The Groundwater Diaries: Trials, Tributaries and Tall Stories from Beneath the Streets of London. Tim Bradford
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car, this time with no wheels. I have walked onto a set from The Sweeney, perfect for handbrake turns, jumping on and off bonnets, pointing a lot and calling people ‘slags’. It’s not so easy to find these bits of bombsitesque London now, even compared with five or six years ago. English Heritage should get areas like this listed.
Further up is a seventies-style Vauxhall estate car written over with some classic full colour graffiti. It should be in a gallery. But as a Time Out journo might say, (Mockney voiceover) ‘London is, in a very real sense, its own gallery.’
At the edge of the dirt track, near the road, is a sign for the estate managers who own the site – ‘state’ has been cut out of the sign, probably by some bright spark anarchist. Smash the state, please fuck the system NOW. That’s what Crass wanted, back on Bullshit Detector.
The living that is owed to me I’m never going to get,
They’ve buggered this old world up, up to their necks in debt.
They’d give you a lobotomy for something you ain’t done,
They’ll make you an epitome of everything that’s wrong.
Do they owe us a living?
Of course they do,
Of course they do.
Do they owe us a living?
Of course they do,
Of course they do.
Do they owe us a living?
OF COURSE THEY FUCKING DO.3
‘Do they owe us a living?’, Crass
Back on Hornsey Road I walk through the tunnel under the mainline railway to the north. The walls have the peeling skin of a decade and a half of pop posters. At the edges I can make out flaking scraps from years ago – Hardcore Uproar and Seal plus multiple layers of old graffiti.4
I’ve wandered away from the course of the river. Access is impossible due to the railway lines and the Ashburton Grove light industrial estate, the planned site of Arsenal’s new stadium. There’s a seventies factory development, a taxi car park and another broken car, this one burnt out as well. A big-boned bloke in a shell suit is inspecting it. Was it his? Maybe he was on a stag night and his mates did up his motor for a laugh. The road is a dead end so I walk back and around Drayton Park station with the river valley off to my left under the Ashburton Grove forklift centre – for all your forklift needs. There’s a beautiful big sky that’ll be lost when Arsenal build their new dream stadium. To the right is Highbury Hill, with allotments on the other side of the road banking down to the railway like vineyards, a vision of a different London.
And so into the reclaimed urban landscape of Gillespie Park. It’s an ecology centre developed on old ground near the railway, with different landscape areas and an organic café. I sit down for a while and stare out at the little stone circle and neat marshland pools, surrounded by grassland and meadow in a little urban forest created by local people, and listen to the sounds of thirteen year olds being taught about ‘nature’ by their teacher.
‘Can we catch some tadpoles sir. Goo on.’
‘No, now we’re going to look at the water meadow.’
‘Aww fuckin’ boring.’
The kid sticks his net into the pool anyway and swishes it around, while shouting, ‘Come on, you little bastards.’ The teacher, evidently of the ‘smile benignly and hope the little fucker will go away’ school of discipline, smiles benignly and begins telling the group about the importance of medicinal herbs.
I walk up the track past the ‘wetlands’ and can see Isledon village on the other side of the tracks. You get a sense of how the railway carved through the landscape in the mid-nineteenth century. Even then, when progress was a religion, people would have been aware of the landscape that would be lost:
I am glad there is a sketch of it before the threatened railway comes, which is to cut through Wells’ Row into the garden of Mr I. and go to Hackney. We are all very much amazed at the thought of it, but I fear there is little doubt it will come in that direction.
local girl Elisabeth Hole to her friend Miss Nicols,December 1840
In Gillespie Park it’s hard to discern the real contours of the land because it’s obviously been built up. There’s a little tunnel into the trees, then down a dirt track to a wooden walkway and to the left is marshland. It’s like a riverside. I stop and look across to the little meadow with another stone circle on the left. The rain lets up for a while and I sit down at a bench behind the stone circle with my notebook. Nearby, in the circle itself, sit four dishevelled figures. Two black guys, one old and rasta-ish with a high-pitched Jamaican accent, one young with a little woolly hat and nervy and loud, a tough-looking middle-aged cockney ex-soldier type and a rock-chick blonde in her late forties with leather jacket and strange heavy, jerky make-up. They look battered and hurt and are all talking very loudly, the men trying to get the attention of and impress the woman, as a spliff is passed around and they sip from cans of Tennent’s Super. They must be twenty-first century druids. The younger bloke, whose name is Michael, starts to shout out, ‘Poetry is lovely! Poetry is beautiful! Chelsea will win the league.’ I finish my quick notes and get up to go, as he smiles at me still singing the joys of football and poetry.
‘You’re right about the poetry anyway,’ I say.
‘Do you know any poems?’ he asks. I recite the Spike Milligan one about the water cycle:
There are holes in the sky where the rain gets inThey are ever so small, that’s why rain is thin.
‘Spike is a genius. What a man!’ he yells. ‘We love Spike, Spike understands us!’ and he starts to sing some strange song that I’ve never heard before. Maybe it was the theme tune to the Q series. Then the little Jamaican bloke with a high-pitched singsong accent jabs me in the chest, his sad but friendly eyes open wide, and he smiles.
‘If ya fell off de earth which way would ya fall?’
‘Er, sideways,’ I say, trying to be clever, because it is obviously a trick question.
‘NO ya silly fella. Ya’d fall up. And once ya in space dere is only one way to go anyway and dat’s up. Dere’s only up.’
‘The only way is up!’ sings Michael. ‘Baby, you and meeeeee eeeee.’
‘Whatever happened to her?’ asks the woman.
‘Whatever happened to who?’
‘To Yazz … ’
At this strange turn in the conversation I wave goodbye and walk towards the trees. The little gathering is a bit too similar to the blatherings of my own circle of friends, confirming my suspicion that many of us are only a broken heart and a crate of strong cider away from this kind of life. I can see Arsenal stadium up to the right, looming over the houses. At a little arched entrance, a green door to the secret garden, I come out onto Gillespie Road.
This is the heart of Arsenal territory, where every fortnight in winter a red and white fat-bloke tsunami gathers momentum along Gillespie Road, replica-shirted waddlers dragged into its irrepressible wake from chip shop doorways and pub lounges, as it heads west towards Highbury Stadium. As an organism it is magnificent in its tracksuit-bottomed lard power, each individual walking slowly and thoughtfully in the footsteps of eight decades of Arsenal supporters. Back in the days of silent film, when the Gunners first parachuted into this no-man’s-land vale between Highbury and Finsbury Park from their true home in Woolwich, south London, football fans lived a black-and-white existence and moved from place to