The Groundwater Diaries

by Tim Bradford

  So I set off at top speed, with thoughts in my head of the headlines in the morning papers (‘Writer Foils Criminal Mastermind’). My wife and I have a bit of a laugh sometimes and pretend to be Starsky and Hutch. I’m Hutch and she’s Starsky. And, er, well, I don’t think I should really tell you any more.

  Anyway, owing to the tiredness in my legs due to having already run about six miles, my top speed was sadly not enough to stop the ‘robber’ escaping into the complicated tunnel system. I sniffed around down some stairs and in a couple of tunnels but all I picked up was strong piss odours. He’d vanished.

  When I get back to the crime scene, the woman was being comforted by a big Irish guy who’d appeared from a nearby bar.

  ‘Did you catch him?’

  Oh yes. Here he is in this specially built Thief Net I’m carrying. Of course I had to render it invisible, which is why you can’t see him.

  ‘Er, no. You see, I’ve just been on a long jog and my legs feel like lead. And, er, no.’

  ‘Fucking hell!’ she shouted. It turned out all she’d lost was a chain and I asked myself, pragmatically, had I just risked life and limb for a trinket her boyfriend probably won at a fairground?

  ‘You got a good look at him though, didn’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Well, I saw the back of his head. And the way he ran.’

  ‘So, could you be a witness?’

  If a line of people stood up and showed me the backs of their heads, then ran off, maybe. She asked if I could write down my name and telephone number – I thought of putting down a comedy name, so the cops wouldn’t be calling up. Roy Race 01 261 7193. We’d phone his hotline when we were kids to find out what was happening in the football world. We’d also nick my gran’s ciggies. And pour boiling water over ants’ nests. Urgh. Anyway, it wouldn’t have been very gallant to be unhelpful so I gave her the information.

  She was still pretty cross with me for not catching the mugger-who-might-have-been-armed-for-all-I-know. Whereas she was positively purring to the big Irish guy who was still hanging around. It seemed that they were about to have sex, so I headed off for the bus. Slowly. ‘Bye, then,’ I said in my best have-a-go-hero voice. But they weren’t listening.

  1 At least according to the Ordnance Survey map from 1865, along with an older map from 1771 and one from 1829. Also mentioned in The History of Muswell Hill by Ken Gray and People and Places – Lost Estates in Highgate, Hornsey and Wood Green by Joan Schwitzer.

  2 A Brief History of Muswell Hill http://www.muswell-hill.com/muswell/history/muswellhill

  3 http://dowsers.new-hampshire.net/lettertorobin

  8. Can You Feel the Force?

  • The Tyburn (or Tyebourne) – Belsize Park to the Tachbrook Estate

  Westminster Abbey – brass-rubbing fat kid – Belsize Park – Swiss Cottage – Central Mosque – Regents Park – Marylebone – Oxford Street – Buckingham Palace – Mayfair – Green Park – Tachbrook Estate – Pimlico – Thomas a Becket – Special Brew time travel – ‘Put you Watson, Kung Fu!’

  FLASHBACK: It’s 1988. I sit back in my seat. The cool medieval air of Westminster Abbey cloaks my face like a damp shroud. Faint muffled voices echo across the ancient walls, footsteps reverberate into the high space above me. I sink into myself. It’s been a tough morning – I had to write a couple of letters and listen to the cricket on the radio. I close my eyes and tingle with the peace of meditation until all I can hear is my breath. In … out … in … out … in … out … in … out … in … screeeech oout in screeeech out. I slowly open one eye. Sitting next to me is a five-piece American family. A boss-eyed, plump-arsed screechy adolescent is pleading with his dad, who is busy videoing a party of Italian girls as they wiggle past the pews while the mother watches, purse lipped and nervy.

  Screechykid: Hey dad, can we do some more brass rubbings?

  Dad (George Bush Senior whiny voice): You did the brass rubbings already.

  Screechykid: Jeany’s still doing them.

  Dad: You can sit here.

  Screechykid: Aww Dad, just one more brass rubbing.

  Dad: I already told you, you did the brass rubbing.

  Screechykid: But Jeany’s done it twice. I wanna do another brass rubbing. I wanna do another brass rubbing. I wanna do another brass rubbing.

  I open both eyes and jump out of my seat, then get up and walk quickly away, out of the Abbey, over the road getting faster, down Abbey Orchard Street then onto Victoria Street where I speed up so much I look like I’m in a twenties silent film. I only relax when I’m back at my desk.

  At a point directly under Buckingham Palace the Tyburn splits into two (possibly three) branches that run down to the Thames. This would all have been marshland and Westminster Abbey was built on what used to be known as Thorney Island, in the Tyburn’s delta. The island was at one time flanked by two channels which flowed where Downing Street and Great College Street now lie. It has been suggested that on Tothill there was possibly a religious site, an artificial mound, thousands of years ago.

  But it was only plotting the route of the Tyburn, which begins in Belsize Park, onto my A to Z that I noticed something striking about the stream. On its course, as well as the abbey and Buckingham Palace, were some of London’s most famous landmarks: Lord’s Cricket Ground, the Central Mosque, 221b Baker Street, Westminster Cathedral, New Labour headquarters at Millbank, the Treasury and the Paul Smith Sale Shop. Had I discovered something that no one else had spotted? Or, rather, had I blown the whistle on something that lots of people in power obviously already knew about? The Tyburn is the river of power and secrecy. Why else would it be the only river to have no streets or parks named after it? I charted the positions of these landmarks onto a map of London. The result, when a line was drawn though all the co-ordinates, was a picture of the Big Dipper. A famous constellation. I drew again – this time the CND logo.

  Perhaps the stream had some kind of powerful energies which, as the Druids understood, could be tapped for religious or political purposes in the same way that the football clubs had fed off the smaller tributaries. After all, isn’t it this hard-to-explain energy that is picked up by dowsers and water diviners when they’re looking for wells or underground streams? With this in mind I set off on a Tyburn walk with a can of trusty dowsing juice – Tennent’s Super – tucked away in my bags.

  Belsize Park Town Hall

  One branch of the Tyburn began at Belsize Park. Coming out of the tube I notice that everyone has sunglasses on top of their heads. The women are bra-less with long coiffured hair swept back and tied with bands, the blokes tanned and clean shaven, no socks, expensive leather loafers. White jeans, jumpers slung causally over shoulders, they look like the lead characters from French sixties show The Aeronauts. They sit around in cafés, discussing clothes or talking on mobile phones about which café they’ll go to next.

  The Tyburn’s main source is what used to be a well round the back of the Town Hall, a majestic redbrick ornate building erected in 1877. Aldermen, burghers, councillors and mayors know the power of old holy wells and the pomposity and self-adulation of setting up shop above a former holy shrine – although whereas 700 years ago people would throw offerings to the well they now take their chequebooks along to pay council tax or parking permits.

  The Swiss Cottage

  The land slopes to the left towards the nineteenth-century Tyrolean-restaurant-style Swiss Cottage. Across the road is a big detached house, with a green iron front gate and metal grilles over the windows to deter squatters, green shutters and green doors. As the beer takes effect, I stare at the green door. Shaking Stevens, the Welsh Elvis, had a hit with ‘Green Door’. Something to do with the Green Man and druidic altered states, perhaps? In the side streets there’s a dip in the land as the gentle river valley heads into the heart of St John’s Wood and the houses get smaller. In front of me is a fifties estate with balconies, called Turner house. Turner the painter or Tina Turner? ‘River deep mountain high’, that’s the Tyburn
connection spotted by a clever architect.

  The Central Mosque

  I turn into Regent’s Park. Formerly forest, then hunting grounds, it was laid out in the early nineteenth century by Nash. Over to the right is Lord’s Cricket Ground. It’s a rural scene, green and beautiful with great views. Near the boating lake across the little bridge there’s a loop of river where the Tyburn hits the pond.

  To the right is the golden dome and the tall concrete white minaret of the central mosque. I wonder if rivers are of any importance when choosing a site to build a mosque? If you’ve ever made a spatula in woodwork class, the same technique is used for mosques. Layers of thin veneer bent into shape. I could have made a mosque. They never told us that at school. We were shown how to make those things you use to stab the turf of your garden with. And a box with a lid and finger hole. And, of course, a spatula using veneer. The woodwork teacher had a long term sports injury. We, generously, used to call him ‘Gammy Leg’. Our impersonation of him owed a lot to Kenneth More’s portrayal of Douglas Bader in Reach for the Sky. For years I thought the Baader Meinhof gang was something to do with the legless flying ace, still fighting the German state decades later. Around the same time someone also told me that ’66 World Cup hero Geoff Hurst’s mum had held up a bank in the USA on behalf of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Respectable news sources were few and far between in Lincolnshire in the seventies.

  A bloke dressed in white, possibly a cricketer, sprays fertilizer on the grass and it blows into my face.

  221B Baker Street

  After the park I cross a couple of roads then bend around into Baker Street. Baker Street is pure essence of Crap Tourist London – roaming herds of hollow-eyed Japanese heritage junkies looking for Sherlock Holmes and hanging outside the London Beatles Store still waiting for Paul to walk barefoot across the road in a deerstalker hat. Concentrate hard and you can taste the grubby tail end of the sixties, acid trip comedown blues. 221B, Sherlock’s Holme, is now an Abbey National office.

  It gets worse. Straight over Marylebone Road. Mary le Bone. The Globe pub ahead is full of thick-necked Aussies here for a holiday – fish and chips to eat in and take away. The sound of a tape loop playing backwards in an echo chamber. Madame Tussaud’s on the left, queues streaming down Euston Road. Look, Roger Moore! Look, Patti Boulaye! Look, Don Estelle! Look, Minder! Look, Prince Edward! To the right A40/M40 Marylebone flyover and West London traffic hell.

  The American Intercontinental University – London

  After Paddington Gardens, where plague victims are buried, I turn down an alley off Moxon Street. Here is one of Europe’s top universities and a famous CIA training centre.1 Outside various operatives are disguised as drippy teenagers and talking in a strangulated valley speak – ‘Yeah like wow, you know?’ Some are in dayglo waterproofs, eating sarnies.

  Across the road is the William Wallace pub – Scottish ales, large Scottish measures. A car alarm goes off.

  St Mary le Bone Church, Brook Street

  Is it to do with St Mary by the Bourne or some kind of pagan/fertility/erection thing? Marylebone Lane follows the winding course of the Tyburn through a bustling area with little Edwardian-style shops. Like a village high street, except with poncey designer gear.

  Paul Smith Sale Store, Avery Row

  Across Oxford Street’s rivers of people I struggle against the tide. It’s almost impossible. Blokes in suits and sunglasses, women in tight T-shirts. Shaved heads. Bright red buses, flower sellers, Selfridges for shoes or records, HMV, Debenhams, boots, suits sweaty, fashions … then suddenly it’s quiet again. Down winding, dipping Davies Mews, then a claustrophobic old alleyway called South Molton Lane and Avery Row, another alley. I really need a purple dogtooth-check skin-tight three-piece suit. Oh look, there’s the Paul Smith Sale Shop. It has all the stylish candy-striped bargains that no one wants. I look down a drain. I can see water. It’s not flowing.

  Berkeley Square

  I stop for a moment and try to imagine this ancient scene – this would have been a lush water meadow on the bend of the Tyburn. But I’m slightly confused. It looks like the river should flow down the middle of the square, but apparently it flowed along the east and then bottom. There’s an old map on a sign that shows the stream in its last (open) days, around the 1740s, as a smelly sewer or ditch.

  At the end of the square I take a right onto an alleyway, Lansdowne Row, bustling with shops. ‘The elegant, the prosperous, the polite Tyburnia, the most respectable district of the habitable globe,’ wrote Thackeray about this part of town. A sign says ‘Medico-surgical procedures fifteen years experience’. A Japanese student stands before it in a bright green rubber dress and I wonder whether they are connected in some way.

  Buckingham Palace

  On Curzon Street the river cuts diagonally towards Shepherd Market and Mayfair, with its bistros and ex-Sandhurst types in v-necked jumpers talking loudly in the pub. Then, crossing over Piccadilly, you can see where the river would have flowed down into Green Park – the Tyburn valley. The Tyburn winds round beneath here, by Constitution Hill. The lake in Buckingham Palace is fed by the stream.

  At Buckingham Palace the tourists are up against the railings like kids at a zoo. It’s grey and depressing, with a dreary asphalt/gravel forecourt where the lads are doing their mini-goose step thing. The royals need something more vivacious, rococo and extravagant – a smart set of rooms in Mayfair would probably do for them, or a rambling old pub down in Sussex. I’d phoned Buckingham Palace earlier and talked to someone in their press office. They’d never heard about the Tyburn (oh yer) and had no records of why the house was built over the stream but did say that originally it was a private residence, Buckingham House, and was bought for the royal family and extended by John Nash. But, sorry, no information about the stream. And they didn’t mention the rumour that the palace was built on the site of an old witch’s house.

  There’s a big pile of horseshit in the road. It’s aligned exactly with the palace and some golden angel monument. Spooky.

  I stop a policeman and ask him about the Tyburn. He scratches his nose (‘sign language which means he’s fibbing’ – Body Language Expert) and says, in thick Glaswegian that he doesn’t know. It’s around here somewhere, I say, looking serious and pointing at the blue line drawn onto my battered A to Z. He looks nervous. He’s obviously picturing Prince Edward in the sewer, in his scuba diving gear, indulging in some strange pagan rituals surrounded by bodyguards and wondering if the young royal is going to be found out. He tells me there’s something near Tower Hill, obviously trying to get rid of me. I walk around to the other side of the palace and to Buckingham Gate, past the stalls selling postcards of Princess Diana’s head. The road swings round and as I take a left onto Palace Street I can see dips in the road where the river winds round here, and what seems like thousands of Japanese tourists buying up Union Jack tea towels from a stall at the side of the road. Maybe they are a Tokyo branch of the Ulster Unionists.

  Westminster Cathedral

  After Palace Street comes Stafford Place. This is the south branch of the Tyburn delta. At the side of the road some high-class winos sit on a little bench watching the world go by. They’re drinking bottles of Stella. Stella, for God’s sake. They must have money to burn. Now out onto the crazy concrete of Victoria Street. Fifty yards up the road is the Albert pub, which is worth going into as it’s the only old building in the vicinity and is an oasis, surrounded by the glass and steel modernist cliffs of the tower blocks. Nearby are newish pillars and walkways designed by some bright spark in the sixties who’d been on holiday to Bologna and simply copied the style but made a complete botch of it. The architects of Victoria Street probably said to each other, ‘Pure form!’ ‘Bold geometry!’ But it’s a shit hole, plain and simple.

  I eventually arrive at Westminster Cathedral. It’s a Catholic church but wouldn’t look out of place in a more eastern setting. It’s got a big Italianate cross in front, with people sitting on th
e steps. Next to it are lots of redbrick Edwardian mansion blocks populated by old Nancy Mitford clones living in cologne-scented apartments with round-cornered thirties walnut furniture. All these women have poodles and thousands of pounds worth of crockery with the royal family on it, pre 1953, and they never go out to drink except to posh wine bars in Soho with their hairless man friend of forty years. And I’m not generalizing here.

  Tachbrook Estate

  Now I turn down into Tachbrook Street – same river, different name. Coming out of the Uniwash laundrette are two women with kids, one a little Asian in orthodox Muslim gear, the other permed and in stonewashed eighties denim. Both have loud cockney accents and are talking about porn. ‘It’s better watching it than having to do it‘ says Perm Girl and her mate roars a dirty laugh. They drag their washing in the other direction, pissing themselves.

  And then the Tachbrook Estate. According to The Lost Rivers of London, the Tachbrook flowed alongside the flats until the seventies.

  Tyburn House

  I cross to the other side of the busy Grosvenor Road which runs alongside the Thames. There are two oldish buildings that have obviously been renovated recently. Tyburn House is 40C. First time I’ve seen the river mentioned. The house has a little patio and stairs down to their boat at an old dock, and the river apparently flows underneath it into the Thames. Next to it is all building sites – London Town Plc. A load of yellow hats are looking down a drain.