by Tim Bradford
Scene: I’m now walking up the famous Lavender Hill. There used to be lavender fields around these parts apparently, all the way down to the marshes next to the Thames.
(I squint and look up the hill, stroking my chin, as if trying to imagine that ridiculously rural image.)
Voiceover: Sid James starred in the Ealing film, The Lavender Hill Mob, along with Alec Guinness, Stanley Holloway and Alfie Bass. Mmm – Bass and Guinness. Am I the first scholar to notice that two of the leading actors were from big brewing families? Cheeky late-forties cockney characters churned out Eiffel Tower paperweights as a way of transporting stolen gold. They all talked in that strangulated BBC-London posh-prole accent that sounds layk theu speakah ‘as a moath fuill ov ’orseradesh’. Released in 1951, The Lavender Hill Mob was one of the last Ealing Comedies. Now it – Lavender Hill – is just another smart south London address.
Scene: In the main library I mumble to a man behind a desk about underground river…Falcon pub…south London…magic glasses. This librarian looks like a bombed-out rock star with seventies hair, teeth going, sunken eyes and sallow cheeks.
Whispered Voiceover: It could be Nick Kent, the NME journalist. Or is he dead? Maybe in Wandsworth they have a Job for Life scheme for old seventies superstars – Led Zep processing council tax claims, Steve Harley a traffic warden, the drummer and bassist of the Glitter Band in the parking permit section. It’s a nice idea. Well done, Wandsworth.
(Give double thumbs up to camera. ‘Nick’ looks at me and smiles like Nosferatu (close-up of fangs), then points me in the direction of the local history library upstairs.
The Historian looks like a hippyish Woody Allen. He’s a non-stop talker.)
Me: Hi, I’m …
The Historian: I don’t know, I’ve been trying to find some information for this gentleman about the numbering of roads and how they changed them some time in the mid twentieth century so the house numbers aren’t the same and there’s no way of finding out which was which.
(He carries on for several minutes in the same vein, thinking I’d be interested, while I’m trying to get a word in and also nodding and going ‘uhuh’ to be polite. I suppose I have a benign ‘Hmm that’s interesting’ neutral look with a slight smile which makes people think ‘This guy is really here for me’ when actually my brain has disengaged from reality and I’m cataloguing my 1980–81 7-inch singles in alphabetical order of record company. Finally he stops talking (actually, he takes a breath).
Me: Hi, I’m looking for information on Falcon Brook.
The Historian: It’s named after a pub called the Falcon.
Me: (smiling)Uh-huh.
(He rummages around in filing cabinets for a while and finds some folders with material. Camera pans round library to a trendy vicar studying a microfiche. He smiles weakly when he sees the camera. A skinny guy in his sixties who looks like the actor William H. Macey is having problems with another of the microfiches. The librarian rushes across and presses a couple of buttons and the machine speeds up and completely unravels. He gets flustered. The film spews out all over the floor.)
Voiceover: (while I sit flicking through folders with hand on chin) Records seem to suggest that the Falcon pub goes back to the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries in a previous form (I flick through more pages). The river wasn’t called Falcon Brook until the seventeenth century (turn more pages). Before that it had been called Hidaburna/Hidebourne (turn over another page). The St John family who were the lords of the manor in the area had a falcon rising on their crest and the pub at Clapham Junction is named after them. The big question is this: When did people named St John start being called ‘Sinjun’? The Knights of St John were sort of descendants of the Templars and took over their land and property after the Templars were outlawed. Was it a joke about them possibly being Templars – i.e. put to death, a singed one – singe ‘un. What do you reckon? (Flicking through pages really fast now. Comes to end of folder and throws it over shoulder. The trendy vicar walks over.)
Trendy vicar: Actually, Hidaburna – possibly of Celtic origin – is mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles relating to 693. Land ‘by the Hidaburna in Surrey’ was granted to Eorcenwald of Barking by Cædwalla, King of Wessex, and confirmed by Æthelred, King of Mercia. You know, the blond lad. It wasn’t called Falcon Brook until the seventeenth century.
Voiceover: Thanks, vicar.
Scene: I walk down Falcon Road past the Meyrick Arms, a low-slung Victorian pub, under the railway bridge, then left.
Whispered David Attenboroughesque voiceover: This is a very different Battersea. Sixties tower blocks. Pubs boarded up. Knackered-looking, tattooed girls with fags hanging out the side of their gobs.
Voiceover: In the shadow of the run-down tower blocks, it’s a happy, tight-knit community
Scene: In York Gardens a fat blonde woman going pink in the sun is at once haranguing her kids and swearing at someone at a distant flat window. Languorous, leggy girls lounge around on grass and on benches, screeching with laughter as the boys get all jumpy when their three fighting dogs start attacking each other. They try kicking them in the head but this doesn’t work – it just makes the dogs more frenzied.
Scene: walking down to the pedestrian crossing over the busy York Way, past old boarded-up warehouse buildings on the river. There are hundreds of new flats all around.
Shouted to camera over traffic noise: Some flats are so new they haven’t been opened yet. But they’ve been built over part of the Battersea Creek, the final stretch of the Falcon Brook. It’s weird to think that since I first thought of this project even more bits of the rivers have disappeared. New developments seem to have accelerated in the last four years. Lots of new flats with no amenities. Where’s the nearest shop round here? Or the nearest pub?
(Wail of police sirens. Then a helicopter takes off and drowns everything out. I’m still talking but you can’t hear anything I’m saying.)
Scene: Camera jumps into helicopter and as it takes off pans across river to Battersea Power Station.
Voiceover: It looks like an upside-down early-seventies pool table in the back room of a seedy provincial high street boozer. Or the exhaust pipes of the planet.
Cut to: Computer graphic of Battersea Power Station turning into pool table, then exhaust pipes.
Cut to: Me walking back to the station. Me on the train staring out of the window. Me walking home. Putting key in door.
Cut to: Me sitting at desk with old maps. Wearing glasses. I look up.
Talking to camera: There was something about The Lavender Hill Mob that was bothering me. When I got home I decided to mark on a map of London where the Guinness brewery and the old Bass-Charrington Anchor brewery were located – Park Royal and Mile End. Then I marked in Holloway (for Stanley) and St James (for Sid). The surnames of the four main actors in the film. When I drew a line through them it was the same formation as the moles on my left arm. Then I drew lines through each point to make a near perfect pyramid. Like the triangle designs on the houses in Hendrick Avenue . And right in the centre of the pyramid, the site of the all-seeing eye, was Old St Pancras Church. What message were the makers of The Lavender Hill Mob trying to pass on? And why did it have to be done in such secrecy that it would take exactly fifty years for it to be deciphered?
Scene: I show my wife the map, and explain the theory. But for some reason the second time it was Holts, the Doctor Martens shoe shop in Camden Town, that was now at the epicentre of the pyramid. She nods and looks at me with concern.
18. Doing the Lambeth Walk
• The Neckinger – Lambeth to St Saviours Dock Rotherhithe Mill Stream – Southwark Park to Cherry Garden Pier
Beckett’s brain – pissedory studies – War, religion, Dickens – history quiz – rural London – Captain Bligh – Imperial War Museum – Gentlemen of the Tin – Elephant and Castle – David Copperfield – Honest John and Punch – James Buckingham Bevington – Bill Sikes – St Saviours Dock – Cardboard City – ocean
pinks – Cherry Garden Pier
What does the word ‘history’ conjure up? To me, it’s many things: eleven-year-old boys drawing pictures of Thomas à Becket’s brain squirting out over the floor of Canterbury Cathedral; the heavy-eyed feeling you get when reading about Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden’s military triumphs in the seventeenth century; quoting Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down at discos to impress women; the smell of fusty old books in libraries, putting on National Health spectacles that make you look clever (then taking them off again – clever stupid clever stupid); the lovable pomposity of the profound musical accompaniment to TV history programmes; the vapour trail of strong lager as you commit your mind to dangerous psychic experiments; the cold steel of bent coat hangers; the splash of standing water as you trudge around a park; the sogginess of an A to Z that’s spent too long in the rain, finding where you live on an old map of London and discovering it’s just a field and needing a shit because of the sheer mind-blowing excitement of it.
I fucking love history. In fact, I love history so much that I’m thinking of inventing my own branch of it – pissedory. It’s like history, except that you find hard evidence by researching, using alcohol and coat hangers as special divining tools. I know I’ve been down this street before, but I’m only beginning to see my techniques for what they are – a revolution in the way we write about our history and the environment.
Some of the buried river routes are too long to do in a day if you’re sauntering and waving to passers-by, rather than marching like a crazed early-period-Dr-Who-style robot in 8th Army shorts and Hawaiian shirt, while talking into a Dictaphone and (sometimes) clutching a can of Tennent’s Super. But rivers like the Neckinger and the Mill Stream are ripe for inclusion into a tourist trail of some kind, due to their brevity. The Neckinger rises near the Imperial War Museum, packed with interesting uniforms and photos of angry-faced blokes with ’taches and eyes too close together, and flows north-east to the Thames at St Saviours Dock. Just before it hits the Thames the Neckinger splits into two branches, which surround Jacob’s Island. The river also passes the site of Bermondsey Abbey as well as areas that were heavily bombed in World War Two. War, religion and Dickens. An unbeatable combination.
There can’t be many old Londoners left who remember the war, apart from my next-door neighbour. And it seems that many kids these days – due to the bending of the truth in films, TV, comics and travel books like this – get confused about the dates of big battles. I was under the impression that the National Curriculum was supposed to have a dates-of-battles approach to history so kids wouldn’t always be going ‘Hmm, but what’s the source?’ when confronted by a so-called history ‘fact’.
1. The Battle of Hastings: Douglas Bader and the Romans took on Napoleon in a big biplane battle over the south coast. Can you remember what Samuel Pepys said about the English King, Winston Churchill I, in his diaries?
2. The Battle of Agincourt: Margaret Thatcher and the Normans, led by Norman Tebbit and the police, fought the miners, resulting in the Great Fire of London. How high is the Tebbit Memorial at Monument?
3. The Battle of Waterloo: A load of Argentinian solders arrive on the Eurostar and try to ‘take’ the Royal Festival Hall and the South Bank Centre. Field Marshall Montgomery wins a famous battle. What would he have thought of much of modern art?
4. The Battle of Britain: King Harold invading with the Mongol hordes but was repelled by an army led by Margaret Thatcher, with Prince Andrew in a helicopter. Do you know under which platform at King’s Cross Mrs Thatcher is buried?
5. The Battle of Creçy: Edward III, who had a manor house in Bermondsey, won the Battle of Creçy with a band of knights dressed as women. The French were too busy trying to get off with them to fight. In celebration, the Order of the Garter was founded. How often do you think medieval knights washed their hair?
Think of old London before the streams were buried and it’s easy to conjure up an idyllic picture. I tend to transpose my own countryside memories onto it. Gentle babbling brooks, sticklebacks, ducks and water voles, rolling landscape, quiet meandering lanes, birdsong, butterflies, sheep in water meadows, walking lazily through cornfields, farmers shouting at you for treading on their crops, mad pissed-up bikers wanting to smash your face in on a Saturday night, boredom on a Saturday afternoon, older people telling you they should kick the wogs out … it’s probably an accurate reflection of pre-industrial London. It’s relatively easy to make the leap from rural idyll to the present day, but we tend not to dwell on the early industrial era of grinding poverty and public health crises.
The area around the Neckinger in south London was by all accounts particularly hellish. Dickens described it, in Oliver Twist, as ‘The filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are hidden in London … Crazy wooden galleries, with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out … rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter.’
I come out of Lambeth North station and cross over onto the busy Kennington Road and Georgian Lambeth Road. No. 100 was inhabited by William Bligh, commander of the Bounty. He had a lisp and was highly jealous of his first mate Fletcher Christian, whose photos bear a passing resemblance to Marlon Brando. This area was originally marshland, and on this hot summer day the air is sticky.
Two 15-inch naval guns stand in front of the museum. These are the guns that will defend Britain if we’re ever under attack. Actually they’re pointing north so they’ll be stopping incursions from north London – cabbies, Yorkshiremen and the like – with their ability to fire two shells an hour. They’re from First World War dreadnoughts, the huge battleships which symbolised Britain’s position as the leading naval power in the world that is, of course, before the advent of the submarine and the aircraft carrier made big guns obsolete.
£6.50 to get in. Whoah! I love war as much as the next guy, but I’m not that flush. I decide that if I can’t get my fix of Weaponry Through the Ages, I’ll head instead to the Big Softy ice cream van in the museum garden and have a largish pacifist 99 cornet for £1.10. A few moments later I stand licking it in the sun and stare dumbfounded at the Bell, a simple memorial to commemorate the 27,000,000 Soviet citizens who lost their lives in World War II.
A hippy-looking dude in specs is sat under a little tree staring at the museum, giving it the peace vibe: ‘End all wars, man. Stop war. War is bad. War is stupid and people are stupid.’
There are three puddles at the entrance where the river source is – yet it’s been dry in London for several weeks. This must be the holy well, and as if to confirm it, I look up and see that the puddles are guarded by four mythical figures, the Gentlemen of the Tin – two Scotsmen, one tall and dark-haired in his twenties, the other a pinched and leathery forty year old (the teacher with his trainees), a skinny West Indian guy and a Comedy French Drunkard (don’t see many of those). They ask if they can help me.
Me: I’m looking for the source of a river. The Neckinger.
They look at me then each other and take swigs from their tinnies, with lots of dunno and do you know?, with Gallic shrugs and je ne sais pas from the Comedy French Drunkard.
Old Scotty: Ah, yeah, a river. Is it?
Comedy French Drunkard: ’Ere?
Me: Yeah, it starts around here somewhere and goes down that road there, Brook Drive.
(There’s a pause.)
Young Scotty: (pointing) There’s Brook Drive.
Me: Er, thanks.
Young Scotty: (beaming) No problem.
I wave goodbye. They all sit back down again and eye up their boffin affectionately, pat him on the shoulders, well done mate, and his face gets even redder, with that unbeatable combination of excess alcohol and embarrassment. As I turn into Brook Drive and look back, to see them still waving and giving me the thumbs up, I wonder if the puddles of ‘water’ at this gate might not be a
holy spring but … ‘something else’. The swampy stickiness seems to be increasing.
Elephant and Castle seems shagged out – peeling, mad sixties architecture more than thirty years past its prime with a rubbish subway system. On Heygate Street I can’t get down to street level, as there’s no pavement, so end up on a walkway next to a twelve-storey oatmeal tower block nightmare. It’s as if it’s designed to keep people cooped up in their estates. I feel a buzz as I head into the estate, then go onto a long walkway covered with peeling and cracked dark green paint. I look up and see I’m being watched by three hard-looking suspicious faces, who continue to eye me up. Not in a good way.
I get back to the road and pass a massive block of flats called the Crossway. Then a little park called David Copperfield’s Garden with a little statue and a plaque – ‘to connect this spot with the flight of David Copperfield to his aunt in Dover. This tablet has been placed by the Dickens fellowship’.
A nearby phone box has not so much been vandalized as turned into a work of art – everything ripped out of it and completely covered in multicoloured graffiti. Cockney girls are standing outside a shop, all drinking Coke and trying to chat up a window cleaner. A huge survivalist mohawk haircut bloke with big tattooed arms and army fatigues lurches out of a side street. Why wear green camouflage in a city? Surely ‘brick’ coloured clothing would work better? He’s carrying what looks like a mortar on his shoulder (though could be a rolled up John Rocque map).