No Business with Flow Business on the River Lavant

It was a showery day when I walked on The Trundle on the South Downs near Chichester on Saturday 4th March. The back half of me, facing into the weather, got soaked as I walked up the hill. The sun came out again as I walked up the hill and dried off. I sketched on the north side of the hill, the brick hut near the masts sheltering me from the chilly westerly wind. As I walked back into the city centre, the sky darkened again as showery clouds rolled in; though the rain held off until I was on my way back home. These showers came with at least a temporary shift to more unsettled weather, with the low pressures taking a more southerly track. Good for rivers whose flows are predominantly dominated by surface run-off after rainfall. For groundwater, and groundwater chalk streams, however, this could be too little too late. Certainly for the Lavant: I found it still dry, but for a few puddles as I walked through East Lavant. There may yet be some flow if and if and when the rainfall during late January and February percolates through the soil into the chalk to raise the water table. If so, it's likely to be meagre and brief: groundwater levels are still well down after the dry winter and the window of opportunity for recharge is now closing. Weeds were beginning to grow in the riverbed. Daffodils were flowering along the bank in Sheepwash Lane, showing spring wasn't waiting. 

According to the monthly hydrological summaries published by the Environment Agency and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, groundwater levels in the Compton House and Chilgrove House wells (both near Chichester) were respectively at their 7^th and 13^th lowest levels in 122 and 181 records at the end of January. The level at Chilgrove was lower than it was at the same time in 2012; the last winter no-show of the River Lavant. That came after two successive dry winters. The subsequent pick up and about turn in water fortunes which came with the wet spring was very unusual. To assume it will happen again this year is wishful thinking. This entrry illustrated by photos from East Lavant (4th March), together with subsequent doodles involving daffodils, dipsticks and dowsers.

Readings on Water - Spring (Springs)

Tim Bradford, The Groundwater Diaries, paperback (2003). 

I picked a copy of this up about a year ago in Kims secondhand bookshop, Chichester, though only started reading it at the beginning of this month. I was expecting something fairly straight and conventional about the groundwater under London (in the Chalk, beneath the younger Palaeogene layers of London Clay etc); references to occasional flooding of subways (like the Exhibition Road-South Kensington tube station one) when the water table is high; or something about the lost (buried / banished) rivers such as the Fleet on the lines of Nicholas Barton’s The Lost Rivers of London. The book is indeed about lost, buried rivers, though the take and tone of the book is completely different from what I’d expected – in a good way. The subtitle should have give me a clue, Trials, Tributaries and Tall Stories from beneath the Streets of London. The overall tone is witty and, in places, surreal. Compared to my readings on water earlier this year, it’s light relief for spring (in both senses of the word). There are illustrations on about every other page with the author’s sketches and cartoon drawings. Some of them would have benefited from being bigger, though they were generally sharp, especially considering the lower quality of production (slight yellowing of the paper). I started reading it to read myself to sleep after an evening meeting which went on a bit. Instead, it had the opposite effect, laugh-out-loud. I only stopped when my Literary Man wanted lights-out ahead of his busy day involving meetings dragging on a bit. 

First came the lists of contents and illustrations which intrigued me as to what was to come, and made me laugh: among the illustrations listed: A Danish farmer’s punk crossover; Algae Scum kicks Rupert’s head in; Special Brew Dowsing; and who are The Littlehampton Boys (page 135)? In the first chapter a little known, “third rate” punk album is floated in a Lincolnshire river to placate it after a flood in the early 1980s. Flowing on from this, speculation about the album heading out across the North Sea and sparking off a Danish punk movement. Subsequent mentions of a famous eighteenth century painting; the powers of Special Brew beers / lagers in aiding perception and one-ness with subterranean rivers; Arsenal FC / football in relation to rivers…

As of the first week of March, I’m up to about page 100, in the midst of a pub crawl along the valley of the buried and sewered River Fleet. The Fleet is the largest and most famous of the lost (underground) rivers of London. Others include the Tyburn, the Quaggy, the Effra. It seems from this that there are numerous other smaller ones, too: among the Ching (sounds like a till or  stereotypical 1970’s English bloke's stereotypical picture of the Chinese) and the ostentatiously named Moselle (I thought there was just the one in flowing into the Rhine at Koblenz). In the appendices at the back, a “Highly scientific diagram of flow rates”, the units of measurement , much simplified, ranging from A few puddles to Raging torrent .

The author would have been his early to mid-thirties (as I was) around the time of writing. He admits to being a river obsessive, Come and see my etchings of tributaries of the Tyne. Good to know I have a contemporary kindred spirit out there. He was writing, then, about the London of the 1980s, 1990s and very beginning of the 2000s, so lots has changed since then. The rivers are still buried, though above them, much more building work; the high rises; and of course the 2012 Olympic Park area around the lower reaches of the River Lee.

PS - I’ve just spotted a Wanted poster near the very end, on similar lines to my Lost Lavant posters. We came to these completely independently, albeit via through inevitable idea-flow running along lost rivers.