The Groundwater Diaries: Trials, Tributaries and Tall Stories from Beneath the Streets of London. Tim Bradford
Читать онлайн книгу.
pipes in the thirties) and there’s also a section to the north of Wood Green. I took the Piccadilly line to Turnpike Lane, then ambled east along Turnpike Lane with its flaking Edwardian buildings, mostly small red-brick shops with awnings, selling fruit and vegetables, kebabs, the odd estate agent. It’s a tight squeeze. You almost have to move sideways to get past the people staring at the traffic, at each other, at that nowhere-in-particular place in the middle distance that many bored people look at. There also seemed to be some kind of work-for-all scheme going on – it took five people to transport a crate of satsumas or packet of toilet paper from van to shop and the pavement was full of blokes nattering to each other about the news of the day (‘Oi, Memhet, the bloke next door has got seven blokes outside his shop and there’s only six of us. We need another bloke – can we hire someone?’)
What is a turnpike? The name derives simply from a ‘lane beside a toll barrier’. Many of the major thoroughfares into London had these barriers, presumably to pay for the upkeep of the roads. However, whenever I hear the word turnpike I think of Clifford Brown, the jazz trumpeter who died driving off the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It sounds so much more glamorous than, say, smacking into the back of a bus near Turnpike Lane tube (it’d be the 341 or 141). That’s American roads for you. If there was a road in the US called the North Circular it would seem romantic and mysterious. We’ve all been brainwashed, somehow. Maybe through hamburgers or subliminal messages in rock ’n’ roll records and Hollywood films. They’re much better at that sort of thing than us Brits. Our idea of subliminal messaging is backtaping on LPs so when spotty fourteen-year-old introverts at boarding schools in the seventies played their Led Zeppelin records backwards they would hear stuff like ‘You must worship the deviiiiiiiiiilllll. If you are a girl you want to shag Jimmy Paaaaaaaage.’
I scrutinized the squiggly blue biro line I’d drawn in my A to Z. The section of the New River I was looking for was at the junction of Turnpike Lane and Wightman Road. The New River appeared not very majestically behind a high, half-rotten wooden fence crusted with barbed wire. It snaked from around a small housing estate into a bit of a straight.
Four years after James’s succession to the throne, his patience was at an end. The cleanest drinking water on offer in the capital, for which you had to pay good money, was now suspiciously brown. James invited some of his most celebrated engineers to consider solutions and think ‘out of the box’. In those days the phrase meant that if they didn’t sort it out they would soon find themselves in a box, six feet under.
There was an idea knocking about to build a man-made water channel that would bring in fresh supplies from the boring but clear-watered countryside of Hertfordshire to the north of the City. It was a madcap plan, but it needed someone with a posh-sounding name to bring it to fruition. Step forward wealthy Welsh goldsmith Hugh Myddelton, a man whose life so far had been a classic rags to riches story – young boy leaves the Valleys to find fortune in London, flukes a job at a jewellers in the City, works hard and gets own business, chosen by King to become Royal Jeweller. Myddleton not only offered himself up as the engineering genius to oversee the project but also put up the money as well (the projected cost was £500,000). Work began on the water channel – already called the ‘New River’ – in 1609, starting out at two springs at Amwell and Chadwell in Hertfordshire.
The New River, as if bored with hugging the main drag of Wightman Road, meanders off to the south-east between the houses of the Harringay Ladder, a row of long parallel streets than run down the hill to Green Lanes. I spotted an opening next to an old school and saw the river stealthily heading south. The path was inaccessible, with heavily bolted steel fences and Water Board signs telling people to keep out. I zig-zagged up and down a few of the streets just to peer over walls and railings to spot sections of the river, then walked down to where the river eventually crosses Tollington Road. Further down is the Albanian video shop and its window full of movies by Albanian Patrick Swayze lookalikes with film titles like I Love A Patrick Swayze Lookalike Ladyboy (possibly my translations are not 100 per cent correct).
At one point Myddleton ran out of money and asked the Corporation of London for help. He was refused so turned to King James who agreed to take on half the costs (and profits). Work was finished in 1613, the river ending at an artificial pond called New River Head just off Rosebery Avenue in Clerkenwell, from where water was distributed to houses in wooden pipes. Over its 38-mile course the New River had many long twists and turns as it followed the contours of the land to maintain the steady drop from Hertfordshire to London. The New River was hailed as a great success and Myddleton became a hero. Statues of him can be seen at various stages along the river’s route.
The river travels under the road and reappears in Finsbury Park where it snakes across the ‘American Gardens’. Finsbury Park is one of the few areas in this part of north London which doesn’t seem to have had the clean-up treatment in recent years, possibly due to the fact that three borough councils – Haringey, Hackney and Islington – are responsible for different parts of it. It still has, according to official figures, a higher proportion than most parts of London of crazy nodding people, walking around talking to themselves, staring in glassy-eyed gangs outside the tube station, bumping into you and asking for money, then looking forgetful and wandering off.
One of my favourite buildings in Finsbury Park was a music venue, The George Robey, a Victorian pub which in its time had been the birth place of many third-division punk bands (though no Danish ones) is now some kind of dance club with blackened windows, a fence surround and the ubiquitous ‘security’ hanging around.
As the wooden-sided river passes the cricket pitch and under a little bridge, it’s a bizarrely rural scene, a snapshot of how the whole landscape might have looked when the river was first built. Trees hang down over the banks, the water is clear. The river winds quickly across the north side of the park then disappears under Green Lanes, in the direction of the Woodberry Down Estate, where it disappears behind a fence and railings. Woodberry Down sounds like something from Rupert Bear. By all accounts it was actually like that (not the talking animals bit) until relatively recently – photos from 100 years ago show the New River meandering gently through water meadows past trees, stationary men with big moustaches and a little country cottage. The view is still good, though, and it’s easy to imagine standing on a gentle hill looking down into a green valley of farms and rolling fields, and across Tottenham and Walthamstow marshes.
Naturally there was a danger that, people being people, the New River would soon get clogged up with all the usual debris – shit, blood, pigs’ intestines, sheep’s brains, the rotting heads of traitors, bloated corpses of drunkards who’d fallen in, everything that at that time clogged up most of the waterways of the city. The New River Company decided to combat this by building paths on each side of the river and employing walkers, big burly moustachioed men who would patrol the river and have their pictures taken when photography was invented. These walkers had the power to fine or even imprison anyone they caught throwing rubbish or simply pissing into the river.
By the mid-nineteenth century most of the water supplies in London were once again polluted. The cholera epidemic of 1849 would eventually be traced to the contaminated water supply at Broad Street in Soho. Thanks to the New River Company’s vigilance, their water remained pure and drinkable but as a result it was too expensive for the poor of London. The philanthropist Samuel Gurney spotted a gap in the charity market and under the auspices of his new and snappily named the Metropolitan Free Drinking Fountain Association, opened London’s first drinking fountain in Snow Hill, from water pumped (and bought) from the New River.
I cut across past Manor House, named after the old manor of Stoke Newington which stood nearby. Manor House is a big strippers’ and showbands’ pub, or at least it would have been in its glory days. I walk along the rumbling and dusty Seven Sisters Road for a quarter of a mile until the New River appears on my left looking very sad, chained up, covered in green American algae, another of those crap Stateside imports up there with grey squirrels and confessional TV, with a shopping trolley and plastic football set fast in the gunge. At Sluice House Nine (Kurt Vonnegut’s London novel), on Newnton Close, in the shadow of three big tower blocks, I am finally able to get back down to the river and walk alongside it as it winds past the East Reservoir, still covered in algae scum. There’s a sense of boundary here between