The Groundwater Diaries: Trials, Tributaries and Tall Stories from Beneath the Streets of London. Tim Bradford
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on faces, all shapes and sizes, cockney aristos and Swedish tourists, coked-up crowds and serious punters, the smell of beer, shouting, loudspeaker, trendy crowd with nice specs, ladieeez in tight dresses, old blokes with sheepskin jackets, cheap cigars, scampi and chips, lose a fiver win a tenner, overhear some fellas talkin’ near the bookies, take their advice then find your hound is a mangy bag of bones that wouldn’t make a decent pot of soup even if you boiled it up for a couple of days. Ah, going to the Dogs is beautiful.
Last time I went, I lost loads of money, even though I won on a couple of races. I’d searched on the Internet for some betting systems. One, based in the Midwest USA, had all kinds of equations and maths you had to do before each race. It’s all very well winning, but I think you’ve got to do it with the minimum possible effort. So I decided to develop my own system. It’s the Pogles Wood connection system. I’d pick any dog related to a character or event from this late-sixties kids TV programme. I talked very loudly about this and also wore a pair of pinstripe trousers to make me feel like a Serious Punter.
In the end I ignored my system and went with a dead-cert tip I’d got off the Internet. Rectobond Ace. Couldn’t lose, they said. Race six.
They’re off. Eager thin-snouted flesh torpedoes chasing a toy rabbit that’s been welded to a turbo-powered Scalextric car watched by sinewy punters in Fred Perry shirts and shiny loafers, Yes. Yes. Yes Yes. Yes. YES. YEEEEEEESSSSSSSSS. YEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHSSSSSSSSSSSS. Oh, shit. My bag of bones went off like the clappers then folded after about 100 yards.
However, my very sensible wife had bet on places for long-odds dogs and won enough to get some beers and a bag of chips. I went to the bar, ordered the beer and asked if there were any chips. A tall skinny bloke with a scar turned to me and said:
‘I’ve got a chip on my shoulder mate ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.’
‘I need more than one.’
His mate, an even taller black guy, said:
‘Want chips do you eh eh? How about a kebab as well ha ha ha ha ha haha?’
‘Or how about, how about some lobster ha ha ha ha ha?’
‘First time out without yer mum is it ha ha ha ha ha ha ha?’
‘I … ’
‘Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.’
‘I think that it’s … ’
‘Ha ha ha hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha’
‘I … ’
‘Ha ha haaaaaaaaAAAAAAA!!!!!’
Dickens, if he were alive today, would probably have included Walthamstow Dogs in a couple of his books (probably Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist).
‘Mr Snarzelwechumfuzz, do you have a canine selection for us this fine evening?’
‘Indeed I do, Mr Pickwick, sir. It’s Lady Hamilton Academical in race seven, the Puppy Breeders of the British Empire, Essex Division, Summer Trophy.’
Mr Pickwick laughed. ‘I’ll have some of that, Mr Snarzelwechumwack. Pray, what do you suggest?’
‘A ten-guinea each way tipple, Mr P. And a couple of florins on Cholera Kid in race nine, the Tottenham Hale Open Cup.’
Mr Winkle piped up from the back. ‘I say, Snarzelwechumpog, do they have fried slices of potato here?’
There was a snort from Sam Weller. ‘Froyd slices uv potayto?!? Do you vink this is vee Savoy, Mr Winkle?’ The others began to laugh merrily.
Etc.
• The Fleet – Hampstead Heath to Blackfriars
Literary Fleet – Raquel Welch in bloodstream – the River of Wells – the London Spa Miracle – lucky pubs – Hampstead Wells – Pancras Wells – Old St Pancras Church – King’s Cross – St Chad’s Well – jazz – Bagnigge Wells – Black Mary’s Hole – Islington Pond – Sadlers Wells – New Tunbridge Wells – London Spa – Clerkenwell – Faggeswell – Smithfield – Eric Newby is lost forever – Bridewell
The River Fleet, or Holebourne (as it was called in that Norman inventory pamphlet), is the largest of London’s forgotten rivers. It rises in Hampstead and winds through Kentish Town, King’s Cross and Clerkenwell before entering the Thames at Blackfriars. It creates a huge valley culminating in Ludgate Hill on one side and Holborn on the other. The valley can still be seen in the deep banks at each side of Farringdon Street, which follows the Fleet’s course down to the Thames at Blackfriars, and Holborn Viaduct was built mainly because of the difficulties vehicles had in negotiating the steep fall then climb when travelling west to east across the Fleet’s flood plain.
The Fleet has been written about a lot. According to my main source material, the book Wonderful London, it fell ‘from a higher grace than any of its sister streams’. It appears in literature – Pope’s Dunciad (thick blokes swim in the runny shit with the dead dogs), Ben Jonson’s ‘On the Famous Voyage’ (a couple of madsers in a boat sail down the Fleet in a precursor to the Raquel Welch film Fantastic Voyage in which a submarine is miniaturized and injected into the bloodstream of a dying man, played by Donald Pleasance, to try and revive him and Raquel gets her kit off but you don’t see anything), James Boswell (big-mouth Samuel Johnson’s laugh heard from Temple Bar to Fleet Ditch, Johnson doing lots of craps in the river), Dickens’s Mr Pickwick searches for the source of the Hampstead ponds (putting forward cutting-edge ‘Tittlebatian theories’), and, more recently, Aidan Dun’s poem Vale Royal (Fleet Valley ancient druidic site, St Pancras church omphalos, consumptive young poets top themselves at the beauty of it all) and U. A. Fanthorpe’s ‘Rising Damp’, about the ‘little fervent underground/ Rivers of London’, whose buried names are still followed through the city, and in the papers every few years, usually in the context of pressure groups trying to restore it to its former glory.
Before its inevitable descent into a health hazard, the Fleet had flowed through orchards (Pear Tree Court, Rosebery Avenue), meadows (Smithfield – ‘the Smoothfield’) and Italian women (Little Italy in Clerkenwell). It has, at different stages of its course, been called Turnmill Brook and Battle Bridge Brook. It was also known as the ‘River of Wells’, due to the numerous healing springs which lined its banks. Strange to think that this river that now lurks beneath the roar of Farringdon Road was once venerated for its healing properties.
One balmy night, during the never-ending Britpop summer of 1996, I sat with three friends at the bar of the London Spa in Exmouth Market and watched England beat Holland 4–1 on the big screen. When the fourth goal went in we held each other and exclaimed that Truly It Was A Miracle. And, being superstitious in a sad medieval country boy sort of way, I decided that the result was down to the pub’s lucky vibe, rather than the skill of the players. The Spa then became our ‘lucky’ pub for a couple of years, until England lost to Romania at the 1998 World Cup and, like a gang of fickle eighteenth-century hypochondriacs, we went in search of a new lucky pub.
The Spa appears in census records dating back to 1851, but there has been pub there for over 250 years. The name refers to a nearby spa garden and the area surrounding it, also known as Bagnigge Marshes, from which flowed chalybeate springs. These were at one time used as holy wells and by the eighteenth century had been rediscovered and turned into pleasure gardens. These days a pleasure garden is a can of strong lager and a place to piss, but then it meant threepence for a glass of murky liquid and some songs and rhymes. I decided I would trace the Fleet’s course via its spas and wells, seeing if I could pick up on the ancient healing vibe and celebrate its traditions with a modern-day version of taking the waters. Drinking Beer.
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