The Groundwater Diaries: Trials, Tributaries and Tall Stories from Beneath the Streets of London. Tim Bradford
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with a smaller branch near the start of Liverpool Road.
Then my mind drifts and I stare at the faded chequerboard floor and listen to the beep of the book-checking computer thing, the cherchercher of the till, the murmur of African accents, the rumble of traffic going past the window. In Stokey library people eye each other up, but not in a good way – more ‘Errr, you’re walking along the lesbian crafts and hobbies section? You must be a poof.’
At last I find what I’ve been looking for. An old map, from some obscure US university, showing the course of the Hackney Brook in relation to the nearby New River and which corresponds with the old map from the Islington book that my neighbour lent me. It shows the rivers crossing over at a point parallel to the Stoke Newington ponds, about a quarter of a mile west. Thus ‘the Boarded River’ was the New River, kept at the correct gradient as it passed through the Hackney Brook valley and over the Hackney Brook. This is the point in the film where I turn to my glamorous assistant, as the Nazi hordes are waiting to pounce, and she kisses me in congratulation. I take off her glasses and realize she is actually quite beautiful. I then hand her a gun and say, ‘Do you know how to use this?’ Suddenly the door bursts open, she shoots five evil Nazis and we smash though a window and escape …
I also had a look at John Rocque’s famous map of London in the British Library (rolled up it looks like a bazooka). Rocque’s depiction of Hackney Brook is a little sketchy – he has it starting further east and north than its true course and doesn’t have it crossing Blackstock Road at all. This might have thrown me off course, but allied to various mistakes in the same area suggests that Rocque never actually visited Hackney and Stoke Newington. He was too scared. Probably got one of his mates to do it.
Mate: So there’s this little river. I’ve drawn it on the back of a beer-stained parchment for you.
Rocque: Tis very squiggly.
Mate: OK, if that’s your attitude why don’t you go and have a look at it?
Rocque: Ooh no, I’m, er, far too busy. And I’ve got a cold.
I had a vague notion of walking the route of the Hackney Brook and then all the other rivers and streams in London, then writing to the Guinness Book of Records and appearing on Record Breakers.
Me: Yes, well, you have to bear in mind the substrata of London and its alluvial plane. Back in the mists of time there blah blah blah …
Then the studio floor opens up and there’s an underground river. A little boat appears in the distance with a single oarsman and it’s Norris McWhirter and he’s holding a clipboard and tells the audience some factoids about the rivers. Then we listen to a tape of Roy Castle doing the unplugged version of ‘Dedication’ and the audience cheers.
It’s time to do some dowsing again. I buy a can of Tennent’s Super and walk across the zebra crossing at the bottom of Blackstock Road, over and over again. I don’t drink Special Brew so much as use it as a tool. I see myself as part of the same tradition as Carlos Castaneda. Whereas he got in touch with the spirit world through his use of Mexican psychoactive funguses, I buy cheap beer from Pricecutters in Highbury Vale and walk around muttering to myself, getting a clicking sound in my right knee (an old hurdling injury). I am also keen to reclaim these drinks from being the beverage of mad drunkards and to create a new form of Special Brew literature. Funnily enough, I found a book by Benjamin Clarke, a Victorian Hackney man who wrote a book called Glimpses of Ancient Hackney and Stoke Newington, in which he says that Hackney Brook used to be regarded as a river of beer. The Woolpack brewery, near Hackney Wick, churned out barrels of the sort of stuff that Londoners loved (and love) to drink – soapy mouthwash with no head. Discovering the alchemical secret of turning water into beer – it’s every man’s dream.
As my head buzzes pleasurably, I look up the road and see the river valley ahead of me. I’m ready to do the walk. But first I need a piss (beer into water reverse alchemy technique).
The northern branch of Hackney Brook apparently starts at Tollington Park, around Wray Crescent and Pine Grove. It’s just off Holloway Road, which is packed with people – dark-eyed lads with eighties jackets hawking tobacco; pale-faced chain-smoking girls with bandy legs and leggings tottering along with prams; huge-bellied tracksuit trouser blokes waddling from café to pub with a tabloid under their arm; Grand Victorian department stores turned into emporiums of second-hand electrical tat; eighties-style graffiti; students queuing at cash points; geezers flogging old office equipment piled high on the pavement. At no. 304 lived Joe Meek, the record producer of songs like ‘Telstar’, strange futuristic pop classics. Dang dang dong dong ding deng dang dung dooong. He must have been influenced by the strange atmosphere of this neighbourhood with its crazy adrenalin-fuelled rush of bodies, bumping against each other like electrons in matter, Oxford Street’s ugly sister.
I had been hoping to see some kind of plaque or ramblers’ guide at the start of the walk, possibly even a fountain bubbling with pure spring water. Instead I am faced with a large fenced-off mass of earth, a secret building site, with a lonely blue prefab building. Men with yellow hard hats stand around holding stuff – clipboards, balls of string, spanners, a spade. It’s a tried and tested workman’s trick. Hold something functional just in case the ‘boss’ happens to be driving past in his silver Jag and looks over. ‘Hmm, good to see Smithy is working hard with his ball of string.’
There are two ways of looking for a river’s source. You can do it the proper way with geologists, maps, digging equipment and people from Thames Water saying ‘please hold the line’. Or you can look for puddles. And right in the middle of this mass of dirt is a large pool of standing water. This must be it. At the far edge of the site is a JCB digger-type thing with tank tracks next to a big hole. It looks as though the blokes with yellow hats are planning to cover the water with the big pile of dirt. Then it dawns on me that this is the Area 51 of London rivers. They were finally trying to eradicate all trace of the famous Hackney Brook. Why? And who are they?
I quickly make a sketch of the scene on a Post-it Note, then retreat. One of the yellow hats spots me and mutters into a walkie talkie to one of his mates about five yards away, who is fidgeting with his ball of string. I quickly cross the road, staring into my A to Z, and pass a severe old grey brick Victorian house, the sort I imagine Charles Dickens had in mind when he described Arthur Clennam’s mother’s house in Little Dorrit: ‘An old brick house, so dingy as to be all but black, standing by itself within a gateway. Before it a square court-yard where a shrub or two and a patch of grass were as rank (which is saying much) as the iron railings enclosing them were rusty … weather-stained, smoke-blackened, and overgrown with weeds.’
And into a big estate. I keep looking behind me to check the men with yellow hats aren’t following. Who are the yellow hats, anyway? Historically, the yellow hat has denoted royalty – crowns and stuff (or religious folk with yellow auras/halos). Geoffrey Plantagenet, father of Henry II and precursor of the Plantagenet dynasty, was so-called because he wore a sprig of yellow broom (a Druid’s sacred plant) in his hat so his soldiers would recognize him. His daughter-in-law, Eleanor of Aquitaine, is credited with the creation of the Knights Templar, forerunners of the Freemasons. Whereas I watch a lot of Bob the Builder with my daughter – the show is about a bloke with a yellow hat who talks to machines and a scarecrow that comes alive.
A quick detour around the modern Iseldon (original name for Islington) village with its strange dips in the road as it goes down the river valley, and where the two heads of Hackney Brook would have converged, and then I head onto Hornsey Road, alongside the Saxon-sounding Swaneson House estate with its dank sixties/seventies shopping arcade with laundrette, grocers and chemists. When I was a kid I used to have books which showed what the new exciting world would look like, and most of the pictures were like the shopping arcade of the Swaneson Estate. What a crazily drab world must it have been in the sixties, with its Beatles harmonies, cups of tea and cakes, that we were suckered into thinking these shopping centres were the height of futuristic sophisticated living? To the left are some tired swings, then further up some beaten-up cars. Some local creative has recently taken a crowbar to one, leaving