantly, my book about Lincolnshire will then be about an area that no longer exists. Or one of those Undersea-Lost-World-type things.

‘How do you know all this stuff?’ asked my mate.

‘I saw it on TV.’

Anyway after all the hotcoldrainsnowsuncoldhot stuff, it went cold again. Maybe we had gone straight from early summer to late winter. It became so consistently grey that my sensitivity to the London seasons became even more numbed than usual. As a kid, in rural Lincolnshire, every day held new smells and sensations. Cow parsley. Corn. Peas. Sugar beet. Rotting leaves. The perfume of a girl who’d just chucked me. Singed hairs on the back of a fat farmer’s neck as he gets his ‘winter cut’ at the local barber shop. Rotting roadkill. Cow shit. Blood.

And after a few days of cold, the sun suddenly came out and I guessed, from stuff in the newspaper, it must be some time in August. On the way back I walked along the little avenue of trees in Clissold Park. This is a sacred space where we sometimes sit in the evenings, surrounded by people doing tai chi, yoga, reading, skinning up or snogging, and we watch some of the crap football lower down in the park. Fat women jog tortuously around the little running track. Above, breadcrumb clouds scud across a perfect sky, and a leather football hits a nearby tree.

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.

‘Have you got a burst underground river, then?’ I ask, smiling. The man with the board looks at me nervously and smiles, but doesn’t say anything. As I walk down the road a mechanical drill starts opening up the pavement Er er er er er ererererererererererereerererere. Down below, the New River flows on, biding its time.

1 (Peter Skellern style number) Is it me Is it you We two Let’s do It.

2 Reader: Does Lincolnshire only exist so that you can write a book about it?

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

• The New River – Turnpike Lane to Clerkenwell

Invisible rivers – Sex File – magic glasses – more dream analysis – in the library – Turnpike Lane – Clifford Brown – Patrick Swayze in Albanian Ladyboys – Finsbury Park – Woodberry Down – Swedish prisons – Highbury Vale – Clissold Park – Canonbury – Islington – Clerkenwell – Special Brew visions – the floods

Another dream. I’m walking along the bank of the New River in the park with my wife and daughter. The path is very narrow and the water is full of crocodiles. We start to throw golf clubs at them (irons, not woods) to stop them climbing onto the bank. I throw the whole bag in and tell the others to run for it.

London is a city of invisible boundaries. Areas alter in atmosphere or architecture in the space of a few yards, and a reason for this might be that the rivers which once flowed were often the borderlines between ancient parishes and settlements. You might walk down a street now and suddenly notice a change in the air. Chances are you have walked across the course of an underground river. The New River would have been no different. Although a recent addition to the waterways of London (about 400 years old), when it was built it would have run through mostly open countryside and settlements would have grown around it.

Some portions of the New River are visible to the naked eye. Yet these sections (for instance, Turnpike Lane to Finsbury Park), which flow silently behind housing estates and terraced streets, seem somehow not as alive as those which have disappeared. It’s the ghost parts of the river, now covered by houses, gardens, shops, parks and roads, that get me going more than the algae scum¹ cuts I can see filled with bikes, shopping trolleys and empty plastic Coke bottles.

Searching for lost rivers is, in a way, a spiritual journey, searching for things that I once valued but have lost, like my Yofi acoustic guitar, God, my grandfather’s retirement watch, a sense of childlike wonder at the universe, old girlfriends’ phone numbers, a large cardboard box containing copies of the New Musical Express 1979–82, and my Sex File. Actually, my Sex File, one of the Really Big Things in my life that was truly lost (or, rather, forgotten about – it’s often the same thing) – a pink four-sided A4 folder plastered with pictures of models from a stolen late-seventies edition of Playboy, with notes and drawings (and even coloured in areas) by me – was recently rediscovered by my father. He found it folded up in an old cobwebby red-brick chicken shed in the field behind the family house, where it had lain untouched (except by spiders) for over twenty years. The Sex File was a snapshot of my early teenage desires and fears, in many ways a mystical (almost religious) document – sort of like an East Midlands Dead Sea Scrolls but with leggy blondes, huge breasts, erect nipples and adverts for penis enlargers.

Before I could track the exact course of the New River I needed to do some research at my local library. However, I was immediately faced with a problem. I wouldn’t be able to take any books out because I was currently a library Non-Person as I had a couple of books that were seven months overdue. One was an earnest tome about water spirits (the author had apparently lived with the spirits for several months and had been accepted as one of them), the other a teach-yourself aikido manual written in the fifties.

Aikido is a jolly nice way to get fit and beat up chaps who are giving you a hard time or staring at your wife. Rather than going into the ring with them you simply give them a couple of hefty aikido chops and, hey presto, their nose cartilage has been pushed up into their brain and they’re stone-cold dead! Crikey! You’ll be the talk of the Lounge Bar. I say, old chap, here come the rozzers. Remember, this is the fifties. The forces of Law and Order don’t take kindly to fellows who are dressed up as Chinamen. You’d better leg it, old man. Aiiee banzaaai!

The Gentleman’s Guide to Aikido

To go with my new habitat I also had a new look, a pair of mid-seventies National Health glasses. I’d originally got them when I was thirteen but never used them, having been anxious in my early teenage years to appear both tough (to stave off the hard cases who roamed the playground like carnivorous dinosaurs with feather cuts) and cool (to try and impress just one of the many girls I fell hopelessly in love with every week). Janus-like, I looked in two directions, at the birds and the bullies. Pity they weren’t in focus. Like the Sex File, the glasses had been forgotten about for a couple of decades until I recently found them at the back of a drawer in my parents’ house and brought them back to London. Now I wanted to reclaim my swottishness. If I hadn’t been so hung up on not being beaten up and getting a snog I would probably have been a pupil who enjoyed learning (‘Ha ha, not really, Togger. Only joshin’, mate!’) Now I was going to recreate the Anal Years and spend weeks in libraries. The National Health specs would give me the vision of an inquisitive and swotty thirteen year old. Without the spots, the Thin Lizzy albums and the contraband porn mags.

Leaves were already blowing across Clissold Park. The skies were now grey and heavy. Then, just as an autumn melancholy was descending over north London, summer started up again, with muggy days and tropical drizzle and dragonflies dancing around the park. Then came a full-blown three-day heat wave while all over the country irate lorry divers were picketing garages due to a petrol shortage. A sense of unreality was in the air, culminating in England winning a cricket series against the West Indies. Then the rains came again.

An email arrived from Keith the online dream analyst:

Water in dreams is a consistent symbol for emotions. (Some people speculate that our first emotional memories are created when we’re still floating in our mother’s wombs. This may explain the correlation between water and emotions.) Accordingly, floods and tidal waves and other dream visions of rising water usually are associated with periods of ‘heightened’ emotion in our lives.

Keith

This was getting annoying. Keith the online dream analyst hadn’t analysed my dream – he’d completely ignored the stuff about crocodiles and golf clubs. This highlighted a major problem with the online world. Things don’t get done properly and you, the consumer, have no come-back because even the biggest corporations are actually run from some student bedroom in the LA suburbs. With razor-sharp clarity I realized there was only one way to sort this out – go to a better and more expensive online dream analyst.

More rain. The old tree-covered New River embankment in the park was dotted with pools of murky water. Beneath some of the trees were clusters of magic mushrooms. A few years ago I would have been tempted to pick them to find out what strange dreams the river might offer me. Now, my drug of choice was a strong cup of tea. Maybe with a biscuit. While splodging around at the edge of the park I noticed that the gate to the little Victorian pump house was open and I just had to peek inside. Expecting to find lost and magical artefacts relating to the New River’s past, I found only empty cans of strong lager and cigarette packets. I stood in the building trying to imagine what it would have been like 150 years ago, but all I could picture was a couple of blokes in tatty leather jackets with beetroot faces swearing at each other. I then walked to Stoke Newington Library and sat there surrounded by books on London, place names, rivers, architecture. For the first hour I flicked through free leaflets on yoga and local arts courses, then read the papers. The other people, mostly old or worn-out looking folk and the odd goateed library employee, seemed to be there because they didn’t have anything else to do. But not me. No, ha ha, not me.

(Adjusts National Health glasses) When James VI of Scotland arrived in London in the hot summer of 1603 to be crowned King of England, he soon discovered to his horror that his new capital had a foul and unhealthy water supply. Most of the city’s medieval wells and streams had been used up and the water in the larger rivers was undrinkable. The largest of the tributaries, the Fleet, was little more than an open sewer, while the Thames was also, literally, full of shit. Small-scale conduits were piped in from outlying villages such as Paddington, but these had little impact on the now rapidly rising population. James knew that something had to be done quickly because he was thirsty.

After my first book Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive? was published in the spring of 2000 I began to consider the idea of myself as Travel Writer. Travelling, jotting things down on the back of beer mats and being paid for it seemed too good to be true. Emboldened, I decided to embark on my second book. One idea was provisionally titled Heartbreak On The Horizon, a sort-of-travel-book about (me) trying to make it as a country music songwriter, incorporating my experiences in a group which once nearly supported Eric Random and the Bedlamites at Nottingham Ad Lib Club.

However, I’d also been plugging away on a book about my experiences of London. It had developed from a novel I’d written in 1988 about tai chi film-buff bikers, set in and around a squat in Leytonstone (with free jazz, Leeds United and the history of the pullover thrown in) and had entered in the P. G. Wodehouse Comic Novel competition. After getting the rejection slip back I buried it in a field somewhere – I still get backache just thinking about it. Now I dusted down the idea. Travelling in London seemed more intriguing than roaming the planet in search of the exotic. The stuff happening at the end of any street in London is far more interesting than, say, the antics of someone stuck on a didgeridoo farm for a year. The idea of finding mystery and adventure on the other side of the world has been hijacked by the tourist industry and TV travel shows. There’s nothing new to find out there so people are turning in on themselves and looking for enchantment closer to home, looking at the things they’d forgotten about or possibly never even looked at. Like the Hare Krishna food delivery van parked across the road, the bloke at the end of the street who shouts ‘Grandad Grandad’ at the top of his voice every evening, the 125-year-old Greek woman who sits at the top of her front steps and waves to passers by. It was now obvious to me that my only course of action was to attempt a book about real life, a diary about my various journeys along the courses of the underground rivers of London.

Maybe I could do the rivers book and incorporate the country music stuff – get C&W stars to don wetsuits and swim in some of the subterranean water courses. For charity. Then record a concept album about the whole experience.

Using the old maps, I traced the course of the New River – as close as I could get – onto my A to Z. I had decided to start the walk just up the road in Hornsey, near Turnpike Lane tube, where the river reappeared after an underground stretch. There are also various sections further north – an original loop, an ornamental waterway, now flows around Enfield Town (it was replaced by a straight section of underground pipes in the thirties) and there’s also a section to the north of Wood Green. I took the Piccadilly line to Turnpike Lane, then ambled east along Turnpike Lane with its flaking Edwardian buildings, mostly small red-brick shops with awnings, selling fruit and vegetables, kebabs, the odd estate agent. It’s a tight squeeze. You almost have to move sideways to get past the people staring at the traffic, at each other, at that nowhere-in-particular place in the middle distance that many bored people look at. There also seemed to be some kind of work-for-all scheme going on – it took five people to transport a crate of satsumas or packet of toilet paper from van to shop and the pavement was full of blokes nattering to each other about the news of the day (‘Oi, Memhet, the bloke next door has got seven blokes outside his shop and there’s only six of us. We need another bloke – can we hire someone?’)

What is a turnpike? The name derives simply from a ‘lane beside a toll barrier’. Many of the major thoroughfares into London had these barriers, presumably to pay for the upkeep of the roads. However, whenever I hear the word turnpike I think of Clifford Brown, the jazz trumpeter who died driving off the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It sounds so much more glamorous than, say, smacking into the back of a bus near Turnpike Lane tube (it’d be the 341 or 141). That’s American roads for you. If there was a road in the US called the North Circular it would seem romantic and mysterious. We’ve all been brainwashed, somehow. Maybe through hamburgers or subliminal messages in rock ’n’ roll records and Hollywood films. They’re much better at that sort of thing than us Brits. Our idea of subliminal messaging is backtaping on LPs so when spotty fourteen-year-old introverts at boarding schools in the seventies played their Led Zeppelin records backwards they would hear stuff like ‘You must worship the deviiiiiiiiiilllll. If you are a girl you want to shag Jimmy Paaaaaaaage.’

I scrutinized the squiggly blue biro line I’d drawn in my A to Z. The section of the New River I was looking for was at the junction of Turnpike Lane and Wightman Road. The New River appeared not very majestically behind a high, half-rotten wooden fence crusted with barbed wire. It snaked from around a small housing estate into a bit of a straight.

Four years after James’s succession to the throne, his patience was at an end. The cleanest drinking water on offer in the capital, for which you had to pay good money, was now suspiciously brown. James invited some of his most celebrated engineers to consider solutions and think ‘out of the box’. In those days the phrase meant that if they didn’t sort it out they would soon find themselves in a box, six feet under.

There was an idea knocking about to build a man-made water channel that would bring in fresh supplies from the boring but clear-watered countryside of Hertfordshire to the north of the City. It was a madcap plan, but it needed someone with a posh-sounding name to bring it to fruition. Step forward wealthy Welsh goldsmith Hugh Myddelton, a man whose life so far had been a classic rags to riches story – young boy leaves the Valleys to find fortune in London, flukes a job at a jewellers in the City, works hard and gets own business, chosen by King to become Royal Jeweller. Myddleton not only offered himself up as the engineering genius to oversee the project but also put up the money as well (the projected cost was £500,000). Work began on the water channel – already called the ‘New River’ – in 1609, starting out at two springs at Amwell and Chadwell in Hertfordshire.

The New River, as if bored with hugging the main drag of Wightman Road, meanders off to the south-east between the houses of the Harringay Ladder, a row of long parallel streets than run down the hill to Green Lanes. I spotted an opening next to an old school and saw the river stealthily heading south. The path was inaccessible, with heavily bolted steel fences and Water Board signs telling people to keep out. I zig-zagged up and down a few of the streets just to peer over walls and railings to spot sections of the river, then walked down to where the river eventually crosses Tollington Road. Further down is the Albanian video shop and its window full of movies by Albanian Patrick Swayze lookalikes with film titles like I Love A Patrick Swayze Lookalike Ladyboy (possibly my translations are not 100 per cent correct).

At one point Myddleton ran out of money and asked the Corporation of London for help. He was refused so turned to King James who agreed to take on half the costs (and profits). Work was finished in 1613, the river ending at an artificial pond called New River Head just off Rosebery Avenue in Clerkenwell, from where water was distributed to houses in wooden pipes. Over its 38-mile course the New River had many long twists and turns as it followed the contours of the land to maintain the steady drop from Hertfordshire to London. The New River was hailed as a great success and Myddleton became a hero. Statues of him can be seen at various stages along the river’s route.

The river travels under the road and reappears in Finsbury Park where it snakes across the ‘American Gardens’. Finsbury Park is one of the few areas in this part of north London which doesn’t seem to have had the clean-up treatment in recent years, possibly due to the fact that three borough councils – Haringey, Hackney and Islington – are responsible for different parts of it. It still has, according to official figures, a higher proportion than most parts of London of crazy nodding people, walking around talking to themselves, staring in glassy-eyed gangs outside the tube station, bumping into you and asking for money, then looking forgetful and wandering off.

One of my favourite buildings in Finsbury Park was a music venue, The George Robey, a Victorian pub which in its time had been the birth place of many third-division punk bands (though no Danish ones) is now some kind of dance club with blackened windows, a fence surround and the ubiquitous ‘security’ hanging around.

As the wooden-sided river passes the cricket pitch and under a little bridge, it’s a bizarrely rural scene, a snapshot of how the whole landscape might have looked when the river was first built. Trees hang down over the banks, the water is clear. The river winds quickly across the north side of the park then disappears under Green Lanes, in the direction of the Woodberry Down Estate, where it disappears behind a fence and railings. Woodberry Down sounds like something from Rupert Bear. By all accounts it was actually like that (not the talking animals bit) until relatively recently – photos from 100 years ago show the New River meandering gently through water meadows past trees, stationary men with big moustaches and a little country cottage. The view is still good, though, and it’s easy to imagine standing on a gentle hill looking down into a green valley of farms and rolling fields, and across Tottenham and Walthamstow marshes.

Naturally there was a danger that, people being people, the New River would soon get clogged up with all the usual debris – shit, blood, pigs’ intestines, sheep’s brains, the rotting heads of traitors, bloated corpses of drunkards who’d fallen in, everything that at that time clogged up most of the waterways of the city. The New River Company decided to combat this by building paths on each side of the river and employing walkers, big burly moustachioed men who would patrol the river and have their pictures taken when photography was invented. These walkers had the power to fine or even imprison anyone they caught throwing rubbish or simply pissing into the river.

By the mid-nineteenth century most of the water supplies in London were once again polluted. The cholera epidemic of 1849 would eventually be traced to the contaminated water supply at Broad Street in Soho. Thanks to the New River Company’s vigilance, their water remained pure and drinkable but as a result it was too expensive for the poor of London. The philanthropist Samuel Gurney spotted a gap in the charity market and under the auspices of his new and snappily named the Metropolitan Free Drinking Fountain Association, opened London’s first drinking fountain in Snow Hill, from water pumped (and bought) from the New River.

I cut across past Manor House, named after the old manor of Stoke Newington which stood nearby. Manor House is a big strippers’ and showbands’ pub, or at least it would have been in its glory days. I walk along the rumbling and dusty Seven Sisters Road for a quarter of a mile until the New River appears on my left looking very sad, chained up, covered in green American algae, another of those crap Stateside imports up there with grey squirrels and confessional TV, with a shopping trolley and plastic football set fast in the gunge. At Sluice House Nine (Kurt Vonnegut’s London novel), on Newnton Close, in the shadow of three big tower blocks, I am finally able to get back down to the river and walk alongside it as it winds past the East Reservoir, still covered in algae scum. There’s a sense of boundary here between the self-conscious bourgeois charm of Stoke Newington to the south – with the reservoir and trees, a church spire, Victorian rooftops, it could be the countryside – and the more uncontrolled and more recently built-up area around Seven Sisters Road to the right, a canvas of white council slab flats, shopping trolleys left upturned, kids playing football (two kids are trying to juggle a ball then the smaller of the two nicks it off the big one. The big kid knocks him over), an old people’s haven with three plastic benches like a prison. These tower blocks, another part of the huge Woodberry Down Estate, are quite spectacular.

The scheme had originally been planned in the early twenties when it was decided to get rid of much of the Victorian architecture in the area (Victorians hated Georgians, Modernists hated Victorians, we hate the Modernists – those fucking bastards), although not finished until 1952. Its four eight-storey slab blocks with projecting flat roofs in parallel rows were designed in a ‘progressive Scandinavian style coloured in the pale cream like Swiss municipal architecture’ according to the bloke in the little Turkish grocer’s shop across the way on Lordship Road.

The reservoir is a haven for birds and their human sidekicks, birdwatchers. Looking back, where the river meets the road, is my favourite view of the New River – a blanket of green covers a small sluiced section dotted with cans, blue girders, a red plastic football, aerosols and bottles coming up for air like gasping fish, the three identical tower blocks of Stamford Hill rising in the distance like silver standing stones. There’s ducks too, one old lad with four duck chicks – well, not chicks, they’re ducks, and one younger male with a dodgy leg who’s just been beaten up, probably in a fight over the duck harem, which waits in the background ready to change allegiance at a moment’s notice should the old fella peg it suddenly.

Across the road on Spring Park Drive is a fifties estate. A fat woman shouts out of a sixth-storey window to her daughter below, ‘Oi, get me some leeks.’

‘I don’t want to get leeks,’ says the girl.

‘Get me some fucking leeks, you little bitch,’ shouts her mum.

‘I don’t want to,’ says the girl and the mother is looking very, very angry. Get the leeks, go on, for a quiet life.

‘I don’t know what leeks look like anyway,’ the girl shouts up, then runs away. A right turn and there’s an old wooden bench on a patch of grass that once would have had old lads sitting down looking over the view, now it just looks onto the health centre. Look, there’s the window where they had the wart clinic. Ah, those were the days. Across Green Lanes again into the back streets and onto Wilberforce Road, with its rows of massive Victorian houses where there are always big puddles on the tarmac. Only 150 years ago all this area north of here up to Seven Sisters Road was open countryside with two big pubs, the Eel Pie House and the Highbury Sluice alongside the river, where anglers and holidaymakers would hang out. Then, in the 1860s, the pubs were pulled down and everything built over in a mad frenzy. If you compare an 1850s map of the district and the 1871 census map you can see the rapid growth of residential streets in Highbury and south Finsbury Park.

On Blackstock Road there are a couple of charity shops and a huge Christian place, all with great second-hand (or more likely third-or fourth-hand) record sections. Their main trade, however, is in the suits of fat-arsed and tiny-bodied dead people and eighties computer games (i.e. Binatone football and tennis – which is just that white dot moving from a line one side of your screen to another). They also have a fine selection of crappy prints in plastic gilt frames – mostly rural scenes, Italian village harbours and matadors. I buy a lot of crappy pictures in gilt frames and paint my own crappy pictures of London scenes over them, most recently Finsbury Park crossroads on top of a Haywainy pastiche. It’s cheaper than buying canvases and you get the frame thrown in too.

Now on Mountgrove Road, the old accordion shop is empty, the estate agents have moved, the graphics company has closed up, the electrical shop has been turned into flats. This was originally a continuation of what is now Blackstock Road, called Gypsy Lane, but it’s been cut off, like an oxbow lake. Cross over my road and you’re suddenly into very different territory – there’s an invisible border I call The Scut Line with cafés and corner shops on one side, nice restaurants and flower shops on the other. It marks a boundary of the old parishes of Hornsey, St Mary’s and Stoke Newington. The mad drunken people of Finsbury Park and Highbury Vale don’t stray south of the line, marked by the Bank of Friendship pub (‘bank’ possibly alluding to a riverbank). People would stand on one side of the river here and shout at the poncey Stoke Newington wankers – ‘Oi, Daniel Defoe, your book is rubbish!’

The course of the New River has been altered several times in the last 400 years. Originally it flowed around Holloway towards Camden, but in the 1620s it was diverted east to Finsbury Park and Highbury. Since these early days most of the winding stretches were replaced by straighter sections and its capacity was increased to cope with the capital’s increased demand for water. This meant taking water from other streams, to the fury of people whose livelihood relied on the rivers, such as millers, fishermen and fat rich red-faced landowners who just liked complaining. Later on, pumping stations were put up along the route which pumped underground water to add to the river’s flow. Until recently the New River still supplied the capital with drinking water, 400 years after completion. It’s obsolete now that Thames Water’s new Ring Main system is operational.

The river now runs only as far as the reservoirs to the north of Stoke Newington. South of here it’s mostly been covered over – this happened in 1952 when the Metropolitan Board of Works, eager four-eyed bureaucrats with E. L. Whisty voices, made it their policy for health reasons.

Across Green Lanes yet another time, past the little sluice house and the White House pub where skinheads drink all afternoon, and into Clissold Park. Originally called Newington Park and owned by the Crawshay family it was renamed, along with the eighteenth-century house, after Augustus Clissold, a sexy Victorian vicar who married the heiress (all property in those days going to the person in the family with the fuzzy whiskers). The now ornamental New River appears and bends round in front of the house. It ends at a boundary stone between the parishes of Hornsey and Stoke Newington, marked ‘1700’, although it would originally have turned a right-angle here and flowed back west along the edge of the park. Where there used to be a little iron-railed bridge over the stream is the site of a café where the chips are fantastic and the industrial-strength bright-red ketchup makes your lips sting. This is the very edge of Stoke Newington (origin: ‘New Farm by the Tree Stumps’). The area, once a smart retreat for rich city types and intellectual nonconformists such as Daniel Defoe and Mary Shelley. went downhill badly after the war and by the seventies was regarded as an inner-city shit hole. Over the last ten years or so the urban pioneers (people with snazzy glasses, sharp haircuts and a liking for trendy food) have moved in and the place is on the up once more. I walk down the wide Petherton Road, which has a grassed island in the middle where the river used to run, towards Canonbury.

At Canonbury I enter a little narrow park where an ornamental death mask of the river runs for half a mile. This is a great idea in principle but in reality it’s faux-Zen Japaneseland precious, some sensitive designer’s idea of tranquillity, rather than reflecting the history of the area and its people. Completely covered in bright green algae, the river looks more like a thin strip of lawn. Here, too, the river marks a boundary, between the infamous Marquess estate on one side and Tony Blair Victorian villa land on the other.

Canonbury Park, further south, is a more typical London scene: silver-haired senior citizens in their tight-knit Special Brew Appreciation Societies sit and watch the world go by (and shout at it now and again in foghorn voices). More and more people walk around these days clutching a can of extra strong lager, as a handy filter for the pain of modern urban life. Out of the park and into Essex Road – a statue of Sir Hugh Myddelton stands at the junction of Essex Road and Upper Street on Islington Green.

The walk ends at Clerkenwell at the New River Head, once a large pond and now a garden next to the Metropolitan Water Board’s twenties offices. Above the main door is the seal of the New River Company showing a hand emerging from the clouds, causing it to rain upon early seventeenth-century London. I go into the building and take a photo, then ask the receptionist if there are any pamphlets or information about the New River. He shrugs, although apparently the seventeenth-century wood-panelled boardroom of the New River Company still exists somewhere in the building.

A few days later I mentioned the walk I’d done to my next-door neighbour. She was already beginning to sense that I was obsessive, as it’s all I ever talk about to her these days, and told me about a book that mentions the New River. A family friend had lent it to her years before. Would I like to have a look at it? Ha ha. Give me the book, old woman, I screamed, twitching, and nobody will get hurt. It’s a crumbling old volume on the history of Islington, printed in 1812. Inside is a pull-out map from the 1735 which shows not only the New River but also a ‘Boarded River’ not on any of my other maps. What is this? I re-read the chapter in Wonderful London on the lost rivers and searched the net. Up comes The Lost Rivers of London, by Nicholas Barton. A couple of days later I’m eagerly poring over its contents – a survey and histories of many of the lost rivers – including the map he’s included with the routes of various underground rivers. According to him, it’s not the New River flowing under my road, but something called Hackney Brook. This is confusing.

But then I remembered the can of strong lager in the old pump house. Could it have been a clue to the New River’s mystery, a key to a parallel world? Naturally, I decided that it was – mad pissed people can see the barriers that are hidden from the rest of us, that’s why they stick to the areas they know. Perhaps, if I got pissed on extra strong lager and wandered out into the street I too might see the invisible lines and obstacles opening up before me. I promptly went out and bought a selection of the strong lagers on sale in my local off-licence. Kestrel Super, Carlsberg Special Brew, Tennent’s Super and Skol Super Strength (they’d run out of Red Stripe SuperSlash).

‘Having a party, mate?’ asked the shopkeeper.

When John Lennon first took LSD he apparently did so while listening to a recording of passages from the Tibetan Book of the Dead translated by Timothy Leary, some of which ended up as lyrics in ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, the last track on Revolver. Looking for a more modern psychic map I decided to watch one of my daughter’s videos, The Adventures of Pingu.

Skol Super (‘A smooth tasting very strong lager’ – alc. 9.2% vol.) 7.30p.m.: Tastes salty, tar, roads, burnt treacle. The side of my head starts to pulsate almost straight away. After five or six sips I feel like I’ve had a few puffs of a high-quality spliff; I should stop now. But no, my need for scientific knowledge is too strong. Sounds are much louder. The radiator behind the settee suddenly comes on and I nearly jump out of my skin. I’m becoming superhumanly sensitive already. I feel that my powers are increasing. Like someone out of the X-Men – actually, that’s not a bad idea for a comic book series, a group of superheroes who are all pissheads.

Carlsberg Special Brew (‘Brewed since 1950, Carlsberg Special Brew is the original strong lager. By appointment to the Royal Danish Court’ – Blimey, must be hard work being a royal in Denmark – alc. 9.0% vol.) 9.30p.m.: Took ages to finish the first one. This has a dry-sweet taste and lighter colour with a damp forty-year-old carpet smell. Could possibly do with another couple of years to age properly. It sobers me up after the Skol. Pingu, on its fourth re-run, is getting a little bit boring. Fucking throbbing in my head. This feels like poison in my system.

Tennent’s Super (‘Very strong lager. Consumer Helpline 0345 112244. Calls charged at local rate’ – alc. 9.0% vol.) 10.20p.m.: Sweet, more like normal beer with a nice deep amber colour and a thick frothy head. A few swigs of this and I’m really starting to feel pissed. I can feel large areas of my brain closing down for the night. But which parts, that’s the question?

‘On a scale of 1–100, how much shite am I talking now?’ I ask my wife.

‘Well, it’s difficult to say. You regularly talk a lot of shite.’ (I look hurt.)

‘But, yeah, any more than normal?’

She doesn’t answer. A police car, siren blaring and lights flashing, zooms down our road. I quickly rush upstairs and search for a copy of The Golden Bough. I don’t have one – never have. I’m drunk. I phone the Tennent’s Super Consumer Helpline and leave a message about the dangers of living over groundwater.

Kestrel Super (‘Super strength lager – an award-winning lager of outstanding quality’ – alc. 9.02% vol.) 11.20p.m.: Smells of Belgian beer. Very complex taste, with strong malt notes, flowery like a real ale. I stroke my chin. I want to unbutton my itching head which feels like it’s covered in chicken wire yet strangely I feel very focused. I have also started talking to myself in hyperbabble while thinking I’m actually very nice looking. Actually.

I suddenly realize that we are in deep shit – the evil water spirits are everywhere. Maybe they’re nice, not evil. I think the house might be haunted. I’m doing lots of pissing and have bad gut rot. But I also feel clear headed. Then start to feel a bit sick. I go to the wardrobe, take out a coat hanger, break off the ‘curvy bit’ and snap it in half, bending each piece at right angles. I then get two old pen cases to use as handles and da daaa I have dowsing rods! First off, the sitting room. I wander around and the rods are going crazy – there’s water everywhere. Or is it because I’m a bit pissed or walking over the house’s water pipes? I spend the next hour wandering around our road and the nearby streets, charting the areas above water, and noting down my findings on bits of crumpled-up paper. According to my calculations the river (whichever one) misses our house by about 10 feet and comes up the adjacent road then crosses over and runs under the pavement for a while before going underneath the houses and coming out again at the used car lot next to the White House pub. Back at the other end of the road I check out the Scut Line. It’s the start of a very steep hill heading towards Highbury Village. People who are pissed cant wolk up it gravity take sover superbrew legs. I am startinf to git a hedache or is it my riverline-seeuin 3rd eye? Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhh.

At the end of the month the heavens opened yet again, but this time they didn’t stop. Waterfalls of rain, thunder and lightning, dark grey skies. The local streets once more began to turn into small lakes and streams. Down on Blackstock Road where, according to the old book the Boarded (New) River and Hackney Brook crossed, ponds formed in the road. Around the country people were flooded out of their homes. And the London rivers seemed to be rising too.

The problem with burying rivers is that we can’t see, and know, what they’re doing. In times of heavy rain it’s not that the rivers themselves will burst – they are encased in concrete – but that the small springs and streams that would originally have flowed into them can’t get into the concrete culvert that the river has become and simply follow the old course, spreading out over the river’s flood plain. Four million people in London live on the flood plains of the lost rivers. One night in early November, Church Street was completely flooded at exactly the point where the New River used to cross over and head south towards Canonbury. The next morning, after more rain, there were huge floods in Clissold Park just where the Hackney Brook would have skirted around the ponds. At the end of Grazebrook Road, pockets of people wandered around in wellies, staring with disbelief at the expanding pool. We’ve got so cocooned in our soft, warm modern urban world that we’ve forgotten that nature is just outside the door. Some day these nineteenth-century shelters of bricks and mortar won’t be able to protect us any more.

One morning the tall smart-blazered Jehovah’s Witness appeared again at my front door and begged me to take a copy of the Watchtower.

‘See all this weather. It’s the end times. Just like the Bible says. Read this leaflet. Promise me you’ll read it.’

Film idea: The Hugh Myddleton Story

Adventure. Big budget/People dying. There’s a race on to see who can come up with the best idea. Myddleton wins but others try to sabotage his project. Love interest: she gets pinched by opposition but he wins her back at end. He also foils Gunpowder Plot and saves King. Not entirely accurate historically. Maybe played by Matt Damon. Shakespeare in there too. And the Spanish Armada. Maybe the fleet can only set sail when they’ve all had enough to drink. Triumphant music at end and high fives as Myddleton blows up Spanish ships. English all played by Americans, Spanish all played by posh English.

London Stories 1: The Dogpeople

The Dogpeople, mostly fat people in their fifties, congregate on the eastern side of Clissold Park, a good distance from the lesbian footballers and just slightly away from the pigeons (who they view as a rival gang. The pigeons ignore the Dogpeople and are more concerned with annoying the ducks.) The Dogpeople shout loudly at each other in high-pitched voices about flea powders and Pedigree Chum, as well as more risqué cries of ‘Johnny, Johnny! Come! Come!!’ A vague smell of urine wafts from their general direction. Various little rat-like dogs scamper around wearing the same kind of stupid sleeveless quilted jackets as their owners. I try to kick them as they run past, but they are always too quick for me. The dogs, that is. The Dogpeople are easy targets. Their bottoms – invariably covered in green corduroy – are so large and soft they wouldn’t feel a thing.

On our street lives one of the Dogpeople ringleaders. Her dog is a pedigree, called something like Chormingly St John Carezza Jane Birkin O’Reilly. They’ve nicknamed him Petrocelli. Every night she puts a bowl out for Petrocelli in her back yard, and he laps heavily at it. It sounds like some bad overdubbing from a Seventies European ‘adult movie’. One great idea I had for Mrs Dogperson was that they could fill their dogs with helium and fly them like kites. They could then do loads of great aerobatic tricks – catch the stick, flying bottom sniffing. It then occurred to me that I’d have to find a solution to the problem of dog shit dropping out of the sky at regular intervals. Perhaps some sort of municipal London version of the American Star Wars defence system. My brother has worked with lasers. He might be able to sort that. Or attach buckets to the dogs. Or put helium into their food so that the shit flies upwards as well. And before you ask, I have a grade C physics O Level.

When the Dogperson was ill I offered to walk Petrocelli through the park in the mornings on my way to the childminder’s, thinking I might be able to ingratiate myself with the Dogpeople. It worked. Suddenly lots of earthy types in wellies started saying hello to me and pointing at the dog. So I had loads of new mates. The downside was the dog shit. I began to smell of it. Mrs Dogperson gave me polythene bags to scoop his poop, but the stupid dog kept shitting far too much and I’d get it all over my hands. Then when I tried to put it into the special dog-shit bins they had a spring-loaded door so I’d get my hand caught and the pooh would ooze out though the plastic onto my skin. I was also pushing a pram, so it was like driving a car using two different-sized rudders. Petrocelli would always try and force the pram in front of oncoming traffic so he could have me all to himself. Eventually I had to withdraw my offer of help and let Mrs Dogperson fend for herself. I wanted to be able to bite my nails without fear of disease.

The authorities are getting wise to the Dogpeople Problem. Already, police helicopters hover for ages at night over Stoke Newington and Finsbury Park. There are various theories about this (drugs, crime, drug crime), but my guess is that they must contain highly trained police marksmen, who are paid a hefty bounty to take out Dogpeople using airguns. Next time you see a lone mutt running down the street and you smile at the absence of a big-arsed minder waddling behind, remember that it’s the taxpayers – you and me – who pay for the bullets.

1 Wasn’t Algae Scum a character in Rupert Bear? A Borstal Boy piglet.

WINTER

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

• Hackney Brook – Holloway to the River Lea

Arsenal – the football conspiracy – Beowulf – the weather – the Masons – Record Breakers – Holloway Road – Joe Meek – Freemasons – Arsenal – PeterJohnnyMick – Clissold Park – Abney Park cemetery – Salvation Army – Hackney – Hackney Downs – tower blocks – Hackney Wick – Occam’s shaving brush

Want to hear something amazing? If you look at a map of the rivers of London then place the major football stadiums over the top of it you’ll see that most of them are on, or next to, the routes of waterways. Does that make you come out all goosepimply like it did me? Well, here’s the hard facts that’ll send you rushing for the bog: Wembley – the Brent; Spurs – the Moselle; Chelsea – Counters Creek; Millwall – the Earl’s Sluice; Leyton Orient (sound of big barrel being scraped hard) – Dagenham Brook; Brentford – the Brent (too easy); Fulham – the Thames; Wimbledon – used to play near the banks of the Wandle; QPR – the exception that proves the rule; West Ham – OK, so that’s the end of my theory. But what of Arsenal?

I have a tatty old nineteenth-century Great Exhibition map¹ on my wall at home on which the London of 150 years ago looks like a virulent bacteria on a petri dish. I have always liked saying 47 to friends, look, see where you live now? Well, look, it was once a … field. Then I’ll stand back with a self-satisfied expression while they shrug as if to say ‘Who gives a fuck, have you got any more wine?’ The Hackney Brook is marked on this map as a small stream near Wells Street in central Hackney. It also appears in various other sections, as a sewer along Gillespie Road, a small watercourse continuing off it towards Holloway and a river running from Stoke Newington to the start of Hackney, then stopping and continuing again around Hackney Wick towards the River Lea, before disappearing in a watery maze of cuts and artificial channels.² But when I transferred the route of this little stream onto my A to Z it struck me that Highbury Stadium, Arsenal football ground, lay right on the course of the stream.

Arsenal are planning to move to another site at Ashburton Grove, half a mile away. This too lies above the Hackney Brook, at a point where two branches of it converge. What’s going on? Is there something about rivers that is good for football grounds? Water for the grass, perhaps? At one time they also wanted to move to an area behind St Pancras Station, the site of the Brill, a big pool near the River Fleet and, according to William Stukely, a pagan holy site.

And, while we’re at it, how did former manager Herbert Chapman manage to get the name of Gillespie Road tube changed to Arsenal in the thirties? Did he inform local council members that Dizzy Gillespie (who the street was named after) was, in fact, black and so all hell broke loose? How did Arsenal manage to get back into the top division after being relegated in 1913? Some sort of stitch up, no doubt. And how did they get hold of this prime land in North London? Did they channel the magical powers of the Hackney Brook using thirties superstar Cliff Bastin’s false teeth as dowsing rods?

A clue is in the club’s original name, from its origins in south London. The fact that it was called Woolwich Arsenal and was a works team is all the proof we need that the club is part, or at least was once a part, of the Military-Industrial Complex. They are the New World Order. Their colours – red shirts with white sleeves – are also simply a modern version of the tunics of the Knights Templar, forerunners of the Masons. Maybe their ground is situated near a stream because they need the presence of sacred spring water for their holy rituals. You know, pulling up their trousers and sticking the eye of a dead fish onto a slice of Dairylea cheese spread.

A search on the Internet for ‘Hackney Brook’ reveals only eleven matches, some of which are duplicates. One of the most interesting is a listings page of Masonic lodges in London. Lodge 7397 is the Hackney Brook Lodge, which meets in Clerkenwell on the fourth Monday of every fourth month. Why were they called Hackney Brook? Maybe they knew why the river had been buried. The Masons know all about all sorts of ‘hidden stuff’. Hidden stuff is why people join the Masons.

I love the idea of the lost rivers being somehow bound up in a mystical conspiracy. Maybe the rivers were pagan holy waters and the highly Christian Victorians wanted to bury the old beliefs for good and replace them with a new religion. Or what if developers – the Masons, the bloke with the big chin from the Barratt homes adverts (the one with the helicopter) – wanted new cheap land on which to build?

I have a dream about Highbury and Blackstock Road in the past, a semi-rural landscape of overlapping conduits and raised waterways, a Venice meets Spaghetti Junction. I am walking over deep crevasses covered by glass peppered with little red dots. Water flies through large glass tunnels, crisscrossing one way then another. Purple water froths over in a triumphal arch. It’s like some vaguely remembered scene from a sci-fi short story.

Arches are always triumphal, never defeatist. Why is that? Because, when you think about it, an arch is like a sad face. A triumphal face would be like an upturned arch. I email the dream to my new online dream analyst (‘Poppy’) to find out the truth.

An email arrives:

(In dippy American accent)

Hi Tim!

Dreaming of clear water is a sign of great good luck and prosperity, a dream of muddy water foretells sadness or sorry for the dreamer through hearing of an illness or death of someone he/she knows well. Dirty water warns of unscrupulous people who would bring you to ruin. All water dreams, other than clear, have a bad omen connected to them and should be studied carefully and taken as a true warning.

I had already noticed a pattern emerging in the California textured world of online dream doctors. Take money off punter then cut and paste a bit of text from a dream dictionary. After a couple of weeks I wrote back to Poppy but the email was returned. On her website was a 404 file not found. Perhaps the web police had raided Poppy’s dream surgery and found her in bed with a horse covered in fish scales.

After a bit of searching around I found a sensible new online dream doctor called Mike. He didn’t seem very New Age and replied promptly.

(Sensible Yorkshire accent)

I thank you so much for using our online Dream Diagnosis! I will interpret your dream as fast as possible. Thank you, and

God Bless,

Michael, Dream Analyst

A river called the Hackney Brook? You have to admit it’s a rubbish name. Some river names, like the Humber, Colne and Ouse, are thought to be pre-Celtic. The Thames is British in origin. Likewise Tee and Dee, and Avon. But the Hackney Brook? – the lazy fuckers just called it after Hackney. Didn’t they? Of course, mere streams and tributaries would not have been given the importance of big rivers. All the same, the Anglo-Saxons yet again manage to show how dour and unimaginative they can be. So what about Hackney? Where does that come from?

There are three possible origins for the name Hackney. Firstly, the word haccan is Anglo-Saxon for ‘to kill with a sword or axe, slash slash slash!’ and ‘ey’ means a river. Or it is a Viking word meaning ‘raised bit in marshland’ – perhaps because Hackney was always a well-watered area, with streams running into the River Lea. But the most likely explanation is that the area belonged to the Saxon chief, Hacka.

Proof for all this? For once I can offer some evidence. Here is an excerpt from the great Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf. In this short section Hacka, the founder of Hackney, makes a brief appearance.

Came then from the moor

under the misty hills

Hacka stalking under

the weight of his river knowledge.

That Saxon pedant

planned to ensnare

the minds of men

in the high hall.

He strode under the clouds,

seeking Beowulf, to tell him

about the river he had found

near his new house.

Nor was it the first time he

had tried to name that stream.

And never in his life before

– or since –

did he find better luck!

For came then to the building

that Beowulf, full of wisdom.

(In E. L. Whisty voice)

‘Beo, there’s this river that runs

through my new gaff.

What should I call it?’

Quickly Beowulf’s brain moved

and he answered direct,

(in John Major voice)

‘Call your new home Hacka’s village.

And the stream shall be named

The Brook of Hacka’s village.’

‘That’s original and catchy, O great chief,’

said Hacka, much pleased. ‘Thanks a lot.’

As he went out, smiling.

He saw an evil demon in an angry mood

Pass in the other direction.

‘Evening, mate!’ said Hacka.

The demon had fire in his eyes.

That monster expected

to rip life from the body of each

one before morning came.

But Hacka didn’t notice –

He was too excited about his new river.

I never thought I’d turn into the sort of person who talked about the weather incessantly, but the rain round our way was definitely getting worse. Big plump drops, vertical sheeting, soft drizzle, aggressively cold splashes, wind-blown white scouring sleet, peppery eye-stinging bursts and, of course, dull, wet London showers.

Holes have been dug in the nearby streets and small Thames Water and Subterra signs have been erected. They are obviously doing ‘something’ to the underground rivers. Cutting a deal with them, perhaps, urging them to be quiet. Or diverting them further underground in case they snitch. Or converting the waters of the river into beer. I got through to Thames Water and tried to find someone responsible for underground rivers, but with no success. Then I’m back in a queue: ‘We are sorry to keep you. Your call is important to us. However, we are currently experiencing high call volumes. You are moving up the queue and your call will be answered as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience at this busy time.’

Floods. Snow. Christmas comes and goes. Under a young tree lies a charred pile of stuff – pieces of clothing, books, aerosol cans and a small stool. A pair of men’s shoes are still slightly smouldering. The aftermath of some apocalyptic festive break-up? Or perhaps a young graffiti-addicted accountant simply spontaneously combusted on his star-gazing stool while contemplating the sheer joy of life.

More lazy days in the library, looking at old maps of the area and the Hackney Brook valley. A book by a local historian, Jack Whitehead, shows the contours of the valley in 3D. The brook rose in two places, the main one at the foot of Crouch Hill, east of Holloway Road, with a smaller branch near the start of Liverpool Road.

Then my mind drifts and I stare at the faded chequerboard floor and listen to the beep of the book-checking computer thing, the cherchercher of the till, the murmur of African accents, the rumble of traffic going past the window. In Stokey library people eye each other up, but not in a good way – more ‘Errr, you’re walking along the lesbian crafts and hobbies section? You must be a poof.’

At last I find what I’ve been looking for. An old map, from some obscure US university, showing the course of the Hackney Brook in relation to the nearby New River and which corresponds with the old map from the Islington book that my neighbour lent me. It shows the rivers crossing over at a point parallel to the Stoke Newington ponds, about a quarter of a mile west. Thus ‘the Boarded River’ was the New River, kept at the correct gradient as it passed through the Hackney Brook valley and over the Hackney Brook. This is the point in the film where I turn to my glamorous assistant, as the Nazi hordes are waiting to pounce, and she kisses me in congratulation. I take off her glasses and realize she is actually quite beautiful. I then hand her a gun and say, ‘Do you know how to use this?’ Suddenly the door bursts open, she shoots five evil Nazis and we smash though a window and escape …

I also had a look at John Rocque’s famous map of London in the British Library (rolled up it looks like a bazooka). Rocque’s depiction of Hackney Brook is a little sketchy – he has it starting further east and north than its true course and doesn’t have it crossing Blackstock Road at all. This might have thrown me off course, but allied to various mistakes in the same area suggests that Rocque never actually visited Hackney and Stoke Newington. He was too scared. Probably got one of his mates to do it.

Mate: So there’s this little river. I’ve drawn it on the back of a beer-stained parchment for you.

Rocque: Tis very squiggly.

Mate: OK, if that’s your attitude why don’t you go and have a look at it?

Rocque: Ooh no, I’m, er, far too busy. And I’ve got a cold.

I had a vague notion of walking the route of the Hackney Brook and then all the other rivers and streams in London, then writing to the Guinness Book of Records and appearing on Record Breakers.

Me: Yes, well, you have to bear in mind the substrata of London and its alluvial plane. Back in the mists of time there blah blah blah …

Then the studio floor opens up and there’s an underground river. A little boat appears in the distance with a single oarsman and it’s Norris McWhirter and he’s holding a clipboard and tells the audience some factoids about the rivers. Then we listen to a tape of Roy Castle doing the unplugged version of ‘Dedication’ and the audience cheers.

It’s time to do some dowsing again. I buy a can of Tennent’s Super and walk across the zebra crossing at the bottom of Blackstock Road, over and over again. I don’t drink Special Brew so much as use it as a tool. I see myself as part of the same tradition as Carlos Castaneda. Whereas he got in touch with the spirit world through his use of Mexican psychoactive funguses, I buy cheap beer from Pricecutters in Highbury Vale and walk around muttering to myself, getting a clicking sound in my right knee (an old hurdling injury). I am also keen to reclaim these drinks from being the beverage of mad drunkards and to create a new form of Special Brew literature. Funnily enough, I found a book by Benjamin Clarke, a Victorian Hackney man who wrote a book called Glimpses of Ancient Hackney and Stoke Newington, in which he says that Hackney Brook used to be regarded as a river of beer. The Woolpack brewery, near Hackney Wick, churned out barrels of the sort of stuff that Londoners loved (and love) to drink – soapy mouthwash with no head. Discovering the alchemical secret of turning water into beer – it’s every man’s dream.

As my head buzzes pleasurably, I look up the road and see the river valley ahead of me. I’m ready to do the walk. But first I need a piss (beer into water reverse alchemy technique).

The northern branch of Hackney Brook apparently starts at Tollington Park, around Wray Crescent and Pine Grove. It’s just off Holloway Road, which is packed with people – dark-eyed lads with eighties jackets hawking tobacco; pale-faced chain-smoking girls with bandy legs and leggings tottering along with prams; huge-bellied tracksuit trouser blokes waddling from café to pub with a tabloid under their arm; Grand Victorian department stores turned into emporiums of second-hand electrical tat; eighties-style graffiti; students queuing at cash points; geezers flogging old office equipment piled high on the pavement. At no. 304 lived Joe Meek, the record producer of songs like ‘Telstar’, strange futuristic pop classics. Dang dang dong dong ding deng dang dung dooong. He must have been influenced by the strange atmosphere of this neighbourhood with its crazy adrenalin-fuelled rush of bodies, bumping against each other like electrons in matter, Oxford Street’s ugly sister.

I had been hoping to see some kind of plaque or ramblers’ guide at the start of the walk, possibly even a fountain bubbling with pure spring water. Instead I am faced with a large fenced-off mass of earth, a secret building site, with a lonely blue prefab building. Men with yellow hard hats stand around holding stuff – clipboards, balls of string, spanners, a spade. It’s a tried and tested workman’s trick. Hold something functional just in case the ‘boss’ happens to be driving past in his silver Jag and looks over. ‘Hmm, good to see Smithy is working hard with his ball of string.’

There are two ways of looking for a river’s source. You can do it the proper way with geologists, maps, digging equipment and people from Thames Water saying ‘please hold the line’. Or you can look for puddles. And right in the middle of this mass of dirt is a large pool of standing water. This must be it. At the far edge of the site is a JCB digger-type thing with tank tracks next to a big hole. It looks as though the blokes with yellow hats are planning to cover the water with the big pile of dirt. Then it dawns on me that this is the Area 51 of London rivers. They were finally trying to eradicate all trace of the famous Hackney Brook. Why? And who are they?

I quickly make a sketch of the scene on a Post-it Note, then retreat. One of the yellow hats spots me and mutters into a walkie talkie to one of his mates about five yards away, who is fidgeting with his ball of string. I quickly cross the road, staring into my A to Z, and pass a severe old grey brick Victorian house, the sort I imagine Charles Dickens had in mind when he described Arthur Clennam’s mother’s house in Little Dorrit: ‘An old brick house, so dingy as to be all but black, standing by itself within a gateway. Before it a square court-yard where a shrub or two and a patch of grass were as rank (which is saying much) as the iron railings enclosing them were rusty … weather-stained, smoke-blackened, and overgrown with weeds.’

And into a big estate. I keep looking behind me to check the men with yellow hats aren’t following. Who are the yellow hats, anyway? Historically, the yellow hat has denoted royalty – crowns and stuff (or religious folk with yellow auras/halos). Geoffrey Plantagenet, father of Henry II and precursor of the Plantagenet dynasty, was so-called because he wore a sprig of yellow broom (a Druid’s sacred plant) in his hat so his soldiers would recognize him. His daughter-in-law, Eleanor of Aquitaine, is credited with the creation of the Knights Templar, forerunners of the Freemasons. Whereas I watch a lot of Bob the Builder with my daughter – the show is about a bloke with a yellow hat who talks to machines and a scarecrow that comes alive.

A quick detour around the modern Iseldon (original name for Islington) village with its strange dips in the road as it goes down the river valley, and where the two heads of Hackney Brook would have converged, and then I head onto Hornsey Road, alongside the Saxon-sounding Swaneson House estate with its dank sixties/seventies shopping arcade with laundrette, grocers and chemists. When I was a kid I used to have books which showed what the new exciting world would look like, and most of the pictures were like the shopping arcade of the Swaneson Estate. What a crazily drab world must it have been in the sixties, with its Beatles harmonies, cups of tea and cakes, that we were suckered into thinking these shopping centres were the height of futuristic sophisticated living? To the left are some tired swings, then further up some beaten-up cars. Some local creative has recently taken a crowbar to one, leaving it like a smashed flower, powdery glass on the road, bits of ripped metal folding outwards. There’s a large pool of unhealthy-looking standing water, then another car, this time with no wheels. I have walked onto a set from The Sweeney, perfect for handbrake turns, jumping on and off bonnets, pointing a lot and calling people ‘slags’. It’s not so easy to find these bits of bombsitesque London now, even compared with five or six years ago. English Heritage should get areas like this listed.

Further up is a seventies-style Vauxhall estate car written over with some classic full colour graffiti. It should be in a gallery. But as a Time Out journo might say, (Mockney voiceover) ‘London is, in a very real sense, its own gallery.’

At the edge of the dirt track, near the road, is a sign for the estate managers who own the site – ‘state’ has been cut out of the sign, probably by some bright spark anarchist. Smash the state, please fuck the system NOW. That’s what Crass wanted, back on Bullshit Detector.

The living that is owed to me I’m never going to get,

They’ve buggered this old world up, up to their necks in debt.

They’d give you a lobotomy for something you ain’t done,

They’ll make you an epitome of everything that’s wrong.

Do they owe us a living?

Of course they do,

Of course they do.

Do they owe us a living?

Of course they do,

Of course they do.

Do they owe us a living?

OF COURSE THEY FUCKING DO.3

‘Do they owe us a living?’, Crass

Back on Hornsey Road I walk through the tunnel under the mainline railway to the north. The walls have the peeling skin of a decade and a half of pop posters. At the edges I can make out flaking scraps from years ago – Hardcore Uproar and Seal plus multiple layers of old graffiti.⁴

I’ve wandered away from the course of the river. Access is impossible due to the railway lines and the Ashburton Grove light industrial estate, the planned site of Arsenal’s new stadium. There’s a seventies factory development, a taxi car park and another broken car, this one burnt out as well. A big-boned bloke in a shell suit is inspecting it. Was it his? Maybe he was on a stag night and his mates did up his motor for a laugh. The road is a dead end so I walk back and around Drayton Park station with the river valley off to my left under the Ashburton Grove forklift centre – for all your forklift needs. There’s a beautiful big sky that’ll be lost when Arsenal build their new dream stadium. To the right is Highbury Hill, with allotments on the other side of the road banking down to the railway like vineyards, a vision of a different London.

And so into the reclaimed urban landscape of Gillespie Park. It’s an ecology centre developed on old ground near the railway, with different landscape areas and an organic café. I sit down for a while and stare out at the little stone circle and neat marshland pools, surrounded by grassland and meadow in a little urban forest created by local people, and listen to the sounds of thirteen year olds being taught about ‘nature’ by their teacher.

‘Can we catch some tadpoles sir. Goo on.’

‘No, now we’re going to look at the water meadow.’

‘Aww fuckin’ boring.’

The kid sticks his net into the pool anyway and swishes it around, while shouting, ‘Come on, you little bastards.’ The teacher, evidently of the ‘smile benignly and hope the little fucker will go away’ school of discipline, smiles benignly and begins telling the group about the importance of medicinal herbs.

I walk up the track past the ‘wetlands’ and can see Isledon village on the other side of the tracks. You get a sense of how the railway carved through the landscape in the mid-nineteenth century. Even then, when progress was a religion, people would have been aware of the landscape that would be lost:

I am glad there is a sketch of it before the threatened railway comes, which is to cut through Wells’ Row into the garden of Mr I. and go to Hackney. We are all very much amazed at the thought of it, but I fear there is little doubt it will come in that direction.

local girl Elisabeth Hole to her friend Miss Nicols,December 1840

In Gillespie Park it’s hard to discern the real contours of the land because it’s obviously been built up. There’s a little tunnel into the trees, then down a dirt track to a wooden walkway and to the left is marshland. It’s like a riverside. I stop and look across to the little meadow with another stone circle on the left. The rain lets up for a while and I sit down at a bench behind the stone circle with my notebook. Nearby, in the circle itself, sit four dishevelled figures. Two black guys, one old and rasta-ish with a high-pitched Jamaican accent, one young with a little woolly hat and nervy and loud, a tough-looking middle-aged cockney ex-soldier type and a rock-chick blonde in her late forties with leather jacket and strange heavy, jerky make-up. They look battered and hurt and are all talking very loudly, the men trying to get the attention of and impress the woman, as a spliff is passed around and they sip from cans of Tennent’s Super. They must be twenty-first century druids. The younger bloke, whose name is Michael, starts to shout out, ‘Poetry is lovely! Poetry is beautiful! Chelsea will win the league.’ I finish my quick notes and get up to go, as he smiles at me still singing the joys of football and poetry.

‘You’re right about the poetry anyway,’ I say.

‘Do you know any poems?’ he asks. I recite the Spike Milligan one about the water cycle:

There are holes in the sky where the rain gets inThey are ever so small, that’s why rain is thin.

‘Spike is a genius. What a man!’ he yells. ‘We love Spike, Spike understands us!’ and he starts to sing some strange song that I’ve never heard before. Maybe it was the theme tune to the Q series. Then the little Jamaican bloke with a high-pitched singsong accent jabs me in the chest, his sad but friendly eyes open wide, and he smiles.

‘If ya fell off de earth which way would ya fall?’

‘Er, sideways,’ I say, trying to be clever, because it is obviously a trick question.

‘NO ya silly fella. Ya’d fall up. And once ya in space dere is only one way to go anyway and dat’s up. Dere’s only up.’

‘The only way is up!’ sings Michael. ‘Baby, you and meeeeee eeeee.’

‘Whatever happened to her?’ asks the woman.

‘Whatever happened to who?’

‘To Yazz … ’

At this strange turn in the conversation I wave goodbye and walk towards the trees. The little gathering is a bit too similar to the blatherings of my own circle of friends, confirming my suspicion that many of us are only a broken heart and a crate of strong cider away from this kind of life. I can see Arsenal stadium up to the right, looming over the houses. At a little arched entrance, a green door to the secret garden, I come out onto Gillespie Road.

This is the heart of Arsenal territory, where every fortnight in winter a red and white fat-bloke tsunami gathers momentum along Gillespie Road, replica-shirted waddlers dragged into its irrepressible wake from chip shop doorways and pub lounges, as it heads west towards Highbury Stadium. As an organism it is magnificent in its tracksuit-bottomed lard power, each individual walking slowly and thoughtfully in the footsteps of eight decades of Arsenal supporters. Back in the days of silent film, when the Gunners first parachuted into this no-man’s-land vale between Highbury and Finsbury Park from their true home in Woolwich, south London, football fans lived a black-and-white existence and moved from place to place at an astonishing 20 m.p.h., while waving rattles and wearing thick cardboard suits in all weathers. No wonder they were thin. Going to a game was a high-quality cardiovascular workout.

(Then: Come on Arsenal. Play up. Give them what for (hits small child on head with rattle) spiffing lumme stone the crows lord a mercy and God save the King.

Now: Fack in’ kant barrstudd get airt uv itt you wankahh youuurr shiiiitttttt!!)

The source of this vast flow of heavily cholesteroled humanity is the pubs of Blackstock Road – the Arsenal Tavern, the Gunners, the Woodbine, the Bank of Friendship and the Kings Head. Further north are the Blackstock Arms and the Twelve Pins. To the south, the Highbury Barn. The pubs swell with bullfrog stomachs and bladders as lager is swilled in industrial-sized portions.

Walk from the south and there’s a different perspective. People in chinos with City accents jump out of sports cars parked in side streets, couples and larger groups sit in the Italian restaurants of Highbury Park chewing on squid and culture and tactical ideas gleaned from the broadsheets and Serie A. As I mentioned before, the scut line is around my street. Here, outside the Arsenal Fish Bar, which is actually a post-modern twenty-first-century Chinese takeaway, lard-bellied skinheads stuff trays of chips down their throats to soak up the beer. Inside the café, on the walls nearest the counter, there’s a picture of ex-Gunners superstar Nigel Winterburn looking like he’s in a police photo and has been arrested for stealing an unco-ordinated outfit from C&A, which he is wearing (should have destroyed the evidence, Nige).

In the Arsenal museum they have lots of great cut-out figures of many of the players who have long since departed. And a film, with Bob Wilson’s head popping up at the most inopportune moments. He does the voiceover but materializes (bad) magically every time there’s something profound to say, then dematerializes (good) in the style of the Star Trek transporter. Lots of nice old photos, and they make no bones about the fact that they never actually officially won promotion to the top division – in fact they’re even quite proud of the shenanigans and arm twisting that went on. My main question, how Gillespie Road tube was changed to Arsenal, is never answered apart from the comment that the London Electric Railway Company did it after being ‘persuaded’ (tour guide laughs) by Chapman.

It’s my belief that Arsenal were somehow involved in the shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand⁶ and the onset of World War I so they wouldn’t have to spend too long in Division Two. For lo and behold, the first season after the war they got promoted, despite only finishing fifth in the Second Division. How did that happen? It was decided by the powers that be (Royalty, Government, Masons, Arsenal) to expand the First Division following the end of World War I in an attempt to stave off proletarian revolution by giving them more football. By coincidence, Tottenham finished in the bottom three of Division One that year, yet were still relegated.

I dive into the Arsenal Tavern on Blackstock Road for a quick pint of Guinness because it’s only £1.60 during the day and I weigh up whether to ask the landlady about history but she is slumbering near the side door, arms like hams, chins on gargantuan bosoms, so I sit at the bar and chat to a gentleman called Dublin Peter, Cork Johnny, actually no I think it was Mullingar Mick, who anyway I’ve seen and talked to in here before and I notice that everyone is facing east. There are about twelve people in the pub – stare at pint sip stare at pint stare at wall stare at pint sip stare at pint stare at wall and repeat until need piss. The pub was called the New Sluice in the nineteenth century and I imagine they must have documents and photos of the pub back then.

The back room of the Arsenal Tavern is the exact point at which the boarded river crossed over Hackney Brook. I stand there for a few moments drinking and breathing hard, waiting for inspiration or some kind of sign. Peter Johnny Mick then appears again and starts explaining to me why Niall Quinn is still so effective as a front man for Sunderland: ‘He’s got mobility. Mobility, I tell you. He has the mobility of a smaller man. Have you seen how he can turn in the box?’

I walk along an alleyway past a building site where the crushed remains of a tower block lie in mesh-covered cubes like Rice Krispie honey cakes. Nearby is a weeping willow, a nice riverside touch. I eventually come out at the not very aptly named Green Lanes then cross through the northern end of Clissold Park about 200 yards from the New River walk, by the ponds – the brook ran alongside them. It’s an enchanted place, with birds and mad people sitting on the benches. For a brief moment, I imagine I am back a couple of hundred years. Through the gate and over Queen Elizabeth’s Walk.⁷ Then along Grazebrook Road, where sheep, I suppose, used to, er, graze next to the brook. Then the land rises up to the right. And left. There’s a school in the way so I go up to Church Street, which is full of young well-spoken mums, old leathery Irishmen dodging into the dark haven of the Auld Shillelagh, unshaven blokes in hooded tops sitting on the pavement asking for spare change, estate agents crammed with upwardly mobile families fecund with dosh or young couples looking longingly at places they can’t afford, skinny blokes with beards on bikes, kids, lots of kids, kids in prams, kids running, kids in backpacks, kids with ice creams, kids playing football, kids coming out of every doorway, Jewish guys with seventeenth-century Lithuanian suits, young lads with thick specs and thin ringlets, the odd big African in traditional dress, tired-eyed socialists and anarchists drinking in big, dirty old pubs and still dreaming of the revolution.

Turning into Abney Park Cemetery, I walk in a loop around its perimeter, past the grave of Salvation Army founder William Booth. It’s quiet and boggy, with lots of standing water and a strange atmosphere like a temperature shift or pressure change. Or something else … ghostly legions of Salvation Army brass bands emitting the spittle from their instruments. Branches curling down over old weathered stone, graves half buried in turf and moss, some with fresh flowers, which is strange as these graves are all well over 100 years old. I wade through big puddles as the track pretty much follows the course of the brook along the cemetery’s northern boundary. My beautiful new trainers keep slipping into the water and I fear I’ll be pulled down to an underworld by the grasping corpse-hands of the shaven-headed vegan N16 dead. The track ends at the main entrance on Stoke Newington High Street.

Just down the road is the Pub Formerly Known As Three Crowns, so called because James I (and VI) apparently stopped for a pint there when he first entered London and united the thrones of England, Scotland and Wales for the first time. Maybe he had the small town boy’s mentality and thought that Stoke Newington was London (‘Och, ut’s on’y gorrt threee pubs!’) In those days Stokey was pretty much the edge of London. Up until that time the Three Crowns had been called the Cock and Harp, a grand fifteenth-century pub which was knocked down in the mid-nineteenth century just to be replaced by a bland Victorian version. When I first used to come to N16 the three nations had become Ireland, the West Indies and Hardcore Cockney, and the age limit was sixty-five and over. Then it was the Samuel Beckett (Beckett wasn’t from bloody Stoke Newington). Now it’s called Bar Lorca (and neither did bloody Lorca. Bloody). How unutterably sad is that? (Puts on cardigan and lights pipe then walks off in a huff). There should be. A law against. That kind. Of. Thing.

I continue towards Hackney, with the common on the right. This used to be called Cockhanger Green, suggesting that Stoke Newington was a sort of Middle Ages brothel Centre Parcs, until someone, most likely a Victorian do-gooder, decided to change the name to the rather less exciting Stoke Newington Common. There used to be an exhibit timeline at the Museum of London showing a Neolithic dinner party. A nineteenth-century archaeological dig had unearthed evidence of London’s earliest Stone Age settlers right here next to the Hackney Brook. The exhibit showed what looked like some naked hippies in a clearing holding twigs, and barbecuing some meat. These days they’d be chased off by a council employee or more likely a drug dealer. I buy a sandwich and wander onto the common then sit down to finish my snack, wondering if any evidence of my meal will appear in some museum 3,000 years hence (‘And here we have artefacts from the time of the Chicken People … ’).

At the junction with Rectory Road ‘Christ is risen’ graffiti is on a wall. A gang hangs about on the street corner, just down from Good Time Ice Cream, typical of gangs around here in that they are all around eleven years old.

A tall black geezer strolls up to me and cocks his head to one side.

‘Aabadadddop?’

‘What?’

‘Aabbadabbadop?’

‘What did you say?’

‘Are you an undercover cop?’

‘Argh?’

‘An undercover cop, man? Talkin’ into that tape recorder. What you doin’?’

I spend about five minutes explaining to him about the buried rivers, in my special ‘interesting’ researcher voice, showing him the Hackney Brook drawn into my A to Z and how the settlements grew up around the stream. His eyes start to glaze over and he makes his excuses and speeds off towards Stoke Newington.

At Hackney Downs I can see the slope of the shallow river valley with an impressive line of trees, like an old elm avenue, except they can’t be elms because they’re all dead. At this point I should say what kind of trees they are, being a country boy, but fuck me if I can remember. I used to be able to tell in autumn by looking at the seeds.

At the Hackney Archive there are some old illustrations of Hackney in which the river looks very pretty and rustic as it winds its way past various countryish scenes and one of the Hackney Downs in the late eighteenth century, with a little Lord Fauntleroy type looking down into a babbling (or in Hackney these days it would be ‘chattering’) crystal stream. Behind him, where now there would be muggers, dead TVs, piss-stained tower blocks and junkyards, are bushes, shrubs, trees and general countryside.

Benjamin Clarke, writing 120 years ago, lamented how much it had changed in the previous 150 years and had it on good authority that in the 1740s ‘the stream [“purling and crystal”] was quite open to view, trickled sweetly and full clearly across the road in dry weather but rapidly changed to a deep and furious torrent when storms along the western heights of Highgate and Hampstead poured down their flood waters’.

A few people are hanging out in the Downs but it’s not a real beauty spot, more an old common. A battered train clatters past along the embankment to the right. Along cobbled Andre Street and its railway arches with garages, taxis, banging, welding, industrial city smell of petrol and chemicals, and those urban standing-blokes who never seem to have anything to do. And, of course, smashed cars and engine parts. People doing business, chatting, negotiating, and almost medieval noise among the cobbles. Are you into cars? If not what are you doing down here? We all love cars. Water drips along the cobbles. One day all this will be really shite coffee bars. I make it to the end of the street without buying a car then turn left past the Pembury Tavern – alas, not open any more.

Here, the Victorian stuff blends with spoiled tower blocks/failed high-density housing projects, burned-out cars piled high behind wire fences; swirling purple, shaved-head speccy blokes jogging with three-wheeler prams; shaven-headed bomber-jacketed blokes pulled along by two or three heavily muscled dogs, nineteenth-century schools refurbished for urban pioneers with lots of capital. Hackney used to be shitty, now it’s not so shitty (Tourist sign: ‘Welcome to “Not As Shitty As It Used To Be” Country!’) The brook in central Hackney was culverted in 1859–60. In his book, Benjamin Clarke visits the old church and finds a ducking stool in the tower which used to be near here and where they’d give scolds (women with opinions) the dip treatment. A bloke is following me laughing madly and loudly, then runs across the road into Doreen’s pet shop, no doubt to buy a budgerigar for his lunch.

I head up towards Tesco, built on the site of old watercress beds – I reckon the stream goes right underneath their booze section. I hang around near the liqueurs for a while, checking the emergency exit, when the alarm goes off so I nip around the vegetable section and out by another door. Onto Morning Lane now, which follows the line of the river. There used to be a mill for silk works here and the Woolpack Brewery using Hackney Brook water. I love Benjamin Clarke’s idea that this is a River of Beer. I wonder how easy it would be to turn a stream into beer. Just add massive amounts of hops, malt, barley and yeast, I suppose. Further down there used to be a Prussian blue factory. Lots of big blond lads with moustaches singin’ ‘bout how their woman gone left them ja and ’cos the trains are so damn efficient she’ll be miles away by now. Woke up this morning etc., etc.’ Oh, blue factory, that’s ink, right? Now it’s heavy traffic, cars, white vans, trucks, housing estates.

Large swathes of this part of Hackney must have been flattened by bombs in the Second World War. Or by the progressive council madmen who hated the elitism of nice houses and squares. Past Wells Street and little funky shops where the tributary marked ‘Hackney Brook’ on my map used to flow. Reggae blasts out from a shop – Rivers of Dub. People shouting, radios blaring, big arguments. At the end of Wick Road two guys in tracksuit trousers (or sports slacks) are giving hell to each other and pointing at each other’s chests. Up above is the sleek black hornet shape of a helicopter, watching. On the other side of these flats, to the north, are the Hackney marshes.

Two pubs here, one a cute compact place, dark green and yellow Prince Edward, not the not-gay TV production guy but the Prince of Wales who became Edward VII, the fat bloke with a goatee who liked shagging actresses. I have an idea for stickers with a river logo and pint glass plus a thumbs up sign, like an Egon Ronay guide thing, that landlords of pubs along the routes of rivers could put on their front doors.

Benjamin Clarke wrote that when he was young that ‘the popular name for the area around Wick Lane and beyond was “Bay” or “Botany”, so nicknamed because of the many questionable characters that sought asylum in the wick, and were ofttimes not only candidates for, but eventually contrived to secure transportation to Botany Bay itself’.

More flats here, cubist and Cubitt mixed together. Then at the junction to Brook Road the roads rise up each side from the river valley. I keep straight on. There’s a new Peabody Trust building site, announced by their little logo, which is two blue squiggly lines, like waves – maybe they only build on top of buried rivers. From Victoria Park, on a slight hill where the river once skirted round the north-east corner, I can see tower blocks in the distance of different shapes and sizes.

Back out and down into the river valley into the heart of the Wick under some rough-looking dual carriageways, past a lime green lap dancers’ pub on the left. I turn right underneath both roads of the A12 Eastcross route, onto the Eastway. A little old building says ‘Independent Order of Mechanics lodge no. 21, 1976’. Their sign is a sort of Masonic eye with lines coming out from the centre. I pass the Victoria, an old Whitbread pub seemingly left high and dry by the road building, and St Augustine’s Catholic Church, which hosts Eastway Karate Club. Then a beautiful thirties swimming pool in the urban Brit Aztec style. I look along Hackney Cut, a waterway made for the mills of the district so the Lea could still be navigable, as it stretched down further into the East End.

Now I am in Wick Village with its CCTV and sheltered housing. It’s pretty dead, like the end of the line, a real backwater – dead cars resting on piles of tyres then a graveyard with hundreds of cars piled up. I climb up a footbridge to take a look around. It’s still ugly from there, except I can see more of it. Lots of dirt in the air, windswept, everything is coated in it, blasted and bleached, grit in my eyes. Someone has dropped a big TV from a height and it lies in pieces by the stairs – perhaps in protest at the death of the Nine O’clock News. Great piles of skips here like children’s toys, and lots of traffic. I cross over the Stratford Union Canal lock and to the Courage Brewery, where an army of John Smiths bitter kegs wait to do their duty.

A couple of old people dawdle up to me and I ask them about what they know about Hackney Brook.

Responses of local old people when you ask them about an underground river

1. Outright lying

2. Wants to unburden soul

3. Does rubbing thing with ear suggesting they’re contacting some secret organization

4. Doesn’t understand me

5. Idea of underground river makes them want to urinate – ‘You are my best friend!’ etc.

There’s a plaque for the Bow Heritage Trail and the London Outfall Sewer walk. Part of London’s main drainage system constructed in the mid-nineteenth century by Sir Joseph Bazalgette. I can smell the shit. It’s a shitty sky as well. But at last I can hear birdsong. There are scrub trees, wildflowers, grasshoppers, daisies and cans of strong cider.

Finally I am at the point where the newer Lea Navigation cut meets the old River Lea/Lee. The name is of Celtic origin, from lug, meaning ‘bright or light’. Or dedicated to the god Lugh (Lugus). There are two locks here. This is the end of my walk, although the path continues to Stratford marsh. Two big pipes appear, on their way down to a shit filter centre (technical term) somewhere out east. Maybe there is poo in one and wee in the other. I go down some steps to have a closer look at the river. The sewer is in a big metal culvert under the path. There’s a small sluice gate on the other side, also an old wooden dock. Water rushes out a bit further up, and I’m happy. Maybe that is the Hackney Brook, maybe it isn’t. It’s good enough for me.

To the left is Ford Lock near Daltons peanut factory, on the right the placid winding waters of the old Lea. I cross over the locks and am blasted by the smell of roast potato and cabbage. It’s deserted, like an old film set.

My online dream doctor Mike’s online dream interpretation arrives:

Hello Tim!

A very interesting dream indeed! It looks to me more like it is set in a future setting than in the past, and it sounds like a very beautiful place! (!) Water is symbolic of change, and it seems that your dream makes quite an artwork out of change. Walking over the deep crevices in the ground is symbolic of passing over problems in life successfully. If you were not passing over them successfully you’ll be falling into or stumbling on the crevices. The glass over it covered in little red dots sounds to be very symbolic of health issues.

The flying water sounds to be very symbolic of the turbulent future, but the way you handle yourself and your feelings about this dream make it sound like everything will be fine. It sounds like this dream is predicting some hard times ahead, but you are able to overcome them and continue along a path.

I certainly hope this helped you, there really wasn’t a whole lot to go on. If I may be of further assistance please feel free to write.

Sincerely,

Mike

ps: This is not to be considered medical or psychological advice because I am not a doctor or psychologist. I offer this as my opinion and should be evaluated with this in mind.

I phoned up Arsenal F.C. and got through to the club historian, who denied any knowledge of the underground river (he would) but he did tell me that the site was purchased from the St John Ecclesiastical college. The Knights of St John, the Knights Hospitallers, acquired the Templars’ land when they were outlawed in the early fourteenth-century. Canonbury Tower, whose lands stretched down to St John’s Priory, Clerkenwell, has Templarism for its foundations, and a cell in Hertfordshire, on or near, the old estate of Robert de Gorham, was connected with the Order of St John established in Islington. All of Hackney was owned by the Templars, and large parts of Islington. Does this mean anything? Is Highbury Stadium a Masonic stronghold?

The historian skilfully rebuffed my information-gathering technique which, I’ll be honest, consisted of me saying, ‘Blah blah underground rivers blah – so, are you a Mason?’ in a Jeremy Paxman voice. He laughed and made a joke of it. Then I heard a very audible click, which could have been the gun he was about to shoot himself with. Or the sound of secret service bugging equipment. MI5 could be listening in. Or is it my hurdling knee playing up again?

Various people have attempted to explain Occam’s Razor to me. Basically, if there are two explanations for something, you should choose the simplest.

Choice 1: The land near reclaimed rivers was cheap and was bought up by football clubs.

Choice 2: Something to do with mysticism and Masonry, paganism, choosing a river site and picking up on power vibe of ancient druids for occult football purposes.

Hmm. A lesser-known theory is Occam’s Shaving Brush, in which you coat everything with a thin veneer of absurdity and then you can’t see the chin for the stubble. As it were. By burying the streams they – the Victorian sewer maker, brick manufacturers, builders, football club chairmen, the Masons, Edward VII – were burying the last vestiges of the scared goddess worshipping holy springs. It was violent and anti-female, defiling London. No, I meant sacred goddess.

‘What have you got to say to that then?’ I asked the Arsenal historian.

He’d hung up.

More religious people are starting to turn up at my door. It’s the end times, they say. They are joined by an ever-growing band of needy folk who just want something. Yugoslavian immigrants who can only say ‘Yugoslavia’ and ‘hungry’, Childline charity workers, Woodland Trust, gas board people wanting to sell us electricity, electricity board people wanting to sell us gas, people from Virgin wanting to sell us electricity, gas, financial services and some of the thousands of copies of Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield that they’ve still got piled up in an underground warehouse in the sticks, homeless people trying to sell us kitchen cleaning gear, cancer charity people, environmental groups. One day I opened the door and there was a chicken on the floor outside. It must be an omen. Actually it was a half-eaten piece of KFC with a few chips left behind as well. An urban trash culture post-modern voodoo juju hex. Without a doubt.

Film idea – The Herbert Chapman Story

It’s a mixture of Foucault’s Pendulum, Escape to Victory and The Third Man. Takes over struggling Arsenal and gets in with the Masons to utilize the power of Hackney Brook. Have a spring. Players drink magical waters.

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

A while back I miraculously had a bit of money to burn and decided to buy a flat in Hackney before I spent it all in the local pub. I didn’t really need the flat – I was already happily settled somewhere else – it was just greed. The theory was simple: buy something in a cheapish part of town, make some money on it, then sell and get a bigger place. Instant capitalism. Fast cars. Cigars. Shiny jewellery. Gadgets. Swimming pools full of beer. Beatles box sets. Er, big lorry loads of boiled lobsters. Hand-crafted living room furniture made of pasta ….

There were two flaws in my plan. First of all. I am Britain’s most useless fuckwit capitalist. Secondly, the man I’d chosen to be my expert from the world of property was a Dickensian character in a shiny suit called Phil from a disreputable Hackney estate agents (let’s call them Greed & Shite) who had, seemingly, come through a Narniaesque wardrobe from the Victorian era while searching for castiron Empire paper clips, and liked it so much he never went back. Through some outrageous personality quirk, Phil would manage to skirt me around the obvious and plentiful bargains of the area for enough time until prices went up so quickly that I was priced out of the market.

When I told Phil’s boss my upper limit, he did an Elvis-type sneer with a little quiet laugh, then got out an old dusty file called Mugpunter Ramshackle One-Bedroomed Hovels That Haven’t Been Modernised Since The Thirties. There was this little place on Mare Street, Hackney’s central thoroughfare, that I really liked the look of. One bedroom, arched windows. I tried to look at it several times but Phil kept producing blocking manoeuvres. I’d phone up and say ‘Can I speak to Phil?’ and he’d say ‘Phil speaking,’ and I’d go ‘Hi, it’s Mr Bradford. I’d like to view the property in Mare Street,’ and he’d say “‘Ello Chinese laundry no understandee wrong number,’ and put the phone down. Or he’d just play dumb. Eventually I got to see it with a crowd of about six other people. Phil informed me that the price had now gone up by six grand. How is that possible in six weeks, I argued.

‘That’s the market, innit.’

That’s the market, innit. In some way that encapsulated everything I hated about capitalism. Unthinking drones in shiny suits mouthing the ideology of their dad or boss thinking they’re being somehow radical and exciting. This is Hackney, for fuck’s sake. Take it or leave it, Mr Bradford. He then also informed me that I’d have to enter a contract race and I decided, at that moment, to renounce capitalism, forget about buying a flat and becoming a property magnate and concentrate on walking my daughter though the park, racing the old blokes in electric wheelchairs and laughing at it all.

Of course the flat is now worth twice as much. But I never liked the Beatles that much anyway. Shame about the lobsters though.

1 Tallis’s Illustrated Plan of London & its Environs (1851)

2 In The Lost Rivers of London, Nicholas Barton tells us Hackney Brook is now ‘wholly lost’ but at one stage was a large stream which at flood could reach widths of 100 foot.

3 I expect that those lyrics have made their way into the Danish National Anthem by now. King of Denmark: Lave de skylde os en nulevende? Selvfolgelig de lave Selvfølgelig de lave. Lave de skylde os en nulevende? Selvfolgelig de [fucking] lave.

4 When we were kids we had a room that we used to cover in graffiti and drawings then, when the walls were full up, my parents would give us a tin of white paint and tell us to paint over it so we could start again. Like some weird communist job creation scheme.

6 Possibly an obscure relation of top centreforward, Les, who played for Spurs.

7 She walked down from Manor House, one imagines to buy drugs or procure a prostitute.

4. From Eel to Eternity: William Morris and the Saxon – Viking duopoly

• Dagenham Brook – the Lea to somewhere in Walthamstow

Seasonal Affective Disorder – the Danes and Saxons (what they represent), Saxons’ ego, Danes’ id, sensible and crazy – the river near Stevey’s flat – flood plains – oh no, it’s not the Ching – depression vs. positive thinking – William Morris – Dagenham Brook – walk it – go for lunch – look for source of brook – the Beard Brothers – Leyton Orient v. Blackpool – space eels

From the upstairs window looking down over Finsbury Park (the old Hornsey Wood) the sky is a sickly yellow-grey, prickling with TV aerials like broken winter trees. As a kid I used to love winter, the tranquillity and the hard feeling of cold brittle air in my sensitive asthmatic lungs. It gave me energy, as if I was sucking on a can of pure oxygen. Summer seemed frivolous and shallow. Plus it had cricket (sadistic PE teacher whacking a hard ball at you from about 5 yards away) and athletics (running while being shouted at by sadistic PE teacher). Now it’s the other way round. Winter is never-ending, annoying and wet. Maybe we are entering not an ice age but a new crap weather age … (three dots … leave it open … ‘Blimey’, says reader … ‘profound thinker!’ … )

In February, people scowl at each other. It’s bad and it’s called SAD. Sad Arsed Downer. Slobbedout And Drunk. Stoned And Depressed. Shit At Daytodayliving. Seasonal Affective Disorder. Sunlight disappears and people skulk in doorways. Mice shit on kitchen work surfaces when they’re supposed to be in the expensive trap that’s baited with peanut butter – ‘It’s what mice crave,’ said the expert on rodent trapping from the local hardware store. Maybe mice prefer smooth. Pricecutters on Blackstock Road only had crunchy. (Wasn’t the different consistencies of peanut butter the basis of Aesop’s fable about the town mouse and the country mouse?)

Now I’d ‘done’ two rivers, in the sense that I’d walked them and drawn some pictures of local fat people, but I was already feeling a bit shagged out and worried that hanging around underground streams might be unhealthy. Research has shown that they can cause allergies, disease, poltergeist activity, madness and premature death. Or even spots. The next stream I was due to research was the River Ching in Walthamstow. The thing was, the Ching hadn’t really gone. However, I spent three and a half years living in Walthamstow and I’d never heard of it. And seeing as I never knew it existed, it counted as lost in my book.

For a laugh I take my daughter to a local music workshop, where a large-boned crazily grinning lady sings ‘Kumbayah’ and the ‘Grand Old Duke of York’ while bashing away on an acoustic guitar like she’s trying to smash ice with a chisel, while the kids stare with terrified eyes. ‘Dance!’ she cries, ‘DANCE, YOU LITTLE FUCKERS!!!’ Back in the park we take it in turns to look for amazing things. Cathleen likes nature (‘Leaf!’ ‘Tree!’ ‘Pussycat!’ ‘Baby!’), while I’m into celebrity spotting. So far, we’d only managed to see a woman who looked a bit like Helen Blaxendale the actress, but I couldn’t be sure. Similar nose, but she looked much smaller in real life. Famous people generally tend to hide away from me. In thirteen years of living in London the only other famous person I’d seen was Derek from Coronation Street in a toy shop in Covent Garden. He was buying a cardboard build-it-yourself puppet theatre.

Of course, Cathleen doesn’t recognize as many famous people as me just yet. Except, whenever we pass a construction site she thinks she’s seen Bob the Builder and forces me to sing the programme’s theme tune with her while she jumps up and down in her pram.

Walthamstow is on the north-eastern edge of London. Actually, it’s Essex really, even though it’s got a London postcode. The name suggests that it was a Celtic area – Wal meaning ‘foreigners’ (Wales is the Saxon word for ‘foreigners live here – let’s buy second homes next door to them’). Another, perhaps more likely, interpretation is that it is a derivation of Wilcumstow (Welcomesville). In this area, at the River Lea, lay the boundary between the Danelaw and Saxon Wessex, a psycho-geographic buffer zone with crazy blond blokes in the east with mad expressions and sandy-haired sensible blokes in the west with bored complacent expressions. Positive thinkers in the west, melancholy downbeats to the east. The Saxon ego and the Danish id. Happy sad happy sad happy sad. People still dye their hair to look like Vikings – it’s part of an ancient folk memory which basically says, ‘Don’t kill me! I’ve got relatives in Copenhagen!’

In 894 Alfred the Great successfully fought the Vikings on the River Lea. ‘Alf’ ordered the river to be blocked up and did this – or rather told his men to do it – by cutting many channels in order to reduce water levels so that when the Vikings came back they were surprised that the river had virtually gone and they couldn’t get any further. To celebrate, Alfred burned the cakes. Were they hash cakes? Walthamstow is now an enigmatic dead zone where London ends and Essex begins. It’s cheap housing, big skies, teenagers with expensive clothes hanging around the shopping centre, burglaries, pie and mash shops, video stores, a thirties town hall that looks like a cockney Ceauşescu palace. Walthamstow Market is the longest in Europe, with stalls selling three-year-old fashions, batteries, Irish music tapes, training shoes, football wristbands, pots and pans, kitchen knives, fleeces.

I like it a lot. I lived in the Stow for three and a half years. During that time many amazing things happened.

The Amazing Things That Happened in Walthamstow between 1988 and 1991

1. We had dead pigeons in the water tank.

2. Tiny freshwater prawns once appeared in the cold water.

3. Dukey pinched a glamorous local barmaid from a geezer boyfriend with a fierce dog.

4. I did a Jackson Pollock rip-off painting on an old door in the garden which Dukey then gave away to his glamorous girlfriend while I was away.

5. Ruey blowtorched the grass in the garden.

6. The next-door neighbours shagged really loudly.

7. Our landlord asked how he could meet ‘young ladies’.

8. We got burgled three times.

9. The pubs were full of fat blokes.

They were great days.

I wrote to The Guinness Book of Records explaining my project to travel along London’s streams and rivers and how it would work well on global TV – me racing along with Norris McWhirter by my side being pulled along in a boat on wheels by a car and reciting historical facts about the rivers and their uses. (Cue punk thrash version of the Record Breakers theme tune).

In a bit of a downer mood I went out one night to meet my friend Stevey P. at a North London Short Story Workshop meeting. This group had been going on and off (mostly off) for about six years and now had only two members, me and Stevey. How we lost all the others I can’t quite remember. I think Stevey slept with one of them and the other was his brother. His story was the first chapter in a mad London-based Dickensian sci-fi novel. My stories, on the other hand, were going nowhere. I couldn’t concentrate on finishing any of them. My latest effort, Run, Carla Djarango, Run Like the Wind, consisted of three paragraphs of East Midlands magical realist bollocks. Stevey smiled patiently. He would have put his arm round me if he’d been the tactile sort, but instead he lit up a fag, narrowed his eyes and asked ‘Pint?’

Five minutes later he read my half page short story then said, after taking a sip of his Guinness, ‘Hmmm, it’s got potential.’ We both laughed. I then moaned on about rivers. He told me he had an idea. Great, I thought. What is it? A boat. Why don’t you build a boat? Then dress up in nineteenth-century gear and get pulled around London. What a crazy idea. Thanks for nothing.

Stevey agreed to come out on a river walk in Walthamstow, where he lives. There was a river that runs very close to his house which I presumed must be the Ching.

‘That’s not a river,’ said Stevey, a bit startled.

‘It is.’

‘It can’t be.’

‘What is it if it isn’t a river?’

‘It’s a, a drainage ditch or something. A drain with some water in it.’

‘No, I think it’s a river.’

He started to gabble. ‘No one told me about rivers when I bought my flat. Rivers flood and cause damage. That’s a ditch, not a river. What happens if there’s a really big flood? It’ll ruin my hall.’

To add to his paranoia, soon afterwards Stevey got a leaflet though the door from the Environment Agency informing him he lived in a flood plain and offering some useful survival tactics. This was actually the River Lea flood plain but he seemed convinced that it must be referring to the small river (‘drainage ditch!’) next to his house. He began to fantasize about his street becoming like Venice. Fortunately he lived on the first floor. ‘But what about the post?’

Now here’s a factoid bit for all the research fiends and librarians out there (sounds of skinny blokes with thick specs sitting up suddenly and concentrating). I’d first seen a map containing the Ching in my old second-hand book and, looking at its location in relation to the Hackney Brook, had presumed it was in Walthamstow. But when I looked on my A to Z to check the course of Stevey’s mystery river, I noticed that the Ching actually flowed south-west from Epping Forest and entered the Lea in south Chingford. It didn’t really spend much time in Walthamstow, apart from flowing under the dog track. So Stevey’s river wasn’t the Ching after all.

(Scene: A gang of resentful-looking researchers, looking dead hard, hang around outside a library waiting to beat me up.)

The trouble with SAD is that I get tired of people smiling and being positive at this time of year. Fortunately some new research has recently come to my aid. Apparently you’ve got more chance of being happy if you’re pessimistic. This is because you have lowered expectations, so everything is a bonus. This corresponds with my own world view, what I’d term optimistic pessimism. In this, you go out there with a healthy can-do attitude while accepting that it’ll probably all end in tears.

I also don’t like fun. Or, should I say ‘FUN!’ Fun! is overrated. What I mean is, I don’t like looking for fun! If fun! suddenly appears on my doorstep, that’s great, I’ll invite it in for a cup of tea. If a large candyfloss helterskelter funfair circus run by speedfreak laughing Zippo circus clowns sets up on our street, I’m happy. But the idea of going out and actively searching for fun! leaves me cold. I’d like to say I blame Thatcher – after all, I blame her for most things that are wrong in this country, or with me – but we have got the idea that ‘fun! is our right’ from the Americans. It’s that thing about the ‘pursuit of happiness’ which manifests itself as a need for fun! It’s a waste of time. It’s only in fleeting moments that you’ll ever actually experience happiness. Fun! is happiness with forced laughter, usually while dressed up.

I spent a bit of time in the States a few years ago and I used to feel really tense around happy people. Or at least people who seemed concerned at making the rest of the world think they were happy. Those ‘I’m so pleased to meet you that I’m smiling, look, you make me feel good so you must be a special person’ people. You can always spot them because they pepper their conversation with words they’ve nicked from New Age therapy-style literature. Tim, you look sad, Let Art Heal You. Tim, come into our Love Sanctuary. That kind of thing.

And yet, I realized that I was only going to be able to continue this rivers project if I got myself into a more positive state of mind. So I jotted down a few ideas to get me started.

The Groundwater Diaries self-help guide

This short course aims to turn you from a normal person (possibly even a well-adjusted one, but who cares about that?) into someone who is an incredibly annoying positive person who never gets down about anything. People will run from you in the street when they see you.

For example, being positive isn’t just about thinking, ‘Yeah I can do that. I reckon,’ it’s also about showing the world who’s boss, that you can do anything and that you’ve also got a very loud voice (possibly with a sort of American accent creeping in at the edges). Most self-help books work on the inner person (god how pathetic is that!?), putting over the idea that positive vibes will spill out from you into your universe in a kind of George Harrison sitar big beard huggy sort of way.

The techniques and exercises outlined here work in an opposite direction, making you look absurdly positive on the outside until finally, when you’re head of IBM or you’ve won the Eurovision song contest three years in a row, you start to believe it yourself.

But as most psychology experts will tell you, ‘We take Access or Visa.’ OK, that’s the first thing they tell you. The second thing is that everything is bullshit and pretending. People like to be fooled by others who seem more assured than they are.

Positive Exercises

Get yourself a new name

Ditch your old name that your parents gave you and grab a bright shiny positive new one. Here’s some examples: Dong Powerlamp, Jemma Zii, Zak Backkaboo, Pandora Lightshower, Dalrymp Supercharger. These are positive and say something about you. If you don’t want to go the whole way, why not get into the craze of Power Initials. John Smith becomes John Z. Smith, Ethel Jones become S. Ethel M. Jones. See? Hmm.

Affirmative thumbs

Put your arms straight out in front of you and stick your thumbs up. Hold this position for thirty minutes while holding you mouth in a large wide grin. You can use Affirmative Thumbs™ at work if you are getting hassle from your boss. Half an hour of Affirmative Thumbs™ and he’ll be happy to give you a pay rise. Possibly.

Power Smile

Sit with your arms by your sides. Take a deep breath. Now pull your arms up and insert your index fingers into the corners of your mouth. Pull your mouth as wide apart as possible and hold it. This is called a smile. Remember this facial expression when you are meeting new people or at a job interview. It tells people ‘I am a positive no-holds-barred-get-up-and-go-live-for-today-smiley-doing sort of person.’ It’s more than a smile – it’s a Power Smile™.

Within minutes of digesting that lot I was feeling like a buff-cheeked gibbon that’s inhaled a year’s supply of laughing gas.

Walthamstow is famous for two things. The jellied eel and William Morris. I’m not always keen on the Great Man theory of history, but in the case of Walthamstow I feel it’s appropriate. I’ve always liked the idea of Morris rather than his art, which seemed to me to be a load of girly Laura-Ashley-style designs copied and repeated on a wall. Morris married Jane Bowden, a local girl with red curly hair who was discovered working in a shop (‘I say, a SHOP don’t you know!’) by his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She eventually become Rossetti’s lover again after Morris became obsessed with discovering the perfect wallpaper glue. In portraits she looks a bit like Nicole Kidman.

And jellied eels taste like slimy, dryish sick. My gran told me the whole point of jellied eels was that you weren’t supposed to taste them, just greedily swallow great gloopy lumps like cheap oysters. Morris was obsessed with these small slippery creatures that lived in a pulsating glob of sticky goo. He felt that they were God’s first creatures, living in the primordial jelly. Many of his most famous designs tried to capture the swirly essence of the jellied eel. People don’t realise that the jelly is natural – it is their house and their food source. It’s as if we all lived in places made out of pasta. Morris knew this. He saw the way jellied eels interacted with their environment and each other and it inspired him to try to create a better, more community-based and creative society. The Walthamstow jellied eel also represents, as Morris well knew, the serpent, life and pagan religion. The Vikings were pagan and their longboats had serpents/dragons/jellied eels carried on the front.

Other artists who loved jellied eels:

Pablo Picasso

James Joyce

Jean-Paul Sartre

Joan Miró

‘It does not make a bad holiday’ to go to Walthamstow, said Morris, evidently not bribed by the Walthamstow Tourist Board. The area was mostly countryside until the end of the nineteenth century. I used to love going running or walking around Walthamstow marshes on summer evenings, then lying down in the grass and watching the clouds scoot by, listening to crickets, cockney geezers with pit bulls threatening each other, car alarms going off and ambulances screaming. It’s an area of interesting wildlife.

History bit – The marshes were first drained for grazing purposes in Alfred the Great’s time as a way of showing off to the Danes. They were so impressed they gave him their jellied eels. What did they get in return? Over 1000 years later the Danes would get punk music. Yet something is not quite right about my punk theory. I’ve been staring at a map of the North Sea/ German Ocean/cold slab of muddy water off Mablethorpe and wondering whether the Bullshit Detector on the makeshift raft really made it to Denmark? How realistic is that? I could be fantasizing. When you look at the facts, it’s much more likely that it ended up in Sweden or Norway.

It was time to walk Stevey P.’s river. First of all I had to get in touch with the spirit of William Morris. I’ve never done channelling before. I remember reading about the great medium Doris Stokes whose ears used to go red when she contacted the dead. My whole face goes red when I drink extra strong lager, so something must be happening. And it was to Tennent’s Super that I turned when looking for a name for Stevey P.’s river. A couple of cans in and I was buzzing. Were those ghosts I could hear or my own voices: happy Tim and Morrissey Tim? I sat back and relaxed, taking deep breaths. And then it came to me. I had an urge to look on the A to Z again and I saw it almost straight away. South of the Lea Bridge Road came my answer. Stevey’s river, the mystery river, was called Dagenham Brook. (Cue Time-Team-style ancient drums and flute music). But why Dagenham? This stream flowed nowhere near Dagenham, which lies 12 miles to the south-east – unless …. Walthamstow used to be near Dagenham and, like the Lost City of Atlantis, was engulfed by the waters of the Lea (but, unlike Atlantis, then deposited 6 miles upriver to a spot east of Tottenham). I could see where Dagenham Brook entered the Lea and its course to there from Stevey’s place. But north of that there was nothing. So I decided to take a different tack and walk towards, rather than away from, the source.

Of course, searching for the source is also in a sense a journey to rediscover one’s own spiritual nature through personal exploration and self-cultivation. At least that’s what Poppy, my ex-dream analyst, used to say before I dumped her for Yorkshire Mike. I kind of miss Poppy now, her madcap Californian optimism. I hoped to unlock the spiritual treasures of the universe and light the way to a life of internal and external harmony and fulfilment. And having already had some experience of Walthamstow, I surmised that this journey would have to take place in a pub full of fat blokes. During my Walthamstow years, our old local boozer was the Lorne Arms in Queens Road and it boasted three of the biggest lads in the whole of north London – the Beard brothers, weighing in at around 60 stone between them. Beard, the eldest, was around 23 stone, his younger brother Little Beard was about 20 stone and the baby of the family, Tiny Beard, was 17 stone. They all had the same beards. I thought they might be the living embodiment of the legendary giants of the City of London, known to most people as Gog and Magog (and Tiny GogMagogGog), who are carried around in the Lord Mayor’s procession. They spend most of the rest of their year propping up the bar of the Lorne. Also there was Val the barmaid. We liked her to leave a decent head on our pints of Guinness rather than knife it off into the tray. ‘You boys like a bit of head,’ that was her catchphrase. ‘I said, you boys like’ … And Landlord Len, denizen of the Grand Order of Water Rats, a sort of Freemasons Lite for cockneys, I suppose.

Walthamstow – the sludgeree years

When we lived in Walthamstow we all fancied ourselves as top chefs. Possibly the cheap local produce available at Walthamstow market inspired us. But it was also a good way to impress any woman who dared to come round. I had four specialities:

1. Marmalade paella – only wheeled out when we were absolutely desperate and about to starve, and which consisted of brown rice and marmalade.

2. Oxo porridge – a highly nutritious oat-based meal in beef, chicken or vegetable flavours. Ingredients: porridge oats, water, Oxo cube.

3. Angel-hair pasta with ketchup – what it says.

4. Sludgeree – buy lots of vegetables. Put in pan with water and leave for several hours and go down the Lorne to lose at pool to Dukey, until ingredients have merged into a thick, industrial sludge.

You’re probably thinking, after seeing those recipes, that I was King of the Cooks, the alpha-male of the oven. But I certainly didn’t have it all my own way. Plendy had this amazing dish called pasta and tomatoes. It consisted of pasta, about a hundredweight of garlic and a tin of tomatoes all mixed up together. If he was feeling really fancy he’d make a salad to accompany it. Dukey had tuna explosion, which involved him hiring a small plane and dropping a couple of tins of tuna fish from several thousand feet. He’d then scoop up the resulting mess and stick it in a pan with – a tin of tomatoes. Ruey had some kind of fishy bits thing. He used to get fishy off cuts from a local fishmonger. Tobe had pineapple curry. All I remember is tins of pineapple and curry sauce. Rich never used to cook, so we’d nick his dope and put it in our own meals, just to take the edge off the anger of those who had to eat it.

And we used to make serious money on these meals. If the food cost, say, £1.50 the chef would invariably ask for 70p each, thus making a handy mark-up. This would go straight into a savings account. Occasionally when a woman came round we’d stick on an album of French accordion music that I’d found at a jumble sale and try and schmooze them with top grub. Strangely, late eighties women just didn’t appreciate fine food.

The house was split down the middle between English and Scottish tenants, but it was more complex than that. The split-personality fault lines of Walthamstow also meant that we were divided along organised (Saxon) and chaotic (Viking) lines.

I go round to Stevey’s flat to collect him for our walk of his river. He is still flapping a bit. He’s cleared out his valuable seventies football card collection, in case the place gets flooded, and gives it to me in a Tesco bag, asking that I donate it to the artefacts library of my erstwhile employers When Saturday Comes (independent football magazine). It is a bit of a John Paul Getty III gesture.

We walk up to the end of Blyth Road to Bridge Road and look at Stevey’s river, sorry, the Dagenham Brook, as it slowly snakes its way behind the little terraced houses. There are a few bits and bobs in the water – cans, bottles, old bikes. Soon, we turn into the Leyton relief road, which hasn’t yet opened because they haven’t finished building it. Concrete bollards bar access. A sign says that it’s due to open in Spring 2002. A Somalian guy is in the little Portakabin office, all fenced off. We tell him we are on a research project, hunting for the Dagenham Brook. Right, OK. He seems a bit too laidback and cool for a security guard.

‘Look,’ says Stevey, ‘Bywater on the skips. Are you noticing all these signs?’ Stevey is a bloody teacher knowall. In a minute he’s going to suggest we split up into smaller groups. We find the end of the river before it goes under the new Leyton relief road and under a light industrial estate to the River Lea. As we clamber into the undergrowth we suddenly come upon a group of very smiley people all pushing wheelbarrows. We’ve stumbled across some sort of gardening sect activity, which is alarming. I picture us being kidnapped and in a couple of days we’ll be pushing wheelbarrows too. What are they carrying in their wheelbarrows? We have no option but to press on. But the barrow people are following us.

I confront one of the leaders, who explains to me that he’s from the Environment Agency and these are volunteers helping to clear the lower reaches of the brook. He said they were planting stuff in and around the river, encouraging wildlife back. Kingfishers and that. I ask him about the route of the river. He says it disappears pretty soon after it crosses Lea Bridge Road. Stevey is jumpy, but manages not to ask about emergency flood procedures. As Stevey and I saunter past with our serious explorers’ expressions, the not-barrow-people-but-voluntary-workers who are sweating hard obviously guess that we are pros or environmental activists and start to say hello. The brook then disappears under Leyton Wingate football club. There is a game on, but it’s three quid to get in and we’re not that desperate to find the stream. And that’s the last we see of it, until it sluggishly flows behind houses then disappears somewhere to the north in the vicinity of Markhouse Road. We celebrate our victory by repairing to the Hare and Hounds where we have some god awful half-frozen-food and thin Guinness, surrounded by fat blokes.

In John Rocque’s 1746 map of Walthamstow there are several country houses with ornamental gardens and ponds. Dagenham Brook is called the Mill River and appears to be an artificial ditch, as Stevey had hoped. I’II go round to tell Stevey but I don’t think he wants to talk about it. He’s recently given me some more old bubblegum cards, this time of my beloved Leeds United, believing he can buy me off so I won’t keep going on about rivers and we can get back to How It Was Before – stories, politics, women and football. He’s underestimated me, because … bloody hell, between 1970 and 1974 Eddie Gray only played sixty games for Leeds. I think he might have been injured. I rub the back with a coin. Magic! A picture appears. Then it disappears again! Ooooh.

It’s now late March. I walk from my house to Brisbane Road stadium, which lies about 100 yards to the east of the Dagenham Brook’s southern section, to watch Leyton Orient play Blackpool in a Third Division game. On the way I get caught up in a torchlit procession by hundreds of Kurdish demonstrators, some playing medieval-sounding pipes, some banging drums. The rest are singing a Kurdish version of ‘All We Are Saying Is Give Peace A Chance’. At least that’s what it sounds like. A quarter of a mile further on someone lies dying at the side of the road, surrounded by a crowd of people, a victim of a hit-and-run driver. Blackpool win 2–1.

A few days later the USA pulls out of the Kyoto Protocol for climate control. Then Stevey P. phones me to say he is very worried about the river again. His bit is filled up with rubbish – old bikes, oil cans, car seats. Barely half a mile away, the Environment Agency are planting rare flowers and kissing kingfisher eggs. This is, he points out, the London of extremes. Dagenham Brook, once a river of mystery, is now one of contrasts – heaven and hell, London and Essex, Saxon and Viking, good and evil, kingfishers and used bicycles, something nice and jellied eels.

I needed sleep. I padded through to my study to get my well-thumbed copy of Albert Camus’s The Rebel. I’d been reading it for about five years. (My other insomnia beater is The Scarlet and the Black.) In seconds I was drifting off.

I went back to Walthamstow, bought some jellied eels and took then up to the William Morris Gallery. Didn’t feel anything. I then went back to the Lorne after eating the jellied eels to show some William Morris prints to the Beards and Len the Landlord, plus my eel illustration. It was closed up. Then I walked back up Lea Bridge Road towards the roundabout at Clapton and decided to find out if there really was a psychic border at the River Lea. At the pub there I ran from one end of the bridge to the other to see how I felt. Saxon or Viking? Saxon … run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run … Viking … run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run … Saxon … run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run … Viking … run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run … stop … gulp for air … dirty fumes … have coughing fit …

There was a rumour doing the rounds a while back that a bear had gone missing from a travelling circus in East London (maybe Zippo, maybe not). Eventually the authorities dragged the Lea in Hackney Marshes just south of here, near the Walthamstow pitch-and-putt course, and found the bodies of three bears, skinned. But not the one they were looking for, which turned up somewhere else.

To: The William Morris Society

Hi there

I’m researching a book about underground rivers and William Morris crops up a couple of times. I was wondering if you had any information on whether rivers influenced Morris’s work. I’m also interested in his time at Walthamstow – I’ve heard a story that he loved jellied eels! Have you ever heard this?

Hope you can help.

All the best,

Tim Bradford

Dear Tim

Thank you for your enquiry. Morris was influenced by rivers and nature in general. His designs incorporate natural forms, especially foliage and flowers. In 1881, Morris & Co moved to larger premises at Merton Abbey, where the River Wandle was a ready supply of water and could be used for dyeing the textiles. There is a fabric named after the river, called Wandle, and Morris also produced a number of designs based on tributaries of the Thames.

Morris also had numerous opinions on food and drink. One of the caricatures by Edward Burne-Jones is of him eating a raw fish while in Iceland. Morris spent his childhood at Walthamstow and his family home, Water House, is now the William Morris Gallery and is open to the public. For more information: www.lbwf.gov.uk/wmg

Please do not hesitate to contact me again if you require any further information.

Yours sincerely,

Helen Elletson

William Morris Society

Film Idea: ‘Attack of the Jellied Eels from Outer Space’

Earth is being invaded by the evil eels who want to cover the world in jelly. Only William Morris can stop them. Helped by his friend H. G. Wells, he goes into the future and sees that they are growing their deadly eel spawn in the little Dagenham Brook. Morris creates some wallpaper which shows the plans of the eel spaceships. They throw Manze’s pies up into the air to knock out the alien craft. Starring:

Tom Cruise as William Morris

Nicole Kidman as Jane Bowden

Russell Crowe as Rossetti

Nicholas Cage as H. G. Wells

London Stories 3: Going to the Dogs

Scars on faces, all shapes and sizes, cockney aristos and Swedish tourists, coked-up crowds and serious punters, the smell of beer, shouting, loudspeaker, trendy crowd with nice specs, ladieeez in tight dresses, old blokes with sheepskin jackets, cheap cigars, scampi and chips, lose a fiver win a tenner, overhear some fellas talkin’ near the bookies, take their advice then find your hound is a mangy bag of bones that wouldn’t make a decent pot of soup even if you boiled it up for a couple of days. Ah, going to the Dogs is beautiful.

Last time I went, I lost loads of money, even though I won on a couple of races. I’d searched on the Internet for some betting systems. One, based in the Midwest USA, had all kinds of equations and maths you had to do before each race. It’s all very well winning, but I think you’ve got to do it with the minimum possible effort. So I decided to develop my own system. It’s the Pogles Wood connection system. I’d pick any dog related to a character or event from this late-sixties kids TV programme. I talked very loudly about this and also wore a pair of pinstripe trousers to make me feel like a Serious Punter.

In the end I ignored my system and went with a dead-cert tip I’d got off the Internet. Rectobond Ace. Couldn’t lose, they said. Race six.

They’re off. Eager thin-snouted flesh torpedoes chasing a toy rabbit that’s been welded to a turbo-powered Scalextric car watched by sinewy punters in Fred Perry shirts and shiny loafers, Yes. Yes. Yes Yes. Yes. YES. YEEEEEEESSSSSSSSS. YEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHSSSSSSSSSSSS. Oh, shit. My bag of bones went off like the clappers then folded after about 100 yards.

However, my very sensible wife had bet on places for long-odds dogs and won enough to get some beers and a bag of chips. I went to the bar, ordered the beer and asked if there were any chips. A tall skinny bloke with a scar turned to me and said:

‘I’ve got a chip on my shoulder mate ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.’

‘I need more than one.’

His mate, an even taller black guy, said:

‘Want chips do you eh eh? How about a kebab as well ha ha ha ha ha haha?’

‘Or how about, how about some lobster ha ha ha ha ha?’

‘First time out without yer mum is it ha ha ha ha ha ha ha?’

‘I … ’

‘Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.’

‘I think that it’s … ’

‘Ha ha ha hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha’

‘I … ’

‘Ha ha haaaaaaaaAAAAAAA!!!!!’

Dickens, if he were alive today, would probably have included Walthamstow Dogs in a couple of his books (probably Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist).

‘Mr Snarzelwechumfuzz, do you have a canine selection for us this fine evening?’

‘Indeed I do, Mr Pickwick, sir. It’s Lady Hamilton Academical in race seven, the Puppy Breeders of the British Empire, Essex Division, Summer Trophy.’

Mr Pickwick laughed. ‘I’ll have some of that, Mr Snarzelwechumwack. Pray, what do you suggest?’

‘A ten-guinea each way tipple, Mr P. And a couple of florins on Cholera Kid in race nine, the Tottenham Hale Open Cup.’

Mr Winkle piped up from the back. ‘I say, Snarzelwechumpog, do they have fried slices of potato here?’

There was a snort from Sam Weller. ‘Froyd slices uv potayto?!? Do you vink this is vee Savoy, Mr Winkle?’ The others began to laugh merrily.

Etc.

5. Spa Wars

• The Fleet – Hampstead Heath to Blackfriars

Literary Fleet – Raquel Welch in bloodstream – the River of Wells – the London Spa Miracle – lucky pubs – Hampstead Wells – Pancras Wells – Old St Pancras Church – King’s Cross – St Chad’s Well – jazz – Bagnigge Wells – Black Mary’s Hole – Islington Pond – Sadlers Wells – New Tunbridge Wells – London Spa – Clerkenwell – Faggeswell – Smithfield – Eric Newby is lost forever – Bridewell

The River Fleet, or Holebourne (as it was called in that Norman inventory pamphlet), is the largest of London’s forgotten rivers. It rises in Hampstead and winds through Kentish Town, King’s Cross and Clerkenwell before entering the Thames at Blackfriars. It creates a huge valley culminating in Ludgate Hill on one side and Holborn on the other. The valley can still be seen in the deep banks at each side of Farringdon Street, which follows the Fleet’s course down to the Thames at Blackfriars, and Holborn Viaduct was built mainly because of the difficulties vehicles had in negotiating the steep fall then climb when travelling west to east across the Fleet’s flood plain.

The Fleet has been written about a lot. According to my main source material, the book Wonderful London, it fell ‘from a higher grace than any of its sister streams’. It appears in literature – Pope’s Dunciad (thick blokes swim in the runny shit with the dead dogs), Ben Jonson’s ‘On the Famous Voyage’ (a couple of madsers in a boat sail down the Fleet in a precursor to the Raquel Welch film Fantastic Voyage in which a submarine is miniaturized and injected into the bloodstream of a dying man, played by Donald Pleasance, to try and revive him and Raquel gets her kit off but you don’t see anything), James Boswell (big-mouth Samuel Johnson’s laugh heard from Temple Bar to Fleet Ditch, Johnson doing lots of craps in the river), Dickens’s Mr Pickwick searches for the source of the Hampstead ponds (putting forward cutting-edge ‘Tittlebatian theories’), and, more recently, Aidan Dun’s poem Vale Royal (Fleet Valley ancient druidic site, St Pancras church omphalos, consumptive young poets top themselves at the beauty of it all) and U. A. Fanthorpe’s ‘Rising Damp’, about the ‘little fervent underground/ Rivers of London’, whose buried names are still followed through the city, and in the papers every few years, usually in the context of pressure groups trying to restore it to its former glory.

Before its inevitable descent into a health hazard, the Fleet had flowed through orchards (Pear Tree Court, Rosebery Avenue), meadows (Smithfield – ‘the Smoothfield’) and Italian women (Little Italy in Clerkenwell). It has, at different stages of its course, been called Turnmill Brook and Battle Bridge Brook. It was also known as the ‘River of Wells’, due to the numerous healing springs which lined its banks. Strange to think that this river that now lurks beneath the roar of Farringdon Road was once venerated for its healing properties.

One balmy night, during the never-ending Britpop summer of 1996, I sat with three friends at the bar of the London Spa in Exmouth Market and watched England beat Holland 4–1 on the big screen. When the fourth goal went in we held each other and exclaimed that Truly It Was A Miracle. And, being superstitious in a sad medieval country boy sort of way, I decided that the result was down to the pub’s lucky vibe, rather than the skill of the players. The Spa then became our ‘lucky’ pub for a couple of years, until England lost to Romania at the 1998 World Cup and, like a gang of fickle eighteenth-century hypochondriacs, we went in search of a new lucky pub.

The Spa appears in census records dating back to 1851, but there has been pub there for over 250 years. The name refers to a nearby spa garden and the area surrounding it, also known as Bagnigge Marshes, from which flowed chalybeate springs. These were at one time used as holy wells and by the eighteenth century had been rediscovered and turned into pleasure gardens. These days a pleasure garden is a can of strong lager and a place to piss, but then it meant threepence for a glass of murky liquid and some songs and rhymes. I decided I would trace the Fleet’s course via its spas and wells, seeing if I could pick up on the ancient healing vibe and celebrate its traditions with a modern-day version of taking the waters. Drinking Beer.

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