Viewing and Sketching the Four Horsemen of the Thames
22nd September
The four horsemen here being Jason Decaires Taylor’s Rising Tide –
sculpture along the Thames shore just downstream of Vauxhall Bridge / near MI6, pertaining to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, climate change and humans’ carry-on-regardless use of fossil fuels. They're there until the end of this month as part of the Totally Thames festival. This is the latest in a series of underwater / sometimes underwater sculptures he’s
created around the world, among them the world's first underwater sculpture park off Grenada in the West Indies. This one is high and dry for a few hours around low
tide, though it's vital to know tide times and pick your time. Photos on the Totally Thames website show the horsemen amid varying degrees of submersion by the tide. I needed the tide to be out during
the afternoon. Today low tide was around 14:15h BST. A neap tide (coefficient minus 5%).
Life’s a Beach, someone had chalked on the rusty
cover of a pipe coming out in the grey brick wall of the embankment just
downstream of the "Duck Boats" slipway.
I
got there at about low tide and stayed for nearly two hours sketching beneath the
wall of the embankment. I worked in pens, in my lightweight A4 London
sketchbook. The middle two riders were young boys; two aloof looking suited men
either side of them. In place of the horses’ heads were petrol pumps (the
middle two on concrete platforms); the other two nodding donkey oil pumps. All
now well high and dry on the largely shingle shore of flint, brick. I picked up
a few bits of broken pottery. Figures and animals have never been my strong
point. Struggled with the proportions, but easier than usual in that they weren’t
going anywhere. I left the shore at 4pm, as the tide was beginning to rise visibly, though still someway to go before it wetted the horses' hooves. By now it was getting chilly. I still had the National Original Print Exhibition to visit downriver at Bankside Gallery.
Affluents and Effluents
Affluents here being French for tributaries. Near Vauxhall Bridge and MI6, too is the outflow of the River Effra. Not so much a tributary as a drain - the River Effra Storm Relief Channel. This is one of the Lost Rivers of London, culveted,
and relegated to a drain. It's all got to go somewhere, yet it’s always a
shame when rivers are banished like this. As now, just the last fraction of the stream now seeing
daylight, flowing across the Thames shore at low tide.
Until this evening's sunset behind Chelsea and Albert Bridges glimpsed from the train, the Thames didn't look that inviting either, a sullen grey-brown colour. This turbidity is natural, due to the sediment load and tidal currents. Even knowing that, it didn't look
clean. The potential for sewage-polluted storm effluent after the
heavy rain is well documented. Bazelgette's Victorian sewerage system is now creeking under the strain of a growing modern city, with the urgent need for expensive upgrade (Costing the Earth - Tunnel Beneath the Thames - BBC Radio 4, 22/02/12)
These are some notes about London's Lost Rivers I made during the summer:
Amid a prolonged, infernally frustrating at times connectivity drought,
I’ve been turning again to CDs, live radio and offline digital files, including
those quietly recorded on the Bug, mostly 2005 to about 2009 or 2010. Among
them, a couple of recordings I made of BBC Radio 3’s Words and Music. One being The South Country. Nothing in there
saying who the poets were, Edward Thomas may well have been in there, the focus
of many of my Bibliophile's recent readings, on Hampshire. Lots of mention of familiar
places, following the line of the South Downs and Oh to be in Hampshire
now…Felt quite emotional and a yearning to go back there, though preferably
when we’ve had the hard light of midsummer. What with going to France and my
post-hols reveries, the Downs have somewhat taken a back seat. Much more
pleasant walking on them than pavement pounding along the A27 corridor. I could
do with getting my fitness back and losing some flab, too.
Then
there was the one on Rivers. They repeated at least a shortened version of this last
Christmas Eve, but being Christmas Eve, amid everything going on , I
didn’t give it my full attention. It was about all sizes of rivers up to the
Mississippi (blues lamenting New Orleans flooding). What struck me most was a
reading of UA Fanthorpe’s - Rising Damp
, “Beneath our feet they lie low...”. The names of the lost rivers read as a role
call of the dead:
Effra, Graveney, Falcon, Quaggy,
Wandle, Walbrook,
Tyburn, Fleet
Then at the end, the mythical
rivers of the underworld.
This
was an apt quote on the Caught By the River site, caughtbytheriver.net (not UA
Fanthorpe, ‘A
river can sometimes be diverted but is a very hard thing to lose altogether.’
(J.G. Head: paper read to the
Auctioneers’ Institute in 1907)
I haven’t found the date the poem
was written yet, though UA Fanthorpe was 1929-2009.
After more searching I came across this radio clip from last October: BBC World Service radio
clip, 24/10/14 - London's Lost Rivers. London's Lost Rivers: A Walker's Guide Paperback – 8 Sep
2011
The programme was primarily about
the most famous lost river, the Fleet, probably the one least likely to be
“daylighted”, given it’s been banished beneath a railway line around Kings
Cross, busy roads beneath the Holborn Viaduct, not to mention it being a sewer
since Victorian times. It featured Tim Bolton, author of the book London’s Lost
Rivers
In the broadcast he said, “As the
city grew, rivers tended to get in the way [of development]…a problem that had
to be solved.”.
It didn’t help their cases either
that prior to Bazelgette’s C19th sewerage system, the Fleet in particular, was
an open sewer.
Mention of poems about London by
Tom Chivers, too – Jacob’s Island (the Neckinger).
