The Groundwater Diaries

by Tim Bradford

  Was I searching for my dark side? Underground Tim. The smelly bit that I don’t want to show. The speccy bloke farted and shook his head.

  I volunteer to do a sponsored walk for the Cecil Housing Trust, a charity for homeless women. The walk is from London Bridge to Richmond, about 17 miles. I’d seen a poster in our local laundrette while I’d been chatting to the middle-aged Irish woman who always gives my clothes ‘special care’ without telling her boss. But a few days before I’m due to go I stand on an old Victorian floor tack which takes a deep slice out of my foot.

  I set out with a crowd of well-meaning feminists and even with my rather exaggerated limp, I’ve soon overtaken all of them, apart from a skinny woman who looks like a Deep Purple bassist and her punkish Japanese friend, who stick with me for a while until I lose them in the Wandsworth one-way system. It’s low tide and on the north bank I pass by the sewer tunnels and river mouths of the tributaries – Fleet, Tyburn, Westbourne, Counter’s Creek, a small hatch and bank undulations near Parr’s Ditch, Stamford Brook and the large mouth of the Brent. I realize that I should have done this at the start of my ‘project’, to get an idea of the scale of London and its waters, and to fix a map in my head. But now I feel like I’m saying goodbye to old friends.

  The rich have appropriated most of the river. Luxury flats are everywhere, bland and empty boxes conceived by soulless architects and planners.

  At Old Deer Park a crowd of women walks slowly towards me, with the sun behind them. Their hair is shining gold. Am I delirious? Is it the Hardcore London Feminist River Walkers at last? They are all beautiful and have come for me to take me to their underground water world. As they get closer I realize they are just a group of German tourists in expensive leisurewear. After four and a half hours I arrive in Richmond but there’s no one there to greet me so I bugger off home. But, strangely, my foot feels much better.

  I meet Northern Dave at the Tup in Stoke Newington and we sit out in the beer garden. I want to talk about Hackney Brook and I have brought along copies of Rocque’s map as well as various Ordnance Survey maps. But Northern Dave is having none of it. He pulls out The Anatomy of Melancholy and shows me various snippets, then just when I’m ready to tell him about poor drainage in the Clissold Park area he reveals a cleverly concealed Edie Sedgwick biography. (Northern Dave and I have the same taste in dead actresses and models from the sixties.) He’s marked out the important drug haze passages for me to read, then we dwell admiringly on the black and white photos of Edie. After our third pint, we depart for Abney Park Cemetery. On the way I buy a can of Tennent’s Super Dowsing Ale – my last ever, I have decided – while Dave takes a more prosaic Red Stripe view of things. But inside the gates Dave has one last surprise. He’s brought along his treasured copy of the Tao te Ching: we take it in turns to find a verse at random and read it out whenever the dowsing rods come together.

  Looking back on the last year, I see all the small rivers I didn’t walk, like the Graveney, the Quaggy, Salmon’s Brook and Pymme’s Brook. I’m glad I got the cold shoulder from the Guinness Book of Records. Also, various people never replied to my letters and emails – Ken Livingstone, Prince Edward and all the Beverly Brookses. But no matter, my real regret is not taking a mate’s advice and walking around London in a paper ‘boat’ outfit.

  Now I should be finishing the book but I’m watching the sun set slowly from the upstairs window. Burning bread dough, sand dunes, turquoise and yellow fire of a furnace. Hornsey, Finsbury Park, Blackstock Road and Highbury Vale have become magic kingdoms of light. My neighbour is out in her garden with her camera. But no one will believe her when she tells them about this sunset and when she shows them the photo there’ll be nothing there, just a few clouds.

  The sky goes a deeper crimson, a tower block shifts into silhouette. A police car over on Seven Sisters Road speeds east. I look out over Hornsey Wood and imagine what the New River would have looked like, its water red reflecting the sky. There’s nowhere else you get skies like this.

  The next afternoon I’m walking through Clissold Park. It’s another humid day. As I get to the little mound with a drinking fountain, which (I like to think) taps straight into the New River, I notice streams cascading down into the grass below. As I get closer I see that someone has left the tap on and the water is spilling down, filling up the top basins then the lower inset basins beneath a watery pulsating film. I stand staring at it for a while, slightly mesmerized, hypnotized by its sound. Then I move further in and, as the water splashes over my shoes. I reach for the tap and close it off. The basin settles down. It’s quiet now and I walk quickly away, as the water seeps down into the park’s soil. I continue walking home, a smile on my face, my step a little lighter than before.

  From: Beuerley Brooks

  Date: Tuesday, November 6, 2001 4:20 pm

  Subject: Beuerley Brooks

  Hi Tim,

  I’m a Beuerley Brooks. What’s the scoop?

  Appendix

  Flow rates

  A friend, after I’d explained what this book was about, asked if there would be a lot of information about flow rates of the different rivers. I didn’t know what to say, mainly because I didn’t know what he was talking about. Just for him I have included a heavily researched flow rate diagram.

  What is London?

  London is typically described as a collection of villages rather than a large city. But it’s more a collection of different atmospheres (which may or may not be connected to the layout of the buried tributaries).

  London weather

  Some Top London Buskers

  * * *

  1. Dying baby whale sings ‘Soul Man’

  A small, punky-haired Japanese girl stands outside the Hippodrome on a damp spring morning and sings strange sad versions of soul songs in a mad, high-pitched squawk. People hesitate as they walk past but few stop to put money in her little cup. I can’t tell whether this is terrible or the sound of genius.

  2. Flying-V hippy man at Camden Lock

  No discussion of London buskers could be complete without the flying-V hippy man at Camden Lock. Years ago, he used to stand near the entrance to the old lock market, flared legs wide apart, long curly hair flowing, and blasting out Hendrix riffs from a red (or was it white?) flying-V guitar plugged into a practice amp and a big muff fuzzbox. At that time most buskers were of the ‘Let me take you by the hand’ school. He was special.

  3. Classical duo at Hammersmith shopping centre

  Tall sandy-haired speccy bloke and tall longdarkhaired posh bird in nice clothes play along to classical ‘hits’. Shoppers shuffle past eyeing them up suspiciously. Occasionally someone will ostentatiously tip some coins into the open violin case as if to say, ‘I know this one. I’m a classical music buff, don’t you know.’ A group of track-suited kids take the piss from a safe distance.

  4. Misty-eyed with cans

  Four drunk blokes loiter at the side of a park in Holloway. One stands singing Irish folk songs – ‘Molly Malone’, which segues into ‘Rivers Run Free’ – in a croaky voice, the other three squat around him misty-eyed, clutching cans. I sense a pool of urine slowly expanding behind them.

  5. An earnest black girl with an acoustic guitar

  An earnest black girl with an acoustic guitar gets on the District Line southbound train at Fulham Broadway and belts out a few acoustic numbers. Unbelievably, for a train busker she’s pretty good. ‘That was pretty good, I say. She tells me that a record company is after her. What, has she nicked stuff from them or something? No, they want her to sign. Blimey, busking’s not what it used to be.

  6. Twiddlynote accordion bluster

  Victoria Line going north. Two cheery blokes with watery eyes swagger through the interconnecting door between the carriages, followed by a quiet-looking little kid. The two men flash smiles and are off, one playing the accordion, the other a kind of bazouki thing. Despicably upbeat it’s completely inappropriate for the London Underground. The boy follows on w
ith his hand out, asking for money.

  7. Sid Griffin at the South Bank

  Not strictly speaking a busker. Sid had been hired to play at a Fans United Love-In Get Together at the South Bank, before the 1998 World Cup. Sid, former frontman of the ‘Big in 1985’ country rock band, the Long Ryders, seemed mighty peeved to be playing to a handful of speccy ex-Marxist football fans. At the end of the set he tried to flog some CDs. I never fall for this standard busker cash-grabbing tactic, but I felt so heartbreakingly sorry for him, I bought two. What a mug.

  8. Wake guitarists

  In Hammersmith one evening I hear familiar sounds coming from the subway. South American guitar music. Beautiful. What a strange feeling. When I get down the steps there are two guys playing in front of a little home-made paper plaque for Felipe Romero, a busker. It’s been his funeral today. This is their little tribute. Ba da da da dang. Diddle de di dang dang twaaaaaaaang.

  Bullshit Detector Detector

  I’ll never really know the whereabouts of my copy of Bullshit Detector. Maybe it sank a few yards downstream. But I do know where it isn’t – various second-hand music shops around North London.

  The Etymologists of Bishopsgate Library

  As suggested in the text, the names of many of the Thames tributaries have changed over the centuries and none are especially ancient (compared to, say, the Thames). Take the Tyburn. At various times it has been known as Ayebrook, Ey Brook, Mill Ditch, Kings Scholars Pond Sewer, Tatchbrook, Tiburn, Teyborne, Maribourne. Even Nonce’s River. (No, that was a test one to make sure you’re concentrating.)

  I went to Bishopsgate Library to do some ‘research’. What I found were old magazines packed with letters from respectable gents, about underground rivers. It’s not healthy. What taxed the greatest minds of the Victorian and Edwardian eras was not how to reconcile being ethical and moral while having an empire, the state of the poor, urban pollution, or looking for cures for disease, but working out how the Tyebourne got its name. It’s actually scary. I have this vision of the British Empire crumbling because its top brains were writing to gentlemen’s publications about river etymology. I suppose they were the nineteenth-century version of internet message boards.

  The first blast in this war of words was back in the 1870s…

  ‘Tyburn was doubtless originally Ey-burn. It was also called Aye-brook or Eye-brook. The first part of the name is said to be preserved in the neighbouring Hay Hill and may be compared with the River Y at Amsterdam, and the Wye and Wey in England. The vocables ey, eye, aye, wey, wye, are derived from the British ui, au, aw, av’ Welsh, gwuy (A.S ecí, ig’ Plat: awe’ Dan., aa’ Is., á, aa’ Gothic., ahwa’ Sp., agua), corrupted from “aqua”.

  (R.S. Charnock, Grays Inn. 8 March 1873)

  Then it all went quiet, as the various parties retired to their chambers for a while (nearly thirty years) to consider their responses.

  “Tyburn was a brook, which ran from Hampstead to the Thames. (Rev W.J. Loftie, 16 March 1901)

  This seemingly innocuous sentence, in a letter written by the Victorian river expert, the Reverend W.J. Loftie, in the March 1901 edition of Gentleman’s Quarterly, blew the roof off the genteel world of London river enthusiasts. In fact it was just the first blast in what was to become one of the bloodiest internecine wars amongst gentlemen amateur academics ever witnessed in England.

  Mr H.A. Harben wrote (20 April 1901) ‘Will M.R. Loftie be so good as to give his authority for the following statement?…That Tyburn was a brook which ran from Hampstead to the Thames.’

  ‘In regarding the word bourne (burn, burne &c.) only in the sense of stream (rivulet), is there not the danger of forgetting another meaning of the word – viz., limit, boundary (Fr. borne, Webster)?…When the poet wrote of “that” bourne from whence no traveller returns, one does not imagine he was thinking of a rivulet.’ (W.H.B. 1 February 1902)

  ‘I would never call it the Tyburn, except in a conventional way, for, with the exception of a doubtful passage in a charter of uncertain date, there is…little evidence to show that the King’s Scholars’ Pond Sewer was ever known as the Tyburn.’ (W.F. Prideaux 8 March 1902)

  ‘With regard to the name bourne, otherwise burn, brun, in the sense of limit, boundary…May it not possibly be because the idea limit, boundary, originally always underlay the thought stream, rivulet? and this perhaps through the fact that the first natural limits and boundaries regarded by men would most frequently be streams and rivulets…where bourne or burn is the name received from old time for a stream or river, may not that name point back to that old function of boundary marking.’ (W.H.B. 8 March 1902)

  ‘Mary bourne/Mariborne was invented by the Marylebone Mercury in the late 19th century. For many years past I have endeavoured to investigate the history of my native parish, and have never met the “Mary Bourne” mentioned in any authentic document. But, occurring as it does in an accepted textbook (Mr Arnold Foster’s little school-reader Our Great City), I feel no doubt that fifty years hence the name will be championed…’ (Prideaux 5 July 1902)

  There is a hiatus of six years, during which the correspondents get on with their lives and perhaps become more well-rounded individuals, before Col. Prideaux can’t take it any longer and, in 1908, hits back with a huge letter to Notes and Queries.

  “In the course of a correspondence which took place some years ago (16 March 1901) on “Executions of Tyburn”, the Rev. W.J. Loftie asserted, inter alia, that “Tyburn was a brook, which ran from Hampstead to the Thames”’ whereupon Mr H.A. Harben asked for his authority for that statement. No reply was given, and I doubt if one could be found. [uh-oh – this is going to kick off. Calm down lads…] ‘My own opinion is that…“Teoburn” means not the stream, but the Manor’

  He recalls that the earliest mention of the river is in the Charter of King Edgar in the year 951, conferring a grant of about 600 acres of land to the Church of St Peter of Westminster: ‘of Cuforde upp andlong Teoburnam to thaere wide heres-street’ (from Cowford up along Tyburn to the wide military road)

  (Prideaux adds) “much ink has been spent in discussing the meaning of the prefix “teo”. I belive it to be a form of “tweo”, which is equivalent to “twá”, the fem. nom. plur. of “twgen”, two, and which we find in the word “betweonung” or “betweonan”, between. The word “Teoburna” would therefore signify the land situated between the two burns, which modern topography call the Westbourne and the Tyburn. ‘The truth seems to be that the residents in the manor of Tyburn naturally called the stream the Tyburn Brook, while those in the Manor of Eye called it the Eye brook…No one called it the Tyburn till the nineteenth century was well on its way to maturity’.

  (Col. Prideaux 31 October 1908)

  “I think Col. Prideaux is in error saying that no one called the brook the Tyburn “until the nineteenth century was well on its way to maturity”. There are two MS. plans in the Crace Collection at the British Museum, dated 1732 and made by J. Hanway, jun., in which the brook is marked “Tybourn” and “Ty-bourn” (portfolio xiv. 22, 26). Another question which suggests itself is whether, assuming the etymology to be “Twyburn”, the name would not rather denote a “twofold” or “two-forked” stream than the land between two comparatively distant streams.’ (H.A. Harben, 28 November 1908) “I regret that my absence from England prevents me from replying in detail to Mr H.A. Harben’s criticisms, but may I venture on one or two remarks. [Several pages later…] “What I actually suggested was that the name signified the land lying beween the two burns – that Teooburna, to compare small things with great, represented to the Anglo-Saxon mind what Mesopotamia (the land lying between the two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates) represented to the Greeks and Romans…I think it is to be regretted that before writing his “reply” H.A. Harben did not refresh his memory by again reading the notes on ‘Executions at Tyburn,’ which were respectively written by Mr W.L. Rutton and myself.” (W.F. Prideaux, Grand Hotel, Locarno 19 December 1908)

 
; ‘I have discussed the evidence for the supposed extension of Tyburn manor to Bayswater in a paper on London’s First Conduit System,’ published in the Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archœological Society, within the last two years. I there point out that all the evidence shows is the existence of a very small detached part of the manor of Tyburn in the common fields of Westbourne. I must refer those interested to that paper, as I have no opportunity to go over the evidence again at present. (A. Morley Davies 19 December 1908)

  A new kid on the block…

  ‘I was…wholly puzzled to imagine how the proposed derivation from the Anglo-Saxon “twëo” could be sustained…the w in tw (or other combinations) is never lost unless the sound of o or u follows. But the sound of eo had nothing of the nature of an o or about it. The etymology is simple enough, viz., from the verb to tie, Anglo-Saxon “tígan” and it must be remembered that tígan was itself derived (with the usual vowel-mutation) from the sb. téag-, nom. “teah”, a tie, band, also an enclosure or paddock which was itself derived from téah, the second grade of the root-verb “téohan”, which is cognate with the German “Ziehen” and the well-known Latin “dúcere”. (etc. etc. for quite a lot longer)…’ (Walter Skeat, 9 January 1909)