The Groundwater Diaries: Trials, Tributaries and Tall Stories from Beneath the Streets of London

London Stories 2: A Young Person’s Guide to House Prices

A while back I miraculously had a bit of money to burn and decided to buy a flat in Hackney before I spent it all in the local pub. I didn’t really need the flat – I was already happily settled somewhere else – it was just greed. The theory was simple: buy something in a cheapish part of town, make some money on it, then sell and get a bigger place. Instant capitalism. Fast cars. Cigars. Shiny jewellery. Gadgets. Swimming pools full of beer. Beatles box sets. Er, big lorry loads of boiled lobsters. Hand-crafted living room furniture made of pasta ….

There were two flaws in my plan. First of all. I am Britain’s most useless fuckwit capitalist. Secondly, the man I’d chosen to be my expert from the world of property was a Dickensian character in a shiny suit called Phil from a disreputable Hackney estate agents (let’s call them Greed & Shite) who had, seemingly, come through a Narniaesque wardrobe from the Victorian era while searching for castiron Empire paper clips, and liked it so much he never went back. Through some outrageous personality quirk, Phil would manage to skirt me around the obvious and plentiful bargains of the area for enough time until prices went up so quickly that I was priced out of the market.

When I told Phil’s boss my upper limit, he did an Elvis-type sneer with a little quiet laugh, then got out an old dusty file called Mugpunter Ramshackle One-Bedroomed Hovels That Haven’t Been Modernised Since The Thirties. There was this little place on Mare Street, Hackney’s central thoroughfare, that I really liked the look of. One bedroom, arched windows. I tried to look at it several times but Phil kept producing blocking manoeuvres. I’d phone up and say ‘Can I speak to Phil?’ and he’d say ‘Phil speaking,’ and I’d go ‘Hi, it’s Mr Bradford. I’d like to view the property in Mare Street,’ and he’d say “‘Ello Chinese laundry no understandee wrong number,’ and put the phone down. Or he’d just play dumb. Eventually I got to see it with a crowd of about six other people. Phil informed me that the price had now gone up by six grand. How is that possible in six weeks, I argued.

‘That’s the market, innit.’

That’s the market, innit. In some way that encapsulated everything I hated about capitalism. Unthinking drones in shiny suits mouthing the ideology of their dad or boss thinking they’re being somehow radical and exciting. This is Hackney, for fuck’s sake. Take it or leave it, Mr Bradford. He then also informed me that I’d have to enter a contract race and I decided, at that moment, to renounce capitalism, forget about buying a flat and becoming a property magnate and concentrate on walking my daughter though the park, racing the old blokes in electric wheelchairs and laughing at it all.

Of course the flat is now worth twice as much. But I never liked the Beatles that much anyway. Shame about the lobsters though.

1 (#ulink_2bbefd15-3c3c-5ddb-88c7-e5fdd54a98d2)Tallis’s Illustrated Plan of London & its Environs (1851)

2 (#ulink_2bbefd15-3c3c-5ddb-88c7-e5fdd54a98d2) In The Lost Rivers of London, Nicholas Barton tells us Hackney Brook is now ‘wholly lost’ but at one stage was a large stream which at flood could reach widths of 100 foot.

3 I expect that those lyrics have made their way into the Danish National Anthem by now. King of Denmark: Lave de skylde os en nulevende? Selvfolgelig de lave Selvfølgelig de lave. Lave de skylde os en nulevende? Selvfolgelig de [fucking] lave.

4 (#ulink_29d6cda7-b762-536f-8b6f-71f67aa4c63a) When we were kids we had a room that we used to cover in graffiti and drawings then, when the walls were full up, my parents would give us a tin of white paint and tell us to paint over it so we could start again. Like some weird communist job creation scheme.

6 (#ulink_9bb1bdab-6c1f-5dd8-b042-daa0e8c8c91e) Possibly an obscure relation of top centreforward, Les, who played for Spurs.

7 (#ulink_00b96e96-c3c0-5d00-bd1b-cdfeb343a399) She walked down from Manor House, one imagines to buy drugs or procure a prostitute.

4. From Eel to Eternity: William Morris and the Saxon – Viking duopoly (#ulink_85691e91-de4c-528e-928c-75122585b549)

• Dagenham Brook – the Lea to somewhere in Walthamstow

Seasonal Affective Disorder – the Danes and Saxons (what they represent), Saxons’ ego, Danes’ id, sensible and crazy – the river near Stevey’s flat – flood plains – oh no, it’s not the Ching – depression vs. positive thinking – William Morris – Dagenham Brook – walk it – go for lunch – look for source of brook – the Beard Brothers – Leyton Orient v. Blackpool – space eels

From the upstairs window looking down over Finsbury Park (the old Hornsey Wood) the sky is a sickly yellow-grey, prickling with TV aerials like broken winter trees. As a kid I used to love winter, the tranquillity and the hard feeling of cold brittle air in my sensitive asthmatic lungs. It gave me energy, as if I was sucking on a can of pure oxygen. Summer seemed frivolous and shallow. Plus it had cricket (sadistic PE teacher whacking a hard ball at you from about 5 yards away) and athletics (running while being shouted at by sadistic PE teacher). Now it’s the other way round. Winter is never-ending, annoying and wet. Maybe we are entering not an ice age but a new crap weather age … (three dots … leave it open … ‘Blimey’, says reader … ‘profound thinker!’ … )

In February, people scowl at each other. It’s bad and it’s called SAD. Sad Arsed Downer. Slobbedout And Drunk. Stoned And Depressed. Shit At Daytodayliving. Seasonal Affective Disorder. Sunlight disappears and people skulk in doorways. Mice shit on kitchen work surfaces when they’re supposed to be in the expensive trap that’s baited with peanut butter – ‘It’s what mice crave,’ said the expert on rodent trapping from the local hardware store. Maybe mice prefer smooth. Pricecutters on Blackstock Road only had crunchy. (Wasn’t the different consistencies of peanut butter the basis of Aesop’s fable about the town mouse and the country mouse?)

Now I’d ‘done’ two rivers, in the sense that I’d walked them and drawn some pictures of local fat people, but I was already feeling a bit shagged out and worried that hanging around underground streams might be unhealthy. Research has shown that they can cause allergies, disease, poltergeist activity, madness and premature death. Or even spots. The next stream I was due to research was the River Ching in Walthamstow. The thing was, the Ching hadn’t really gone. However, I spent three and a half years living in Walthamstow and I’d never heard of it. And seeing as I never knew it existed, it counted as lost in my book.

For a laugh I take my daughter to a local music workshop, where a large-boned crazily grinning lady sings ‘Kumbayah’ and the ‘Grand Old Duke of York’ while bashing away on an acoustic guitar like she’s trying to smash ice with a chisel, while the kids stare with terrified eyes. ‘Dance!’ she cries, ‘DANCE, YOU LITTLE FUCKERS!!!’ Back in the park we take it in turns to look for amazing things. Cathleen likes nature (‘Leaf!’ ‘Tree!’ ‘Pussycat!’ ‘Baby!’), while I’m into celebrity spotting. So far, we’d only managed to see a woman who looked a bit like Helen Blaxendale the actress, but I couldn’t be sure. Similar nose, but she looked much smaller in real life. Famous people generally tend to hide away from me. In thirteen years of living in London the only other famous person I’d seen was Derek from Coronation Street in a toy shop in Covent Garden. He was buying a cardboard build-it-yourself puppet theatre.

Of course, Cathleen doesn’t recognize as many famous people as me just yet. Except, whenever we pass a construction site she thinks she’s seen Bob the Builder and forces me to sing the programme’s theme tune with her while she jumps up and down in her pram.

Walthamstow is on the north-eastern edge of London. Actually, it’s Essex really, even though it’s got a London postcode. The name suggests that it was a Celtic area – Wal meaning ‘foreigners’ (Wales is the Saxon word for ‘foreigners live here – let’s buy second homes next door to them’). Another, perhaps more likely, interpretation is that it is a derivation of Wilcumstow (Welcomesville). In this area, at the River Lea, lay the boundary between the Danelaw and Saxon Wessex, a psycho-geographic buffer zone with crazy blond blokes in the east with mad expressions and sandy-haired sensible blokes in the west with bored complacent expressions. Positive thinkers in the west, melancholy downbeats to the east. The Saxon ego and the Danish id. Happy sad happy sad happy sad. People still dye their hair to look like Vikings – it’s part of an ancient folk memory which basically says, ‘Don’t kill me! I’ve got relatives in Copenhagen!’

In 894 Alfred the Great successfully fought the Vikings on the River Lea. ‘Alf’ ordered the river to be blocked up and did this – or rather told his men to do it – by cutting many channels in order to reduce water levels so that when the Vikings came back they were surprised that the river had virtually gone and they couldn’t get any further. To celebrate, Alfred burned the cakes. Were they hash cakes? Walthamstow is now an enigmatic dead zone where London ends and Essex begins. It’s cheap housing, big skies, teenagers with expensive clothes hanging around the shopping centre, burglaries, pie and mash shops, video stores, a thirties town hall that looks like a cockney Ceauşescu palace. Walthamstow Market is the longest in Europe, with stalls selling three-year-old fashions, batteries, Irish music tapes, training shoes, football wristbands, pots and pans, kitchen knives, fleeces.

I like it a lot. I lived in the Stow for three and a half years. During that time many amazing things happened.

The Amazing Things That Happened in Walthamstow between 1988 and 1991

1. We had dead pigeons in the water tank.

2. Tiny freshwater prawns once appeared in the cold water.

3. Dukey pinched a glamorous local barmaid from a geezer boyfriend with a fierce dog.

4. I did a Jackson Pollock rip-off painting on an old door in the garden which Dukey then gave away to his glamorous girlfriend while I was away.

5. Ruey blowtorched the grass in the garden.

6. The next-door neighbours shagged really loudly.

7. Our landlord asked how he could meet ‘young ladies’.

8. We got burgled three times.

9. The pubs were full of fat blokes.

They were great days.

I wrote to The Guinness Book of Records explaining my project to travel along London’s streams and rivers and how it would work well on global TV – me racing along with Norris McWhirter by my side being pulled along in a boat on wheels by a car and reciting historical facts about the rivers and their uses. (Cue punk thrash version of the Record Breakers theme tune).

In a bit of a downer mood I went out one night to meet my friend Stevey P. at a North London Short Story Workshop meeting. This group had been going on and off (mostly off) for about six years and now had only two members, me and Stevey. How we lost all the others I can’t quite remember. I think Stevey slept with one of them and the other was his brother. His story was the first chapter in a mad London-based Dickensian sci-fi novel. My stories, on the other hand, were going nowhere. I couldn’t concentrate on finishing any of them. My latest effort, Run, Carla Djarango, Run Like the Wind, consisted of three paragraphs of East Midlands magical realist bollocks. Stevey smiled patiently. He would have put his arm round me if he’d been the tactile sort, but instead he lit up a fag, narrowed his eyes and asked ‘Pint?’

Five minutes later he read my half page short story then said, after taking a sip of his Guinness, ‘Hmmm, it’s got potential.’ We both laughed. I then moaned on about rivers. He told me he had an idea. Great, I thought. What is it? A boat. Why don’t you build a boat? Then dress up in nineteenth-century gear and get pulled around London. What a crazy idea. Thanks for nothing.

Stevey agreed to come out on a river walk in Walthamstow, where he lives. There was a river that runs very close to his house which I presumed must be the Ching.

‘That’s not a river,’ said Stevey, a bit startled.

‘It is.’

‘It can’t be.’

‘What is it if it isn’t a river?’

‘It’s a, a drainage ditch or something. A drain with some water in it.’

‘No, I think it’s a river.’

He started to gabble. ‘No one told me about rivers when I bought my flat. Rivers flood and cause damage. That’s a ditch, not a river. What happens if there’s a really big flood? It’ll ruin my hall.’

To add to his paranoia, soon afterwards Stevey got a leaflet though the door from the Environment Agency informing him he lived in a flood plain and offering some useful survival tactics. This was actually the River Lea flood plain but he seemed convinced that it must be referring to the small river (‘drainage ditch!’) next to his house. He began to fantasize about his street becoming like Venice. Fortunately he lived on the first floor. ‘But what about the post?’

Now here’s a factoid bit for all the research fiends and librarians out there (sounds of skinny blokes with thick specs sitting up suddenly and concentrating). I’d first seen a map containing the Ching in my old second-hand book and, looking at its location in relation to the Hackney Brook, had presumed it was in Walthamstow. But when I looked on my A to Z to check the course of Stevey’s mystery river, I noticed that the Ching actually flowed south-west from Epping Forest and entered the Lea in south Chingford. It didn’t really spend much time in Walthamstow, apart from flowing under the dog track. So Stevey’s river wasn’t the Ching after all.

(Scene: A gang of resentful-looking researchers, looking dead hard, hang around outside a library waiting to beat me up.)

The trouble with SAD is that I get tired of people smiling and being positive at this time of year. Fortunately some new research has recently come to my aid. Apparently you’ve got more chance of being happy if you’re pessimistic. This is because you have lowered expectations, so everything is a bonus. This corresponds with my own world view, what I’d term optimistic pessimism. In this, you go out there with a healthy can-do attitude while accepting that it’ll probably all end in tears.