London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City

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This book arrived at a perfect moment for me; I was listening to Laura Maiklem’s excellent ‘Mudlarking’ and in the zone for thinking about the layers of history sitting under London. I am a huge fan of London and fascinated by its long history, so launched myself into this book with enthusiasm.

London, investigated through the medium of psycho-geology, is revealed as a nexus of energies, interconnections, memories and resurrections. Tom Chivers, with the forensic eye of an investigator, the soul of a poet, is an engaging presence; a guide we would do well to follow.” Photographs are not necessary because the art of the book lies in the description but better maps would have helped considerably. On the other hand, the typography and illustrations are excellent. The book is a pleasure to read from that perspective. The Cathedral and Collegiate Church of St Saviour and St Mary Overie (meaning over the river) which has witnessed over 1000 years of London history,stands at the oldest crossing-point of the River Thames, at what was for many centuries the only entrance to the City of London. He's since spent years tracing London's hidden landscape armed only with his home-made geology map, a pair of well-worn shoes, and a heightened sense of curiosity. His new book, London Clay, presents his discoveries in a delicious tome of topology. Tom Chiversis a writer, publisher and arts producer. He was born in 1983 in south London. He has released two pamphlets and two collections of poetry, the latest being Dark Islands (Test Centre, 2015). His poems have been anthologized in Dear World & Everything In It and London: A History in Verse. He was shortlisted for the Michael Marks and Edwin Morgan Poetry Awards and received an Eric Gregory Award in 2011.London Clay is a very original book, it’s a collection of essays about parts of London beneath the surface. These are the bits you don’t see in guidebooks and on postcards. It’s very real; it includes the graffiti and the dog turds as well as the more attractive and magical parts. There’s a great mix of factual/social and personal history, with the author sharing the city’s history as well as his own reflections. This makes the book very interesting and it will appeal to a broad audience. It’s not just a factual textbook or a personal memoir but a mixture of both. It’s also written in a very poetic style, I love this line about looking out at London from a high vantage point:

So many of us are unconsciously connected to the lost rivers. They determined the lie of the land. You can walk down Marylebone Lane: the exact bend of the Lane is the bend of the River Fleet. The curve of the architecture around St Pancras station follows the Fleet. There are lots of examples where we are unconsciously following these lost rivers. It’s a kind of startling revelation when you find out about London’s lost rivers.Based on new research, it tells a tale of remarkable technological, scientific and organisational breakthroughs; but also a story of greed and complacency, high finance and low politics. Among the breakthroughs was the picturesque New River, neither new nor a river but a state of the art aqueduct completed in 1613 and still part of London's water supply: the company that built it was one of the very first modern business corporations, and also one of the most profitable. London water companies were early adopters of steam power for their pumps. And Chelsea Waterworks was the first in the world to filter the water it supplied its customers: the same technique is still used to purify two-thirds of London's drinking water. But for much of London's history water had to be rationed, and the book also chronicles our changing relationship with water and the way we use it. In recent months, we’ve seen huge flooding. In a way, that is a warning that we need to be more mindful of how we treat water. Not just the water that comes out of our tap, but also how we build on places where water is indigenous to that landscape. I’m not an academic. I’m not trained in any sort of research. But I did a certain amount of desk research. Reading and looking at maps – that was always important. And I would look very closely and work out any interesting stories that might emerge from that geological map. And then I would get out and walk the landscape again and again. I seem to have a fascination for the abandoned parts of our towns and cities – just this week I’ve been watching Secrets of the London Underground on Yesterday – so London Clay is right in my wheelhouse. Of course Chivers presents a lot of tangible facts and expresses feelings (about his family past and present) but there is something else lurking behind all this, an amalgam of 'Sorge' (an appropriate German word), sadnss, love and anxiety. Maybe a dash of fatalism not helped by COVID.

Given how personal your book sometimes is, what can London’s lost rivers and the book itself tell its readers? Perhaps even about themselves? London has a long history, for the past 2000 thousand years, it has grown to the financial and cultural global city of today whilst surviving several invasions, one major fire, a plague or two. Bronze Age bridges have been found but the people that made it their own were the Romans. They settled there and made their city at the point where it was possible to cross. The river meant they could control the local area and still have access to the resources and might of their empire. Seeing how popular liminal spaces have become online, was the idea of liminality somehow important to the book?

Time and time again, consciously or not, Chivers shows us streets, wastelands, rivers clogged with waste and pollution and 'nature' present but struggling to survive and break through despite the best efforts of its guardians and its underlying geographical reality. It's entertaining, enlightening and deeply moving. You will learn something about London and a good deal about life."

There’s always a temptation to have a strong opinion about the dealings of the City of London. I do have a strong opinion, because I used to live in Aldgate and it’s right on the edge of the city. I see the behaviour and the work ethics of the city and I’ve been quite critical of them. But when you take a much deeper look at the history of London, it is a city of making fortunes and always has been. Having said that, a lot of people are being priced out of the city. It’s easy to see how the book is influenced by the author’s poetry – facts here are communicated clearly but always with an imaginative hook so that none of what could be dry information ever actually is. London at the beginning of the 2020s is as different from, say, London in the 1990s (my last residence decade) as the latter was from the London of the 1970s (when I first arrived). Its multiculturalism is now embedded, its 'different ideology' established and its detritus piling up.The Cathedral and Collegiate Church of St Saviour and St Mary Overie has witnessed over 1000 years of London history