As we start to think about a third series, here are a selection of field recordings from the previous two series on Resonance fm, starting with the credo by which we attempt to work, as laid out in The Fringe of London by Gordon S. Maxwell

Have a listen to this episode for more about Nick’s book Scarp. And you can now watch the full length version of The London Perambulator online.

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looking down across Pentonville

For a few years I lived just off Penton Street and walked every day to and from the South Bank. In fact for about four years I walked everywhere from that high ground that rises up from the valley of the Fleet. One of the threads that emerged from these daily perambulations was the relationship between this area and its natural springs, the pleasure gardens that grew around them and traces left behind. I recorded some of these observations as they came to me on my blog, Islingtongue, but this walk with Nick was really the first attempt to create a cohesive impression in some form.
Nick knows about water, he jokes that he is ‘the river man’, but he could seriously claim to be the ‘urban stream man’. I was intrigued by what he would make of this incoherent slalom between pubs and council estates over a course of only a couple of miles that mark the sites of the springs and pleasure gardens of Finsbury and Pentonville.

We met at Chancery Lane Station. There is no water reference here as such but from Holborn Viaduct there is a fine reveal of the form of the land as it drops into the course of the River Fleet running beneath Farringdon Road. I also want to shoehorn in a log of Saffron Hill where in the evenings you often find the street totally deserted. Saffron Hill was where Dickens set Fagin’s den in Oliver Twist, The One Tun pub features in the book. It was a notoriously lawless slum. Further up the street it was the heart of London’s C19th Italian community where it was noted that not a word of English was spoken. Today it has an austere, indifferent look about it.

There is a realisation that this could be a heritage trail and The Clerk’s Well in Farringdon Lane, Clerkenwell is indeed on a sanctioned route – but what intrigues me is that the other wells and spas  are oddly neglected. Everybody knows Islington – Tony Blair made sure of that. But far fewer know of the 18th and 19th century spa resorts that stretched out along the slopes of Penton Mound. And then there is the whole mythos of Merlin’s cave and observatory here. Islington should be as well known for its pagan rites as its frothy coffee drinking meeja-types (the other untold story of this area is its unusually high percentage of council tenants).

We clock-in at Cold Bath Square where from 1697 patients were lowered into its chalybeate waters seeking the cure for “scorbutic complaints, rheumatism, chronic disorders etc”. We are guided in part this evening by S.P. Sunderland’s excellent Old London’s Spas, Baths and Wells (1915) and Nick has a copy of an 1880s book on the River Fleet.
The Clerk’s Well is visited as is the now lesser known Skinner’s Well, but Sunderland records that in the middle ages it too played host to the performance of mystery plays.

from Old London's Baths, Spas and Wells

Along Bowling Green Lane we bowl to look through the locked park gates at the site of the Spa Fields where once large congregations of radicals would gather. Some of these firebrands found themselves incarcerated back at Cold Bath Square when a prison replaced the Bath House there.
Through the gates we spy Spa Green Estate designed by visionary socialist architect Berthold Lubetkin. This was the Islington Spa and the estate carries the name in Tunbridge Wells House (the pleasure ground had also been called New Tunbridge Wells).
Across Rosebery Avenue we skirt around Wilmington Square where the New London Spaw occupied Ducking Pond Fields and soon we are dropping down into Black Mary’s Hole behind Mount Pleasant Sorting Office. This evocative name has various explanations but I always believe than when such ambiguities exist go with the most colourful story, which is the one put forward by Chesca Potter that this was a sacrificial pit to a goddess.

We slosh through the shallows of the Fleet and emerge out on Grays Inn Road. Up ahead is St Chad’s Well. St Chad is the patron saint of wells and here again we find mythology at work with the legend of the spring rising from a wound in the foot of Edmund Ironside inflicted by King Cnut. The illustrious Bagnigge Wells, home of Nell Gwynn is skulking behind a bus stop on Kings Cross Road, abandoned and unloved like a discarded royal mistress with just a fading engraved tablet as recognition. Is this a punishment for the way that Bagnigge degenerated into a place of debauchery before closing its doors in the time of Victorian prudery?

Up the Riceyman Steps we don’t so much jaunt as hobble and we stand and argue about Merlin on Claremont Square which EO Gordon would have us believe is the summit of Penton Mound, location of the Arthurian wizard’s observatory and cave. I have wholeheartedly signed up to Gordon’s thesis despite the knowledge that this area happened to be developed by a fella by the name of Henry Penton. He egotistically named the area Pentonville in the late 18th Century, rather than it gaining its moniker back in the misty, murky Arthurian past after the Romans left and created some blank pages in the history books which we could fill with whatever took our fancy.
I don’t think London celebrates its mythology as much as it should so maybe we should hush up the Henry Penton link and claim that he changed his surname in line with something he read in the same Welsh bardic odes that Gordon used as the basis for Prehistoric London, its Mounds and Circles.

Islington Spa

Not long ago this was literally my home stretch as we pass the site of the Belvedere Tavern (Bel  vedere = good view in Italian) and a good view it would indeed have had over the fields of saxifrage that swept below into the City. The Lexington Bar occupies its building now and keeps the spirit of dancing and entertainment alive although they may have ditched the games of rackets that were played here.
Just off Penton Street, Dobney’s Tea Garden is curiously marked by Risinghill Street. Peter Ackroyd notes that one could read the etymology of Penton as ‘rising hill or spring’. Nick tries to indulge me but I can tell he’s had enough hocus pocus for one night. So it was with some scepticism that he greets my declaration that our final spring, The White Conduit on Barnsbury Road is the home of cricket. The pub still bears the name under its eves, although it is now Sardinian restaurant. But it was here that the first cricket club was formed which later had to move on to grounds in St John’s Wood where it took the name of the Marylebone Cricket Club or MCC as it is more famously known. When this was a pub I saw the mouldering half-hearted cricket shrine placed above the front door for the benefit of the odd Australian tourist. Peter Ackroyd says there was a maze in the garden and possibly marks the spot of Druidic rituals.

We could have carried on – Islington was dotted with springs and gardens. We could have followed Copenhagen Street to the pleasure garden in Caledonian Park where the cattle market clock tower still stands. We might have sat in the tea garden that still exists behind the Canonbury Tavern and then pushed along to take a imaginary balloon ride from the car park of the Highbury Barn Tavern where the songs of Arsenal supporters have replaced the operettas for which it was noted. But instead we sat on a bench, near midnight in the playground – probably actually in the middle of the batting track of the world’s first cricket club, and wondered how we’d turn all this into a 30 minute radio show.

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Nick on the Romford Road

I still recall the curious cab arrangement in our locomotive—the driver’s compartment was contained within less than half of the train’s frontage, as in a modern-day London bus, enabling this enthusiastic boy to watch as the rails up ahead twitched and crossed one-another before passing beneath and behind us.
On our way to Clacton-on-Sea we hauled into Ilford. As the station’s name-plaque slid into sight and we juddered to a halt I took stock of the place, staring at the sullen backs of the row of brick houses alongside the up-track, their gardens packed with the grey roofs of collapsing coal-sheds, weedy borders to ill-defined and spartan flower-beds; bare light bulb windows granted glimpses of unhappy bedrooms with peeling 1950s wallpaper. Narrow as my sense of the world was at that time, I had actually heard of Ilford, probably through radio reports concerning fatal fires, the only news that ever held my attention in those days. The very name of the place, with its suggestion of eels (and, by association jellied eels) and that slovenly and dull schwa at the centre of the final syllable of the name suggested dismal and dulled minds, common people and general misery.
Then we were off, through a flat landscape that would occasionally manage to attain the status of countryside before giving way once more to town—concrete Chelmsford, or ancient walled Colchester with its elephantine water-tower. Pretty little Thorpe-le-Soken slipped by and we reached Clacton and had our seaside holiday.

The approach to Ilford

Recently I returned to Ilford along with my colleague John Rogers to make a field recording for our radio show Ventures and Adventures in Topography. The reason why we chose Ilford was that both of us were bemused by the bad press the place has received from numerous commentators. Ilford seems to be particularly unfortunate in the far from common tendency of English place-writers to besmirch the suburbs.
John had recently visited the place and, moved by what he had discovered, looked up Ilford in The Outer Circle: Rambles in Remote London by Thomas Burke and dating from 1921. He was intrigued by the disgust which Burke felt about Ilford, which he describes as ‘like tepid soda water.’ Neither does Burke stop there; ‘Not only does Ilford distress the stranger’ he growls, ‘having caught him it does its best to hold him in its chill confines.’
Equally as damning were the remarks made by the Ilford-born poet Kathleen Raine in her autobiography Farewell Happy Fields (1973):

Ilford, considered as a spiritual state, is the place of those who do not wish to (or who cannot be) fully conscious, because full consciousness would perhaps make life unendurable. What if some Mr and Mrs should wake to find that they are strangers to one another’s souls? What if some ambition, “forgotten” … should stir too painfully into consciousness the desire for some skill or craft or knowledge inaccessible?

The Cranbrook Corridor

Harsh words indeed and, as we shall see, ones that Raine unwittingly contradicts elsewhere in her book
Being exploratory topographers with an eye for the overlooked John and I were not prepared to take this lying down. Besides, I had my own agenda, knowing as I did that not only Kathleen Raine, but also the poets Ruth Pitter and Denise Levertov came from Ilford. If, as our commentators claimed, Ilford was so undistinguished, how come this triumvirate of poets all originated there?
We met at Woodgrange Park station and made our way eastwards along the Romford Road towards the much maligned suburb, echoing the steps taken by Burke on his visit and entered Ilford’s margins via a muddy River Roding and a pylon-straddled North Circular Road. By the end of the evening we had discovered a visionary landscape, a place with its own gentle and understated beauty.
The haul over Ilford Hill took us into what looked like a boom town emerging mushroom-like out of the alluvial Essex flats; new office blocks and a vast skyscraper towered over the dinky and easily-missed old lepers’ hospital (now apartments); the whole area spoke of a kind of semi-crazed yet democratic sexiness. There was a pulse clearly evident in the car-movement, the busy crowds heading for the shops in the High Street, the shoppers nattering on mobiles, prams pushed, cash delivered up by holes in walls.
Ilford suffered severely from Hitler’s vengeance weapons and both the doodlebugs and the rocket bombs caused carnage in the centre of the town. Much of the High Street therefore dates from the early to mid 1950s. The rational and large windowed buildings redolent of that time lend an aura of optimism to the place and a type of nostalgia, knowing as we do that the optimism was misplaced.
Intent as I was on basing at least some of the radio show on researches I had carried out into Kathleen Raine and her relationship with Ilford I tried to drag John up towards Barkingside, to the north, where Raine spent her early years.
John wasn’t having it though. His ambition was to visit Valentine’s Park first and, unprepared to argue it, he grabbed my arms, twisted them behind my back and frogmarched me up through some suburban streets towards that place.
We loved Valentines: a large lake brim-full with water fowl and seagulls that swirled around a central island like a whirlwind; an isolated cluster of pine trees; a concrete-conduited Valentine’s Brook and a Dutch canal reminiscent of the one that disappeared years ago at Norwood Green in Middlesex: these spoke of generations of family days out, wild kids on bikes now passed into middle-age and parentage, regional memories accessed by John and I through the exercise of imagination. Valentines Park reminded us that, as George Harrison once said, everywhere is somewhere. As the light began to fail and the park emptied out I sat and smoked while John wandered off to take pictures and notes. I found myself thinking about Raine’s version of Ilford:

Herb Garden at the Valentines

The sensibility of an artist or a poet cannot grow in a mean underworld, and in solitude. It is no wonder that in the Ilfords’ there are more who fear than who desire the stirring of consciousness.

Raine grew up at Westview, a house situated at the junction between Cranbrook Road and Hamilton Road. The house—newly completed when Raine moved there with her family—predated the suburbanisation of Ilford that took place in the period between 1900 and 1914. Raine makes much of the beauty of Ilford at that time. She mentions the ‘Essex Maidens’—the regional name for the Elms, plentiful in the area and sadly now gone forever. ‘All sky and turnips’ was the description she gives of the flat Essex landscape.
A sensitive child, Raine cleaved off her own personal zone of responses to the world she found herself in and moved within them. However, unlike most people, she persisted throughout her long life in seeing the imagination as a gateway or portal through to the eye of her God:

Going to bed by day, in summer, I passed the hours before sleep in the other world. Not in dream but in waking fantasy I would take off, from the bed where I lay, to the summits of some beautiful heavy elms I could see from my window which grew a field away, by a little stream, or ditch rather, which gathered in a pool… From the pool the water flowed away under a brick culvert into darkness and mystery; and down into that mystery, each evening, I passed, travelling with the speed of thought to “the bottom of the sea”. There my companion awaited me: an octopus. How came I by that fantasy? I know only that it was so, and that among the mysteries under the sea we travelled together in perfect identity of thought.

I was intrigued by this passage and, during a visit to Ilford in the hot summer of 2005 I’d managed to locate the pool of water, clearly visible in a hollow in the back garden of a house in Hamilton Road. The contrast between the ‘timeless’ presence of the pool and the passing traffic in the street close-by destabilised my perception of Ilford as a fixed and dull suburb: standing there, on the superheated summer pavement I saw the streets of stuccoed houses waver and threaten to fade like the passing dream of a mushroom god. Old Essex began to re-emerge, the Essex maidens towering over the car-ports, their crazed green hair billowing in the summer breeze. Wild carrot sprouted and held up its birds-nest inflorescence proudly where foreign shrubs were neatly packed into front gardens. The cars—too many of them—rusted and collapsed in on themselves and became the nests of field mice. I was happy standing there, on the edge of deep time, watching our human endeavours fail. I felt superior to it all and, like Raine, was tempted to snort with contempt at the attempt by the denizens of Ilford to put down roots and live the decent suburban life.
However, unlike Raine (who washed her hands of the place and couldn’t wait to get away) the experience left me loving Ilford more than I had done: paradoxically, the packed and cluttered streets, shops and alleyways seemed more precious precisely because of their revealed fragility. They demanded loyalty and hard work on the part of the locals in order to create bonded relations in the community. It takes courage to keep faith with this world of neat front gardens, parked cars, cats on walls, childrens’ play-rooms.
Besides, Raine unwittingly contradicts herself: She describes how, in September 1916, she rushed out into the street to witness a vast sheet of flame hovering in the sky. In fact Captain Leith Robinson was busy shooting down the German zeppelin L2 far to the north, at Cuffley on the South Hertfordshire escarpment. Isn’t that vision as good as any Blakeian angel ascending to heaven, telling us much about the ‘true’ world underlying the sleepwalking and habitual lives we so easily inhabit?
John returned from his foray and we wandered over to Valentines House to shoot films in the delightful herb garden. As the winter oaks, visible beyond the garden’s old brick walls, took on a purple glow in the evening light I thought more about the interaction between the ostensibly stable and fixed suburb and the turmoil of history, the dangers inherent in acts of God:
On the afternoon of Monday 21 August 1939 an unusually violent electric storm suddenly broke over Ilford. The day had been bright and sunny and Valentines Park was busy with holidaymakers. As sheets of rain descended on the town several of families with small children sought shelter by huddling together in a corrugated iron shack near some trees. At ten minutes to five it was struck by lightning. Five adults and two children were killed and nineteen injured.
A witness described the scene: ‘The hut looked like a battlefield. During the war I saw some horrible sights, but none more horrible than this.’
Another witness entered the shack immediately after the lightning strike: ‘A woman at the back of the shed was lying unconscious with her arms round two little children aged about three and five, who were screaming. I tried to get over to help them but could not get past bodies of other people screaming for help.’
As I filmed John emerging from some shrubbery to walk towards the sundial forming the centre-piece of the herb garden I saw him as a momentary presence, a near-intangible consciousness doomed to murmur inaudibly in the grasses and trees of Valentines. We leave traces behind us, echoes to be picked up on by deep topographers in the years to come.

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The night before the walk I perused satellite images of the Crossness sewage treatment works on Google Map. A perfect geometric mat of cylinders inside neat squares with a green baize border nestled snugly against the southern bank of the Thames at Cross Ness Point. Grass it over and the indentations in the ground would be as mysterious as the Nazca Lines.

We arrived an hour later than planned at Plumstead Station, the grey sky hanging ominously low. A tourist snap of the Plumstead Radical Club and off under the traffic island to the beginning of the Green Chain Walk – Plumstead to Lesnes Abbey branch.

At first this seemed a far more visual landscape than an audible one. You want to gaze and wonder at Bostall Woods rising on a high dark ridge from the Plumstead Marshes. It was the monks of Lesnes Abbey just beyond that ridge who first drained the marshes and fought a constant battle against the flood tides of the Thames.

We needed to force out some content for the show and soon dropped into our stride, and began to tune into the sounds drifting in off the flatlands – the metal clanking on the Woolwich Industrial Esate, seagulls and water foul descending on the lake at Thamesmead Estate, the low hum of an electricity substation. We took this all in the elevated view afforded from the atop the covered sewage pipe.

Thamesmead takes you by surprise from the raised embankment of the sewer. Like the Brunswick Centre and a couple of towers from the Barbican picked up and dropped on a conveniently empty patch of land, like a giant had put them down there whilst shuffling around the other city centre blocks and forgot to put them back.

We squabble over whether it is a modernist dream gone bad with a helping hand from Stanley Kubrick or a thoroughly decent place to live – Brutalism-on-Thames. I put forward my belief that Debordian psychogeography came out of a strident critique of the failure of the modernist dream. The concrete Corbusian landscapes the modernist architects created and its channeling of human movement, spirit and soul along its preordained routes antithetical to the psychogeographers’ notion of the city as a place of drift and free association liberated from notions of planned space.

Nick fantasizes that the only other deep topographer in the world lives atop one of the towers chronicling and archiving the life of the region. He might be right.

The view afforded from the 16th storey of the estate would be a vast panorama from its location just shy of Cross Ness – a promontory jutting out into the Thames. Northwards, the imagined topographer could look across Hornchurch Marshes to the high grounds of Essex around at Chigwell and Loughton. Eastwards would offer a view well out into the Thames estuary over the flickering beacon of the lighthouse at Jenningtree Point. Westwards would be low ground as far as I don’t know where, but the Northern Heights of Hampstead and Highgate would most likely be in view to the north-west on clear days. And to the South the vista would stretch beyond the boundary of the city and into Kent.

There was no need for a map on this walk, ascend the raised footpath and yomp along till the path runs out. So much of our usual banter about route, maps and compasses was irrelevant for now (until we reached the end and found ourselves utterly lost).

Soon we had reached terminus. The path just peters out into a thorny hedge near the gates of the plant. The sewage colony slumbering behind the security barrier. It’s a peaceful spot. A landscape incomparably large in London, a flat 37 acre site punctuated with brick buildings and pylons. Every Londoner should make the trip this way once in their life, Nick would make this a compulsory pilgrimage. Without the sewage works here at Cross Ness and over the river at Barking its doubtful London would be the city that it is today – consumed as it would have been by the Great Stink of the free floating effluent choking up Old Father Thames.

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Read Nick’s essay from his 2005 walk along the Southern Outfall Sewer

On summer evenings—when the sun sets furthest north—Scarp casts its shadow over the serried ranks of housing which shatter against its southern rim. Winter brings the sound of gushing below low points in the suburban streets and shopping parades as the streams which originate on Scarp swell and are channelled beneath Edgware, Pinner or Ruislip and flow towards their confluence with Brent or Colne.

Scarp is a conspicuous but broken ridge running from Batchworth Heath, near Harefield, on the Middlesex-Buckinghamshire border, via Oxhey to Elstree and thence eastward to High Barnet. Further east, the ridge runs through Hadley and Enfield Chase, widening considerably north of the former place towards Shenley and North Mimms. The eastern edge of Scarp curves north and then north-east, following the River Lee upstream into Hertfordshire, until it diminishes in height in the region of Hertford and Great Amwell. Much of the land is green belt broken by small clusters of dwellings, old farms and ribbons of Victorian suburban houses. Scarp attains its greatest height at Stanmore Common (480 ft).

Scarp’s northern slope faces onto the Hertfordshire river plain towards St Albans and Hatfield, a land broken by the river valleys of the Lee and Colne. The Chiltern range is clearly visible from many points. Southwards, Scarp frowns down upon London and across to the North Downs and Kentish Hills on the far side of the Thames basin.

Sliced by railways and motorways, topped by old roads running its length, repeatedly scarred in the name of civic utility, yet never acknowledged openly as possessing a coherent identity, Scarp nevertheless persists in the infrastructural unconscious of the northern reaches of the city. North London’s sewage system is aligned with the rivers running off Scarp; our arterial roads follow the major river valleys born of the confluences of these streams and in turn provide the framework for the major trunk sewers serving north London. Thus, the utilities we most take for granted—macro-engineered symbols of our modernity and efficiency—are inextricably bound up with Scarp’s existence. From numerous suburban locations in north London, such as Rayners Lane or Colney Hatch Lane, glimpses are gained of Scarp’s dark mass. It is a fixed and solemn backdrop to the city’s ephemerality. Yet this sinister and unexplained presence seldom provokes comment or recognition.

I have slowly become obsessed with Scarp and I am currently writing a poetic survey based upon the numerous researches I have carried out while walking its undulating yet elevated mass over the last eighteen months. It was therefore apt that the third programme in our second series of Ventures & Adventures in Topography should focus on at least part of this astonishingly overlooked landscape feature.

On a boiling day in June 2009  John Rogers and I set off together with my agent, Jon Elek and the writer Craig Taylor to traverse a section of Scarp from Highwood Hill in Mill Hill to Elstree. Our route took us over Moat Mount, through Scratchwood and onto the Edgwarebury uplands via Clay Lane. All that day we were presented with views from Scarp down onto the smear of North London and across the Thames valley to Guildford and Dorking. Weighed down as they were with cameras, sound-recording devices, maps, sandwiches, compasses, topography books and water-bottles etc my colleagues’ stamina began to flag and so we headed up old Edgwarebury Lane and crossed the M1 motorway onto Barnet Lane before heading into Elstree in search of a pub.

Finally my co-walkers settled down for a beer and crisps before returning to London via mini-cab. Waving goodbye, I made my lonely way on to Bushey via Elstree Aerodrome and Sandy Lane. Eventually I collapsed from heat exhaustion and dehydration and spent the night sleeping in a concrete pipe on remote Merry Hill, waking in the night to survey the sodium-lit nightmare vortex of Watford. I felt lonely and wondered why I ended up in such bizarre situations; how it was that I wasn’t curled up in bed at home with cat of girlfriend. Such is the fate of the deep topographer.

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