london lost rivers expo

7/27/2019 London Lost Rivers Expo

1/8

SF SAIDLONDON'S LOST RIVERS

From the Westbourne to the Wandle: Jon Savage's Uninhabited London photos and SF Said'sLondon's Lost Rivers Polaroids for Maggs Counterculture, at Maggs Gallery, 50 Hays Mews. London W1J 5QJ

Thursday 22nd MarchThursday 19th April, MonFri 1117.00, [email protected] 0207 493 7160 www.maggs.comPV Wednesday 21st March 18.0020.00, RSVP essential

Maggs Bros Ltd


2/8

SF SAIDLONDON'S LOST RIVERS

2011: SF Said accompanied writer Tom Boltonon an exploration of Londons eight lost riverswith a Polaroid camera and old film stock. 18 ofthese Polaroids were used as illustrations for theresulting book Londons Lost Rivers: A WalkersGuide.

SF Said has worked as a speech writer for theCrown Prince of Jordan and an arts journalistfor the Daily Telegraph. He has written twoaward winning novels Varjak Paw and thesequel, The Outlaw Varjak Paw. His photographyhas been exhibited by The Impossible Project inNew York, and has appeared in magazines suchas Time Out, Vertigo and 62nd Floor.

GHOST JOURNEYSWherever you live in London, youre never farfrom water. I used to live off Anglers Lane inKentish Town, beside a fishermans pub that isnow a Nandos, and once helped to dig out anunderground tributary in Soho, where I foundmyself surrounded by clay pipes and animalbones washed down from the butcheries on the

riverbanks. The rivers are all around us, butremain frustratingly elusive.

Imagine a cutaway diagram of London from theground up; its terraces, shops, offices, publicbuildings, stations and substations, extendingfrom the few remaining single-story bungalowsto the top of the Shard. Now mirror that imagedownwards to form a reversal, a ghost-map, acity inverted. What do we find below?Basements, tunnels, railways, ducts, securitybases, crypts, wells, tubes of all kinds. Andconnecting them, a hidden roadmap created bythe rivers of London.

It has become a pub game; how many ofLondons lost rivers can you name? Some of usknow that London is bookended by the Brentand the Lea. More know a little about the Fleetand its tributaries, but it wasnt until I moved toKings Cross that I realised I could see one frommy kitchen. Blocking the channels with detritusand culverting them was not enough to stem theflow of rushing stormwater; every time it rains,the Regent Canal towpath opposite my windowfloods, water bubbling up through the cracks inthe paving. Cyclists skid, children splash andadults detour around the small lake that forms,but nobody thinks about why its there.

In the basement of the converted warehouse inwhich I live, theres a filled-in Victorian well.Further along the street, another eruption of

floodwater, rising through drains and splitmacadam. In Kings Place, new home of theGuardian newspaper, theres another well,

extraordinarily deep. It was filled in when theold pub on this site, the Waterside Inn, waspulled down. I watched the workmen puzzling

out how to demolish it.

So the water pushes South, to Sadlers Wells, toClerkenwell, to Bridewell, and finally to theriver Thames itself. Map the wells, connect thelines and you start to redefine Londonstopography. Overlay the result onto the mostcurrent map of the metropolis, and youunderstand the present. This is no mere exercisein geography, for the rivers tell you somethingmore.

I was drawn to ghost stories because I came tounderstand why they worked. The streets ofancient London followed the lines of hedgerows,which of necessity followed the rivers, becausefields have to be watered. The lowlands werepoor areas largely because they were close to thewater-table and always damp. Water and fogbrought respiratory illness, and early deathscreated superstitions; thats why ghost storieswere more associated with say, the poor East Endthan the citys prosperous hilly North. The sooty,partly derelict London of my early childhoodwas a city of ghosts.

The underground rivers became sewers, andcanals were often riverways remade by man, butwhen we think of canals we conjure Venice, notBerlin or St Petersburg or London. Especiallynot London. In 1849 Charles Kingsley describedthe environment of Bermondsey residents; thewater of the common sewer which stagnates, full

ofdead fish, cats and dogs, under theirwindows. And yet J Stewarts depiction of thenotorious Jacobs Island, painted just nine years

earlier, makes that cholera-riddled waterway aplace of almost Mediterranean charm.

This, in a nutshell, is the paradox of the lostrivers. Despite the fact that mere proximity tothem eventually became enough to kill you, theirmystical significance was once so strong that theRomans floated gods upon their waters. Now,with walking maps to guide us, the journey ofthe hidden rivers becomes clearer.

Christopher Fowler, Kings Cross, 2011

Foreword to London's Lost Rivers: A Walker'sGuide by Tom Bolton, with photographs by SFSaid (Strange Attractor Press, 2011)

River Effra L

River Fleet L


3/8

M River Westbourne River Walbrook M

L River Tyburn River Neckinger L


4/8

M River Effra River Tyburn M

L River Wandle Last River Effra L


5/8

From the Westbourne to the Wandle: Jon Savage's Uninhabited London photos and SF Said'sLondon's Lost Rivers Polaroids for Maggs Counterculture, at Maggs Gallery, 50 Hays Mews. London W1J 5QJ

Thursday 22nd MarchThursday 19th April, MonFri 1117.00, [email protected] 0207 493 7160 www.maggs.comPV Wednesday 21st March 18.0020.00, RSVP essential

JON SAVAGEUNINHABITED LONDON

Maggs Bros Ltd


6/8

JON SAVAGEUNINHABITED LONDON

1977: Jon Savage was drawn to the forgottenparts of West London by the music of TheClash and The Sex Pistols. He took a series ofblack and white photos of these wastelands anddecayed spaces ..on an old Pentax.. with theintention of publishing them in a fanzine (seeaccompanying text). The 35 photos have beenexhibited at Frieze and the Tate has a set in theircollection.

Savage is a writer, journalist, artist andbroadcaster. He wrote Englands Dreaming:Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond,arguably the definitive history of British punk.

PUNK LONDONThese photos were taken on an old Pentaxduring January 1977: their purpose was to serveas an image bank for the second issue of thefanzine Londons Outrage. The location was thesquare of North Kensington that lies betweenHolland Park Road, the Shepherds Bush spur,Westbourne Park Road and the Harrow Road.The bulk of the images come from the streetsaround Latimer Road and Lancaster Road: thedistrict called Notting Dale.

Here, as in other inner London areas like W9(the Chippenham) and WC2 (Covent Garden),the tide of industry and humanity hadtemporarily receded. Slum housing stock hadbeen demolished, but there was noreconstruction: squatting communities likeFrestonia (based in Notting Dales FrestonRoad) occupied the remaining buildings. Not yetthe clichs of punk iconography, large towerblocks loomed like primitive monsters above therubble and the corrugated iron.

I was guided to this area after seeing the Clashand the Sex Pistols. I was very taken with the

Clash, partly because their North Kensingtonmanor was so close to mine. Songs like HowCan I Understand The Flies and Londons

Burning reflected their environment withprecision and passion. London was very poor inthe late seventies. The Clash and the Sex Pistols the guttersnipes and the flowers in the dustbin- spoke of the human cost.

This focus on the forgotten parts of the city waspart of the social realism that would soonswallow punk. There was, however, somethingfuturistic in this desolate landscape. Thelandscape that had been cleared to allow theWestways serpentine path opened up a gap thatallowed imaginative and physical space. By 1976,the ideas contained in J.G.Ballards Crash andHigh Rise were like spores in the wind.

Like the dub reggae that saturated parts of WestLondon, early Clash songs like How Can IUnderstand The Flies, with their instrumental

drop-out, incorporated these gaps into their veryfabric. The hyper-speed velocity of the Clashsearly live shows were, in part, an indication ofthe energy that came from seeing Londonsdereliction as an opportunity: the forgotten cityas playground.

These areas are unrecognisable today. There aredwellings, theme pubs, smart media offices, cars,a new leisure centre. This regeneration is better,surely, than the blasted landscape of 30 yearsago. But there was a kind of freedom in Londonsspaces: before it became trapped in mass mediadefinitions and music industry marketing, Punkoffered a way of envisioning the metropolisanew, of redrawing its mental and physical map,that is now impossible.

(published in Frieze Issue 98, April 2006).

Junction of Lancaster Road and Silchester Road L


7/8

Demolition, Lancaster Road (with the 'magnificent' and soon to bedemolished Public Baths (built 1888) in the background)L

The back of St. Ervan's Road from across the tracks M


8/8

Graffiti under Westway on the corner of Porchester Road and Harrow RoadL Graffiti under Westway looking up Harrow RoadM

london lost rivers expo

Documents