The Groundwater Diaries

by Tim Bradford

  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. I
t 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.

  Hampstead Wells 1 (The Flask, Flask Walk)

  I hold in my hand a glass of Young’s bitter. It’s got a hoppy, salty taste with a soapy head. The Flask refers to the jars people would take to fill with well water. A few blokes are sitting around half watching football on the telly. A ginger bloke is eating chips. Outside people are promenading. A player gets sent off and everyone cheers. The start of a pub crawl is always dead exciting.

  Hampstead Wells 2 (Wells Tavern, Well Walk)

  A drinking fountain in the street nearby has an inscription:

  Drink Traveller and with Strength revived

  Let a kind Thought be Given to Her who has thy thirst subdued. Then render thanks in Heaven.

  Chalybeate water springs were discovered here in 1701 and, as the pub sign says, gardens soon opened offering ‘Good music and song all day long and accommodation for water drinkers of both sexes. Court ladies all air and no dress.’

  The Wells Tavern stood near the springs. It’s a big late-Victorian family boozer, ‘Dedicated to live music’ (says the flyer), with a flowery carpet, hard blokes with dogs, tired mums with kids and, the centrepiece, a glamorous nineteenth-century-style barmaid in a black satin dress. I bet she’s called Flossie. R&B plays on the jukebox. The Green King IPA tastes of chocolate bubblegum. I leave the pub and walk across the Vale of Health along the Fleet valley. You can see the fledgling stream in places around here. At the junction of two little tributaries I find what looks like a Neolithic flint tool and stick it in my bag.

  Hampstead Heath Spring (The Garden Gate, South End Road)

  After walking around past Keats’s house, I’m back on the Fleet’s route. Now I’m on London Pride, a slightly darker beer. It’s watery to start with but has an aftertaste like milky coffee. Very refreshing. The sides of my head start to hurt. Could be the booze and heat. People used to drink this stuff to quench their thirst. I feel good, so it must be working.

  The pub has a thirties Tudorbethan exterior with a nineties shiny wood interior. Lots of people with sunglasses on the top of their head. Barmaids with crop tops, tans, six packs, hipsters and pierced belly buttons. Outside is a public bog with classic Victorian big white enamel urinals. Winos sit nearby, no doubt enjoying the luxurious toilet facilities. Opposite, on a green, is a big drinking fountain with some little offerings tucked into it – some long-dead daffodils, a CD and a bike repair kit case. And a black donkey jacket. Three people sit nearby on a bench, guarding the well – a big witch-like gypsy-looking lass, a young Peter Tosh type and a Donald Pleasance character. I’m happy to see they’re all drinking Special Brew.

  Pancras Wells (The Prince Alfred, Pancras Way)

  Quite a way from the well, which was opposite St Pancras old church, this is the nearest pub I could find. A local boozer underneath a small sixties tower block, it’s got a big screen, keg beer and a load of hard-looking blokes standing around smoking and talking loudly. Little plates of mashed-up half-eaten shellfish are dotted around the place. Arsenal are on. I buy a half of John Bull and sneak into a corner. The beer has a cold, metallic seventies taste. Bergkamp is clean through but misses. ‘Yaaaaayyyyyy ooooohhhh!!!’ shout the hard blokes.

  Two guys are playing pool and arguing; a skinny man in his seventies in a suit with jet black hair and thick specs keeps repeating to a bigger younger man ‘Look, I say it how I see it.’ They’re arguing over a foul shot.

  Outside, I walk down to St Pancras Churchyard. What with the old Hospital for Tropical Diseases, the embanked railway line, the giant Victorian gas holders and the roaring traffic, this spot feels about as urban as London could possibly get – the beating heart of the city experience. I sigh appreciatively, as if sipping a vintage wine, er, I mean John Bull keg bitter. And then, suddenly, a beautiful green space appears in front of me. St Pancras Gardens – a little park filled with gravestones, gnarled old trees and a small, strange-looking church – St Pancras church, supposedly one of the oldest in Europe. The Fleet would have flowed alongside it.

  A smartly dressed old man with a walking stick appears in the middle of the graveyard. He watches me as I stare at the various parts of the cemetery. I go into the church, where I expect to see something ancient and Gnostic, but St Pancras church feels like village England personified. Smiling, well-groomed middle-aged women, all vicars’ wives – are in the entrance to the church, selling cakes, rolls, buns and other wholesome goodies. I feel a tightness in my chest. The blood isn’t reaching my brain properly, I panic as they all smile at me and swivel round to look at the pamphlets. I pick up one that seems to be about the church – ‘History of St Pancras’ – and hand over two quid. It turns out to be all about the church’s patron saint. Little Pancras. ‘You like saints do you sir? We like people who like saints.’ I escape, gasping for air. Apparently the church was attacked by Satanists in 1985 and was closed to the general public until recently. Maybe they’d met the vicars’ wives. Might it have been dyslexic satirists?

  The old man suddenly reappears next to me and starts to talk in a posh Irish accent about the gardens, which were derelict and have been done up recently. He’s the sort of fellow who might accompany you on a Bloomsday breakfast (‘More gizzard there? Splendid!’) and be an expert in the life and works of St John Gogarty. Then he disappears. Seconds later he appears again in another bit of the churchyard, under the unattractive clock tower that looks as though it was stuck on by some crazed Victorian enthusiast. Behind the church is the Hardy tree, a twisted tree surrounded by piled-up gravestones. When part of the churchyard was dug up to build the railway line in 1866 Hardy, who trained as a surveyor, helped in the construction of the line and the piling up of the many stones against this tree. The Midland railway destroyed much of this area when St Pancras Station was built in the mid-nineteenth century. Now that initial digging and smashing up work has begun for the Channel Tunnel terminal it almost feels like being back in the high-Victorian era.

  Ah fookin ’ell. I need a slash. And this seems to be happening more and more frequently. Socio-Urinary Historians would say that my obsession with the flow of water underneath London has triggered a physical reaction in me – I want to somehow free the rivers but am becoming plagued by the threat of bodily incontinence. And the lack of physical evidence of the rivers perhaps has led me at times to need to create my own – the rivers of piss flowing downhill. I search for a bog, but in the end walk on to King’s Cross and home.

  St Chad’s Well (Cooper’s, King’s Cross Station)
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br />   Next day I set out again but I’m not feeling so good. I haven’t been ill for ages, but my first explorations of the healing wells have left me with a foul cold. Sore throat. Thick head. I come out at King’s Cross feeling a bit pissed off with the Fleet.

  Prostitute-soaked drugsbust wasteland it may be, but I’ve always liked King’s Cross. Perhaps because, for me, it’s the gateway to another world – Lincolnshire and the North. In the highly artificial station pub, Cooper’s, squat blond blokes in stonewashed denim waiting for a Great North Eastern Railway train that’ll take them home, clutch pints to their chests and look out at the world through suspicious squinty eyes and tight-pursed mouths while droning on about Leeds United. Oh, just a minute, ha ha, that’s me. It’s my reflection in the barman’s red shiny nose!

  It’s a normal day in King’s Cross as I leave the bar and make my way to the site of the well. A drunk collapses near the phones and rolls over on his back like a dead beetle. Police pull a young black girl to the ground and handcuff her, while her mate shouts at them. At a King’s Cross bus-stop, traffic, hollow-faced girls in leggings stand around in groups craning their necks to look for buses, dead-eyed guys with stubble try to catch your attention, old blokes are smiling and staggering into doorways, people are constantly moving, not staying to contemplate the boarded-up shops, and severe dark grey Georgian streets just off the main drag that offer no comfort.

  The well is down a side street called St Chad’s Place. Where it stood is now the site of the Thameslink Station platform. But above, on the road, I see water spurting out of from a little crack in the pavement. That’s good enough for me. Back on Gray’s Inn Road, I go into Mole Jazz to look for something with a wells reference. But the nearest I can find is the Gordon Wellard Septet.