The Groundwater Diaries

by Tim Bradford

  Letter to the Royal Geographical Society, 1842, from Perambulations Along the Watercourses of Our Great Metropolis by C. F. Talgutt

  No, no, stop it. He does not exist.

  I finished the Guinness quickly and headed for Wood Green library.

  I love sitting down by the riverside,

  Watching the water go flowing by.

  Oh, golly gee, it is heaven to be

  Like a willow tree.

  ‘Sitting by the Riverside’, Ray Davies of the Kinks

  Music/Rivers critic says: In ‘Sitting by the Riverside’, Ray Davies of the Kinks is imagining what the Moselle would have looked like before it was buried. The willow tree in question is on Brook Road, at the bottom of the hill. The willow grows where there is water, sometimes when it cannot be seen. Ray Davies of the Kinks would like to be a diviner. The river is also a stream of ideas – Ray Davies of the Kinks can pick out the ideas as they float by.

  In the library I found copies of various maps: 1822 OS, 1894 OS, 1819 Greenwood, 1741 John Rocque, 1815 Edwardes. The Muswell Stream ran down the hill along the line of the present-day Albert Road.

  I ask for more information and am advised to go to the history archive at Hornsey Library, Crouch End. At the archive Isobel, a librarian, excitedly tells me of a local historian, David Harris, who knew all about the underground rivers of the area.

  ‘He would have been able to walk them with you and tell you all about them.’

  ‘Er, “would have been?”’

  Her face drops. ‘I’m afraid he died three weeks ago.”

  But she gives me some maps of the routes of the Muswell and Moselle.

  Pretty nurse: (takes drag of cigarette and blows the smoke in my face): So, big boy, tell me about the history of Muswell Hill.

  Me: In what is commonly known as the dark ages but I prefer to call the ‘Fuck Me, It’s the Saxons and the Vikings!’ years, the terrain of Muswell Hill seems to have deterred clearance and settlement so the woods and wildlife thrived and it eventually became a hunting park owned by the Bishop of London, spanning a huge area including what is now Highgate and Finchley.

  Much of the land became owned by nuns from Clerkenwell. They’d been given it by a scrofulus king who was cured by the waters of the Mus Well – the mossy well in the heart of the village. The nuns built a chapel near it, ‘bearing the name of our Ladie of Muswell’. The chapel disappeared in the Reformation, but the land remained with Clerkenwell parish until 1900, being known as ‘Clerkenwell Detached’. Until the early twentieth century Muswell Hill was still a remote hamlet, due to its location. It was dragged into the modern age by a gruesome murder which took place in the village in 1901. The papers ran pieces on this crime of passion and people would embark on murder sightseeing trips and stand outside the house to get a bit of that badman juju. Muswell Hill became a sensation and new houses started springing up all over the hill.2

  Pretty nurse: (looking sleepy): How interesting. Now, why don’t you go off on a walk and leave me in peace.

  I tried dowsing again, this time without the aid of druidic hallucinogens (i.e. Special Brew). I wanted to test whether the ability to ‘sense’ the presence of water was innate or came as part of a free gift from the big brewers. I got hold of a pamphlet called ‘Letter to Robin’ by an American called Walt Woods.3 You had to use a pendulum. Fortunately I had one and had used it mainly for Matters of High Level Importance such as football results and the lottery (without success). Unlike most of my stuff, it was still in pristine condition.

  Research on dowsers suggests that they use extra frequencies of brainwave such as theta and delta. They are more ‘aware’ but are also searching for ‘something’. I went out with my pendulum to find the Source.

  I’m in Hornsey High Street opposite Bikerama, a wonderland of toys for boys – Yamahas, Kawasakis and Hondas. Across the road is the Magic Flute Banqueting Hall and further down there’s the Great North Railway Tavern. That’s pretty much it in terms of excitement. C. F. Talgutt is already waiting for me in his walking clothes and standing beside a large wooden structure, like an ark.

  ‘What is this, Talgutt?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s a boat. We’re going to sail down the Moselle to the River Lea, collecting two of every species as we go, then have a fight with some locals and retire for dinner at a good inn.’

  I shake my head vigorously to get rid of this creation, and continue alone.

  There in front of me is old Hornsey Church, which is now just a tower, though in pretty good nick. I’ve got an old print that shows ‘Hornsey Church in the County of Middlesex’ surrounded by hills. There’s birdsong in the tree-covered graveyard and for a few moments I’m imagining Hornsey past, trying to read the gravestones. Most are from the eighteenth century, some possibly even older but illegible. The sound of planes up above mixes with the birdsong. It reminds me of the opening bars of the Orb’s ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’. The comforting urban sound of police sirens breaks the mood. I light up the skinny spliff I’ve knocked up from old chippings found at the bottom of drawers and fag packets and take a few drags. Then I get out my pendulum and start the ritual.

  ‘Is this Hornsey?’ I ask the pendulum.

  Yes, it replies.

  ‘Is there water here?’ I ask the pendulum.

  Yes, it replies.

  ‘What’s best, Kawasaki or Honda?’ I ask the pendulum

  Yes, it replies.

  ‘Am I wasting my time?” I ask the pendulum.

  Yes, it replies.

  ‘Which progrock band did Rick Wakeman play keyboards for?’ I ask the pendulum.

  Yes, it replies.

  There’s lots of standing water around. Some stones are half buried. I look for a dip in the land and scribble some sketches. People are wary of someone with a notebook and a couple stop and stare. The traffic noise calls me out to the road, where there are cafés, estate agents and an interesting little cluster of shops, all pretty down at heel. There are shops that sell bathroom fittings, always a sure sign that the source of a river is close by. People in the Bathroom Fittings Industry know about these things on an unconscious level. You can actually use them instead of dowsing rods. I once got offered a job on a well known Bathroom Fittings Industry publication (as well as bathrooms they also reviewed bedrooms and kitchens). I said I wanted to think about it for twenty-four hours and the publisher was so enraged that he gave the job to someone else. When I suggested to him on the phone that this was not the way to do things, he snarled, ‘The lad I have given the job to was made up. Made up, he was.’ So he cared about his appearance. Big deal. Anyway, I had the last laugh. I dossed about for three more months then went to the World Cup in Italy with my mates, blew lots of money and puked in the shower a lot.

  Laundrettes are always another good bet that there is an old river nearby, and in Hornsey there’s the Crest. This must be the place. I look for a big puddle and find it at the start of Nightingale Lane, near the Magic Flute, a big red idiosyncratic Victorian building. Then I find two puddles at the edge of a road called the Campsbourne. Is that another stream? A group of loud kids walks alongside me then follows me, shouting rather than talking. Past a Territorial Army Centre surrounded by barbed wire, with graffiti ‘FIFÖ’ and ‘Brez’.

  To the left are some more puddles on a little muddy lane. There’s some meat-and-potato drumming coming out of a council house window – could be Ray Davies of the Kinks’ Konk studios, laying down tracks for Ray Davies of the Kinks’ new album, except I think they’re a couple of hundred yards further east on Tottenham Lane. These thudding dreams of stardom make me feel jaded and melancholy. The Nightingale is a bright red-painted Victorian local. Turning a corner there are lots of modern flats and a weeping willow next to the road. I can imagine the river flowing beneath it. I follow the lie of the land along Pembroke Road, crossing over Campsbourne and then Myddelton, onto Moselle Close, where there’s water all over the road, flowing out from a big car wash place. It looks like a dead en
d, just a couple of people chatting, and I’m just about to turn back when one of them walks off down an alleyway with her two kids so I follow because this is the exact line of the river according to David Harris’s map.

  Over the other side of the fence are great mounds of mud and large pools of water. Some kind of works at the reservoirs connected to the New River – there’s still an old waterworks building on the main road. A bloke in a luminous yellow jacket and yellow hard hat is on a walkie talkie, watching me. I look over the river and there is a small stretch of water. It can’t be the New River because that lies abut 50 yards further west – is this a section of the Moselle, being kept prisoner? I look at him then take a photo over the fence. He talks into his walkie talkie again and I walk quickly away, thinking is there some kind of organization which is keeping these rivers a secret from the general population?

  The 1741 Rocque map shows a pond at the Moselle’s source – this is now a used car depot, with bashed-up Ford Fiestas, East German models and others. Then I cross over a dead straight stretch of the New River, only a short distance to the north-west from where I started my New River walk last year. There are real country views here (although through a wire fence), with Alexandra Palace in the background, and water birds’ piercing cries. The wind feels different, more biting. Then down into an old dank tunnel under the railway – dripping water, old pipes, flaking Victorian bricks, old-style eighties graffiti that should have a Grandmaster Flash backing track – except for ‘To Emma and Bradley I love you, love Granddad 15/11/99’, which I feel defies categorization.

  Out the other side to a light industrial area, where a big old rustred gas holder dominates the skyline. When the path ends, the first named street I get to is Brook Road, which still has a rural feel to it, small and forgotten in the shadow of Wood Green’s famous Shopping City, itself directly above the course of the Moselle.

  Inside Shopping City I first have to squelch through a smelly food market hall full of music, squashy food underfoot like a covered street market. The main area is like a space station – wide avenues and purple lights. The Shopping City logo shows the name on a pool-like daub of blue, a reference perhaps to the river running underneath.

  ‘Is this the ultimate shopping experience?’ I ask the pendulum.

  No, it replies.

  ‘Do the phones here work?’ I ask the pendulum.

  No, it replies.

  ‘Did this complex win design awards?’ I ask the pendulum.

  No, it replies.

  Outside is pandemonium. Wood Green is on the move, going upwards, lots of money around, bustling, people packed down with shopping bags. A walkway crosses the high street. I imagine it as a conduit carrying the Moselle, like my dream. I am drawn towards a big pool of water near bus stops. The centre is a mad mix of styles, pick’n’mix, glistening Hollywood cinemas, thirties blocks, sixties modernist flats, Victorian houses and eighties and nineties shopping arcades. Likewise the people, a total heady London mix.

  I cross the road then traverse Gladstone Avenue into the dead straight Moselle Avenue, with trees and Arts-and-Crafts-style small terraced cottages, which pretty much follows the course of the stream for half a mile. The light is different here, brighter, silver even, the land lower lying. It feels like a flood plain and would once have been wide open farmland. There’s a great old sign – ‘Jumping strictly prohibited’. A Spurs celebration poster hangs limply in a window, blue from age like a barbershop photo – possibly the 1991 FA Cup-winning team or even older. It must be tough being a Spurs fan. I see a wooden drumstick lying on the pavement, the second ‘rhythm section’ reference on this walk, then turn onto Lordship Lane, which at this point follows the curve of the Moselle’s course. Offies, video shops, mini markets, laundrettes, the staple no-frills survival fare of any urban settlement in England.

  Next, I am in Lordship Park. In the distance, at the other side of the park, is the Broadwater Farm estate, looking like a modernist cathedral, scene of the 1985 riots. On old maps there is a Broadwater Farm in the middle of open land, and they suggest that the river was quite wide here. At last the Moselle makes an appearance, but it’s a thin channel running hurriedly across the park as though trying to hide. Huge pollarded trees run alongside the bank, majestic like stone megaliths – some trunks lie on the ground nearby, victims of storms. They must be 150 to 200 years old, remnants of what would have once been a wild rural setting. The Recreation Ground is a kite-flying park, windswept and open like an old common. A few people jog around the perimeter path. Graffiti on the bridge reads – ‘E-Dogg sucks Cyc-0’.

  Although it’s great to see a ‘live’ river round here, I’m a bit disappointed by the Moselle. Just a skinny channel coming out of a concrete pipe. There seems to be more water in the standing pools that chain around nearby, possibly from other channels and rivulets flowing into the valley. There’s a small greedy pond with what must be the Moselle’s water and more smashed-up trunks of giant elms. The futuristic brightly coloured Broadwater Farm estate seems a different world – tranquil, kids playing outside as the sun goes down, people coming in from work – it all seems vaguely South American. Yet the riots in 1985 are still lodged in my cultural memory banks. I walk around the estate then turn left off Adams Road and head due north through a thirties estate of small cottages. Groups of women and men are walking around with blue, white and yellow Spurs scarves.

  Another estate in an olde Englishe style has smart cars parked, people talking football. ‘Should have played long ball in the semi.’ ‘We were better off under Graham.’ On Flexmere Road now and I can feel the gentle contours on my ankles and Achilles tendons, and imagine the Moselle flowing around bends.

  In the distance I can now see the White Hart Lane stands gleaming orange in the evening sun, tempting me. It’s getting late. I walk alongside the closed-up cemetery then down a path and up to old White Hart Lane, still a rural lane at the start of the twentieth century, where the river would have come out between there and Moselle Place. A mate has given me his ticket. Spurs are playing Bradford so he thought I’d like to go. Bradford are already relegated at this late stage of the season so they’ve nothing to lose. In the bogs I ask the pendulum if it’ll go for a home win. Yes, it replies. But Spurs are rubbish and only kept in the game by good goalkeeping and the enthusiastic shouts of the fat kid in front of me: ‘Come on yids!’ he squeals. And all the time the medieval-sounding boom of a single drum boom boom boom ‘YIDS!!!’ shouts the crowd, boom boom boom ‘YIDS!!!’ drum drum drum ‘Yids!’ drum drum drum ‘Yids!’ like some kind of ancient battle cry. Studies have shown that the White Hart Lane crowd has the highest proportion of International Marxist Leninists in the UK.

  Afterwards I leave the crowds and walk down Southend Green looking for Carbuncle Alley. It’s black air. There are people out in there in the dark somewhere, I can hear voices, but I can’t see anyone. Someone says ‘injecting it like this’. I head towards the sound of the Lea rushing by in the distance and before it the redirected Pymme’s Brook coming down from Edmonton. But it’s the sound of traffic. After crossing the railway line, at a fastish jog pace now, I find myself in Tottenham Marshes. The Moselle has gone – I can feel it, I’m cold and tired and hungry. I tell myself I’ll come back another day but I know I never will. I quickly head back to Tottenham High Road and get a bus back. From the top deck, North London seems like one big housing estate, street after street the same as developers sucked up the rural land and covered it in brick before anyone had a chance to complain. But who would have complained?

  Well I’m leaving town and I won’t be ’round

  ’Til I reach my destination, tell the world I’m underground.

  ‘Let Me Be’, Dave Davies of the Kinks

  Music/Rivers critic says: Ray Davies of the Kinks’ brother, Dave Davies (also of the Kinks) decides that he is giving up music and will from now on devote himself to the study of underground rivers. But his search is not just for water, it is for meaning and the
understanding of the interdependent one-ness of the universe. The song’s hint at the Beatles’ ‘Let it Be’. And an anagram of ‘Let Me Be’ is ‘Beetle M’ – could this be referring to the so-called death of Paul McCartney in the late sixties? Maybe Dave is about to fake his own death. Conversely, it could also be Belt Meet (Beltane Meeting?) – maybe Dave is a druid and is going to live in a cave.

  London Stories 6: Catching Muggers, Starsky-and-Hutch Style

  * * *

  I had just finished a six-mile run around north London – up to Turnpike Lane then through Crouch End and got lost, then along Hornsey Lane to Archway – and was feeling pretty washed out. I was in training for running for the bus because I’d missed a couple recently. The 141 bus usually came down Green Lanes just as I was coming out onto it from my street, 150 yards from the nearest stop, and I’d have to sprint. Sometimes I have to run on to the next bus stop to catch it. The drivers do it on purpose grinning maniacally all the while. I’ve seen them do it to pensioners in heavy rain.

  ‘Nuffink to do wiv me, mate,’ they say with a sneer if you rant and rave.

  Anyway, I had just slowed to a walk when, at the bottom of the Archway Road, as I hit the roundabout, I heard a woman shouting at someone. Naturally, I presumed it was either a high-spirited female piss-artist just staggering out of the Archway Tavern or a lovers’ tiff. However, she was pointing at something as she was shouting, so I tracked her gaze and noticed, amidst the uninterested people going about their business, a man running away to the north in the direction of the Archway Road subways. I crossed the road to check she was all right but she just screamed at me – in a heavily pissed-off-Japanese accent reminiscent of Yoko Ono telling John the Beatles were shit and he should start doing thrashy dirges with her on backing vocals. She shouted something along the lines of ‘Never mind me, you fuckwit, catch the evil villain.’