The Groundwater Diaries
Page 28
A group of actors called Friends of the Rose Theatre Trust are still committed to total excavation and preservation of the site. There’s a video presentation narrated by Sir Ian McKellen (whose face has healed nicely after his catfights with the builders), who describes the theatre’s history, its rediscovery and how to lie in front of a bulldozer. Eventually, of course, the whole South Bank area will be turned into a Will Shakespeare theme park – giant plastic Romeo and Juliets, a lush indoor Midsummer Night’s Dream garden, and a 3D hologram of the bard (like you get on cheque cards) beamed up onto the clouds above London.
1 http://www.britannia.com/history/therose.html
AUTUMN
19. Bridge Over the River Peck
• The Peck – One Tree Hill to South Bermondsey and South Dock, Rotherhithe (via Earl’s Sluice)
One Tree Hill – Peckham Rye Park – mundane visions – river sighting – the pool room – short history of Peckham – slipper baths
I press on. My river obsession is forcing me to make yet more marks in my A to Z. Apart from the later stretches of Hackney Brook, most of the river routes I’ve walked so far have been in reasonably pleasant neighbourhoods, thus highlighting my birds’n’flowers positive country boy view of London. The next journey would be to a part of the city I had never been to before – Peckham, the Old Kent Road, South Bermondsey and Rotherhithe, the kind of areas that don’t appear in London’s tourist literature. From what I can make out from various maps and sources, there was a little river called the Peck which was a tributary of a larger stream called the Earl’s Sluice. The two channels met around South Bermondsey and flowed on to the Thames near to what is now South Dock.
So now I’m at Honor Oak Park station in south London, looking for the source of the Peck near One Tree Hill, which is ‘famous’ because Queen Elizabeth the First (always her, isn’t it?) took picnics under a tree here while en route from Hampton Court to one of her other big houses. Sadly, the original tree is long gone, probably cut down and chopped up and sold by Good Queen Bess fetishists at the start of the seventeenth century.
There is a song called ‘One Tree Hill’ on U2’s Joshua Tree album, which I’ve never heard. I don’t want to have to shell out copyright money on actual U2 lyrics – that would be a waste – so I’ll speculate how it goes.
(Searing guitar. Gospel-type power chords.)
On One Tree Hill
The sun never goes down
Oooooohhhhhhhh
Aaaahh
On One Tree Hill
You’re closer to your God
Oooooohhhhh
Aaaaaahhhhhhh
On One Treeeeeeee Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiill
On One Treeeeeeee Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiill
On One Treeeeeeee Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiill
On One Treeeeeeee Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiill
I’m right, aren’t I?
I go through a Victorian iron gate and green railings and climb some old steps into an old and overgrown park. At the top of the hill is a little graffiti-sprayed bandstand area, suggesting that, before telephones were invented, people used to communicate using brass-band music. There is also a beacon which was used during Napoleonic times to warn of invasion. The source of the Peck is slightly to the east, near the cemetery, and it flows due north towards the beauteous marshes of South Bermondsey.
At Peckham Rye Park, a sign says: ‘The playing of Golf or golfing practices is prohibited in this park open space.’ These are my kind of people. Tough on golf and tough on the causes of golf. In the park I walk through a meadow, in the direction of a bloke on his own on a bench who is staring at the clouds. ‘Where is the river?’ I ask him, but he just smiles and shrugs. There’s a long grass set-aside experiment going on to find out how a true wild-flower meadow might look. The area is divided by mowing paths, with a different method of improvement applied in each section. (One has been left as long grass, one has high-quality marijuana guarded by hippies.) I walk down in the dip all the way to the end of the common. A plane flies overhead. An old bloke with his dog watches me.
And then onto Peckham Rye Common, which is more like a normal urban park with football pitches. This was where the eight-year-old William Blake saw a vision of a cloud of angels in an oak tree – ‘a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars’. Though it might have been a crowd of OAPs at the Angel. When I was a kid I used to have some cute visions myself.
Vision 1: I’d close my eyes and see images of a laughing skull and faces all over my bedroom watching me. I had to have sleeping pills for a while. Some suggested nervous exhaustion, others thought it might be glandular fever. I have a feeling it was a combination of owning a horror movie annual, along with the pressure of playing third baritone in our local brass band. The laughing skull was the Ultra-Competitive Second Baritone. The faces were the other band members. I’d like to say we did our own arrangements of William Blake poems. But all I can remember is ‘Swinging Safari’, the ‘James Bond Theme’, ‘Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree’ and ‘Save All Your Kisses for Me’.
And the thing about playing third baritone is (and I’m pretty sure a few third baritone or third trumpet players are reading this, leaping out of their chairs and thinking, ‘At last, someone has managed to articulate my pain.’) that you only play a couple of notes. OK, let’s use as an example the melody of the James Bond Theme – we all know how it goes:
Barr ba beh beeerr ba bahhh bai, beeaa bahh ba buaaa borr baaa bawwwww
Now the third baritone part would go like this:
Barr barr barr barr barr barr barrrrr. Barr barr barr barr barrr barr barrrr.
All the same fucking note. Of course, when you put it all together, along with the fancypants second baritone, whatever shit those guys play and the melody of the first baritone, with the cornets playing the real tune, it sounds quite good. But when you practise on your own it sounds, well, stupid.
Vision 2: A few years later, just after my grandad died, I used to feel him sitting on my shoulder sometimes, giving me advice about art and telling me stuff abut the Iran-Iraq war, while listening to A Certain Ratio. Me not him. He preferred Cabaret Voltaire.
I follow the dip at the end of Peckham Rye Common and go into East Dulwich Road. There are some strange-looking toilets, left-overs from the futuristic seventies, space-age push-button types. It could be a time machine – have a dump and come out in a different dimension. Or, better still, you have a crap and the crap shoots down a wormhole to Planet Waste on the other side of the universe. It’s called Utilizing Black Hole Technology. On the left is Jack Dent insurance agent specializing in car insurance (Get it? – Jack Dent ha ha ha ha h ah a h ah ha ah ha h ah ah ah ahah – the insurance industry has its fair share of japesters to be sure.) The mustard and dark green Rye Hotel on the other side has seen better days. There’s a bloke outside selling cheap perfumes and sunglasses. At the end is a triangular patch of green where an old woman with specs is sitting down having a spliff. Go along Peckham Rye, with its wafting strong smell of fish and chips, jewellers and big black guys laughing and shouting at each other even though they’re standing right next to each other. It’s a main street that probably reached its peak 100 years ago.
Then off into the back streets, where a chubby blond lad is being accosted by two lads of similar age. He’s in a maroon school uniform, they’re in baseball caps and flying jackets. He’s trying to convince them of something he didn’t do but they don’t believe him. ‘I didn’t do it,’ continues the kid as they jab fingers and ‘explain’ stuff to him some twins come down the road looking hard. One of the twins says, ‘Oh no, look, here’s another gang!’
‘Looks like we’ll have to have another fight,’ they sigh, resignedly.
The river flowed down the hill here, and Kirkwood Road follows its course almost exactly. A train rattles over the bridge, some smart graffiti says ‘cash’, perhaps referring to Bill Cash, the ri
ght-wing Tory MP. Perhaps not. ‘Deadards’ says another. Then the road just seems to stop at a little park that’s not on the A to Z. There are boulders at the side of the gravel path and OH MY GOD, HERE’S THE RIVER. THE RIVER! Pause for breath as I realize I might be overreacting somewhat. But when you’ve spent countless days wandering around trying to imagine what the river looked like, it comes as a pleasant surprise when one just suddenly … appears. It’s actually dried up, but there are reeds in the river bed, and at the end of the park is a pond half dried up and full of water lilies. Tiny. Little. Lilies. Ahhh, look at the little water lilies. There are wooden poles all around and birds are drinking in it. It’s a pleasant surprise. I’m aware that I have the same expression that my daughter has when she sees a fair or a dog – a massive smile at the sudden and unexpected beauty of the universe, and I’m pointing. And running around on the spot. There’s also a little bridge, a bridge over the River Peck. Overlooking it are redbrick flats with balconies, music blaring out and babies crying inside. What an ace place to live!
I keep going along the so-called Kirkwood Road. I go through a gate at the end, past a kid playing football against the wall and walk down an alleyway through a doorway and into a snooker room. A snooker room? Where’s the ‘street’ gone? It appears to be part of a newish block of flats. A group of lads, who are playing pool, all stop and stare at me. I can’t see another door out.
‘There’s no other way through?’ I say, mostly to myself, then quickly say sorry, smile and walk back out, past the kid playing football, who watches me out of the corner of his eye as I try to have that ‘I’m Doing This on Purpose’ air about me. The road has disappeared, they’ve just built over it. I guess the Oxbridge types who do the A to Z never come down here – they just presume it’s still the same.
A Short History of Peckham
1086 Appears in Domesday Book as Pecheha 1087–1743. Nothing much happens. Mostly meadowland. People fish in the Peck. Catch butterflies. Die of plague.
1744 Stagecoach service runs to the City.
1767 William Blake visits Peckham Rye. Drinks extra-strong ale, has vision.
1823 River Peck culverted.
1865 Peckham Rye gets its railway station.
1889 Peckham becomes part of City of London (previously it was Surrey).
1962 Gregory Peck wins Oscar for his role in To Kill a Mockingbird.
1976 1 have a history teacher called Mr (S)peck.
1986 Only Fools and Horses set in Peckham.
2000 Snazzy new Peckham Library opened.
I double back a bit and eventually reach Asylum Road, which is very quiet, too quiet in fact, though it could be I’m letting the street’s name get to me – if it was called Lovely Avenue or Cuddles Close perhaps I’d feel differently. Tower blocks loom in the distance, there’s an old Victorian school with boys’ and girls’ entrances. A woman, arms dangling, is being pulled along by a huge dog. A St George’s cross is hanging outside a pub. A pub full of patriots.
Me: I say, fellows, how would you feel if they replaced ‘God Save the Queen’ with William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’?
Patriotic pub-goers: Forward-thinking idea, that. After all, ‘God Save the Queen’ is the UK anthem. England does indeed require one all of its own.
Eventually I take a right down Gervase Street. Three tower blocks loom in front, two white, one yellow – suddenly the landscape changes from Victorian to mid- to late-twentieth century as I approach the Old Kent Road. This was the last section of the river to be covered over in the 1830s.
The Peck joins the Earl’s Sluice in Bermondsey, but the Sluice would have crossed the Old Kent Road about a mile north-east near the Becket Bar, where the stream would have met the road as a water-splash crossing. Supposedly a little waterway connected the Earl’s Sluice to the Neckinger up the Old Kent Road at Bricklayer’s Arms roundabout. Of course, no one really knows for certain; some even thought the Earl’s Sluice might be a tributary of the Neckinger.
The Becket Bar, a three-storey, battleship-grey pub with red stencilled letters, is the modern incarnation of an inn that has stood here for centuries. It’s not an Irish boozer tribute to playwright Samuel but a far older reference to the spot where pilgrims would stop for refreshment on their way to visit Thomas à Becket’s shrine at Canterbury. The pub here was first called the Thomas-a-Watering, then the Thomas a Becket, which has been a pub since 1787. It used to be a boxers’ hangout. It also had a music rehearsal room on the top floor where David Bowie and the Spiders of Mars used to practise. An extremely English mixture of boxing and pop music.
This was a major training ground for a lot of South London boxers. We were very impressed that Henry Cooper started his career here as well. The embryonic Spiders really put their sounds together up there, always expecting that Cooper would walk in at some point so we could get his autograph.1
I come to a river of rubbish flowing along the road – leaves, magazines crisp packets Mars Bar wrappers Ritz biscuit wrapper choc digestive wrappers McDonalds chip boxes dancing along in the wind, flipped up then down again. It’s a real-life Damien Hirst entitled Support Capitalism: Buy Some Rubbishy Shite, Today! Down the Old Kent Road then underneath a big flats complex, the Tustin Estate, with walkways across different flats. Out in the yard two groups of hard-looking lads stand around smoking, planning robberies and drinking Dr Pepper. Dr Pepper?! For God’s sake, lads, where’s your pride? Don’t succumb to the power of TV advertising.
The Peck apparently joined the Earl’s Sluice around Ablett Street. One bloke in a van waits here, totally calm and serene looking straight out as two African men shout at each other in the garage. I go back to the main road and see a Victorian building marked Council Slipper Baths. What strange people the Victorians were, who could lay waste to whole cultures, poison the air, wreck the landscape, repress women’s sexuality and yet invent something as cuddly sounding as slipper baths. Yeah, I know, it was probably yet more depraved craziness.
Up ahead I can see the valley of the Earl’s Sluice, which ran from further west at Denmark Hill. Tramping the grey tarmac has given me an idea for new pavements – synthetic organic tarmac that grows artificial grass. Millwall football stadium, the New Den, now looms in front of me. It has that funny piping at the top, like a shopping centre from space. As I go under the first of several road and railway bridge arches on Bolina Road I see graffiti on the wall: ‘Bushwhackers. Kill West Ham’. The road tarmac has been worn away here and all the ancient cobbles are showing through. Water is running down the middle of the muddy road along the cobbles and off into a muddy channel nearby – this is the river valley, after all, the remains of the Earl’s Sluice and probably the only bit of water I’ll see until I reach the docks. Burnt-out bits of car lie rusting on the path and there are several pools of water between great lumps of concrete. Then there’s a tiny little tunnel with cars hooting horns to warn oncoming traffic. A posse of kids on bikes shoots past at top speed whooping like Indians from a fifties Western – a Children’s Film Foundation version – then disappears. I like Bolina Road.
Further on are sixties and seventies blocks of flats, one boarded up with those cutting spin things to stop squatters. Massive red graffiti on top of the flats on the right says ‘Fug’, and on the left is graffiti of a crimson-haired woman, like some goddess painted on the side of a Second World War bomber. A little black kid about seven years old walks past, wearing metal shin pads outside his socks and carrying a huge brown bag full of McDonald’s, grinning away. The wind is really whipping up. Looking back down Yeoman Street I can see the slight river valley. There’s dust in my eyes and throat. I’m in Docklands proper, with eighties developments up ahead.
At South Dock I go straight on through Sweden Gate. The wind is blowing hard. Across the river Canary Wharf and Docklands seem empty, like a city waiting to happen. Or a city after a nuclear war. There must be people somewhere. If there was another downturn, would it become like the old ruined Roman city when the Saxons f
ound it? On Horwood’s 1799 map this area is known as Mr Dudman’s Yard, after Dudman, a well-known shipbuilder. It later became known as Deadman’s Dock. Baltic Quay is on the left, with all sorts of yachts and motor cruisers. Windswept, cold and desolate. Lonely. Depressing.
In Greenland Dock is a little yard office, a survivor of the old days around the start of the nineteenth century when the dock was built. No one is sure what it was used for. According to a history plaque on the wall of the yard office, the Grand Surrey Canal was a ‘pretentious project’ drawn up by Ralph Dodd, a ‘publicity seeking engineer’. Blimey. That’s a bit harsh for a history plaque. What a way to be remembered. Imagine if all plaques had barbed comments like that. Samuel Pepys – wiggy nonce. Samuel Johnson – Black Country pudding. George Orwell – was he Tony Blair’s grandad? But Ralph had a dream. He wanted a canal to run from the Thames at Rotherhithe to Croydon to open up access to land in Surrey, to cultivate and grow food for the people of London. It seems visionary rather than pretentious. The canal was started in 1804 but the promoters ran out of money. After twenty years it had got no further than Peckham, two miles in a direct line. Despite this setback the Grand Surrey Canal company became the Super Rich and Successful Dock Co. and imported large quantities of grain and timber, and they all lived happily ever after. Except for Ralph Dodd.
I walk down Plough Way to the main junction and turn right onto Lower Road towards Surrey Quays station. Here at last is a bit of life – takeaways, fish and chip shops, cafés, curry houses, chemists and a boxy seventies pub (the Surrey Docks). Three minutes later the heavens split and great skiploads of rain come down.