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.
