Going Underground:From the Bollo Brook to the Cock and Pye Ditch.

"When we think of London’s river, the vast thoroughfare of the Thames immediately springs to mind. But this ancient city was built around other rivers too – and traces of these still remain, for those who know where to look".

The author of that quote, Tom Bolton, is certainly one of those who knows where to look and, fortunately, he's articulate and hard working enough to have compiled his findings into a couple of books, and he was generous enough to give his to time to the South East London Folklore Society (SELFS) last night as well. Even luckier for us, he proved to be erudite, learned, and funny too.

Which all made for a rather brilliant evening's talk and one I nearly didn't attend. I doubt I was the only one to have concerns. I work at home alone and so my knowledge of what's going on with, and what's best practice regarding, coronavirus/COVID-19 comes mostly from the Guardian website, the BBC website, and friends on Facebook and WhatsApp.

It's hard to know what to do. I certainly don't trust the government but I know nothing about viruses or their spread so I'm inclined to trust medical officials. They've not said anything, yet, about not attending such events so I went and so did, I noticed, most of the regulars. There was a reasonably decent turn out. This last minute checking and constant re-evaluation of the circumstances as well as the attached worrying will, undoubtedly, be the new normal for the next few weeks and months. After that - who knows?

I have the second leg of the Capital Ring walking project due tomorrow and my first London by Foot walk of 2020 due in eight days. I've not postponed either but I'll keep a constant check on the news and keep people updated. I'm not worried about catching the disease as much as I am about spreading it but I'm also worried about people becoming socially more distant and isolated too. We're human beings. We're meant to be social creatures. But health comes first and if postponements are necessary they will happen. I'll use the time to catch up writing blogs and walks.

So, on top of everything else, last night was great research. I can see myself stealing some of Tom Bolton's ideas. He began his London's Lost Rivers talk at The Old King's Head by talking about the two books of lost river walks he's published. They're not just routes, they also see Tom muse, a la Sebald or Self (according to one impressed reader), on psychogeographical concerns, industry, politics, and even football.

They sound like must reads. The first one, ten years ago, focused on rivers you may have heard of. Rivers like the Fleet, the Tyburn, the Westbourne, and the Effra (there was even a close up of an Effra drain cover which I'm fairly certain was the same one that myself and a small group of friends investigated on our perambulation along the route of the Effra some years back). The second book looks into more obscure rivers, many of them long underground, many of them not much more than ditches or sewers now.

These rivers, the likes of the Bollo Brook, the Moselle, the Black Ditch, and the fantastically named Cock and Pye Ditch, would be the ones that last night's talk would take in but, first, Tom took time out to tell us that since he wrote the first book, ten years back, he's revisited the sites included and noticed just how drastically they've changed over that decade. London never stands still. London always changes. A walk along one river one year can be very different to a walk along the same river a few years later.

Accompanied by yet more wonderful photographs of drain covers, Tom spoke about the layering of London history and how we can decode it and he spoke of how, when trying to trace the route of almost completely forgotten rivers, he looks for the thalweg. Yes, the thalweg. A new word on me too. It means the line of lowest elevation within a valley or a watercourse and once you've spent some time looking for thalwegs you get pretty good at spotting them.

In the 1860s many rivers, the Fleet for example, were incorporated into Joseph Bazalgette's sewer network and we were shown both a hugely confusing 1930s map of the sewer system and a photograph of a walk Tom had taken in one of the sewers. It looks not unlike a tube line without a tube track in it. An impressive if slightly daunting looking circular brick network that, apparently, doesn't smell quite as bad as you might expect.

In fact it mostly smells of dishwasher water these days and, as such and due to it being underground, it gets pretty warm down there. The rats certainly like it, there's plenty of them - and you also have to wear weighted boots to keep you upright against the strong flow of the sewer water. It sounds an interesting experience but not one I'll be making a priority any time soon!

A brief history of some of London's more peculiar river sights (the famous tunnel that takes the Westbourne over the platform of the District Line at Sloane Square station, the Holborn Viaduct that once passed over the Fleet) and a couple of curious facts (the Oval cricket ground was built in to a bend of the Effra and the Fleet creates the western barrier of the City of London) it was time for Tom to break down the stories, briefly, of eight separate waterways. Others, such as the Stonebridge Brook and Parr's Ditch, were briefly alluded to. Ideas, perhaps, for a third book?

The rivers covered last night are the ones that tend to demarcate the edges of London boroughs, they tend to have a lot of light industry on their banks (due to the damp ground), and, until very recently, they've been seriously overlooked but with recent changes to the landscape of London, and building on ground that's hardly been touched for decades, they are now finding themselves at the very centre of change. Scenes of London tension in the 21st century.

The Black Ditch rises, or used to, in Stepney Green before curving round a fairly sizeable swathe of east London and emptying into the Thames near Limehouse, the only part that's not now underground. It gained its name due to its propensity towards pollution but it was also home to rats and outbreaks of cholera which, because it passed through some of the poorest parts of London, not much was done about.

One neighbourhood the Black Ditch passed through was Donkey Row, populated by haddock curers - not a trade that tended to attract the upper class, and another, Fenian Barracks, was famed for its rat infestation and, as its name suggests, was mostly populated by Irish immigrants. It passed through the original, and legendary, Chinatown in Limehouse and, at Limehouse Kiln Dock, you could buy a ticket to travel by boat to Australia. Free trips having previously only been available from Millbank. For prisoners.

The Bollo Brook runs from Hangar Lane to Acton and on to Chiswick where it creates a canal in the gardens of Chiswick House before going underground and eventually, of course, into the Thames. It runs through the honestly named South Acton Laundry District and past the former Wilkinson Sword factory.

The Stamford Brook, like many of the rivers under scrutiny, looks pretty complex. With one start in Acton and another in Willesden and three mouths (all in to the Thames) the only information Tom was offering up about it was that its multiple courses are most likely down to the land being highly floodable.

The first of two Lee tributaries under consideration was the Hackney Brook. Flowing down from Holloway past both the new and the old Arsenal stadiums (Arsenal, Tottenham, Chelsea, and Crystal Palace's football stadiums all stand near rivers - often because that land was cheap to buy in the days when football was still a working class game) and through Clissold Park where it meets with the New River as well as another part of the Hackney Brook that's come down from Stamford Hill.

It joins the Lee at Hackney Wick. Now, of course, underground - it was once one hundred foot wide and featured in an Arthur Machen story about a neighbourhood in Stoke Newington that it was only possible for a visitor to access once in their life (must read Machen, must read Sebald). A real, but possibly even more bizarre, neighbourhood on an island in the Hackney Brook's course was the circus neighbourhood where people kept elephants in their gardens!

Really? Apparently so. It's now entirely gone but during those crazy circus days you could tell you'd arrived by the turquoise and lime green streets. Other, more workaday, businesses thrived as well and Hackney Wick produced the world's first petroleum, the world's first plastic, and, most topically of all, Britain's first toilet paper. The Lesney's Matchbox toy factory was there too - which would have amazed my five year old self. I loved my Matchbox cars.

Another Lee tributary, and one we crossed on a walk last year, is the Moselle. The word's a derivation of Muswell so it's no surprise that it's formed from a series of many small tributaries up on Muswell Hill (and Highgate Wood). From there it flows down through Hornsey, Wood Green, and Tottenham (past the Spurs stadium(s)) before joining the Lee and its reservoirs. In The Compleat Angler, Izaak Walton noted it to be a particularly fine river for fishing.

Counter's Creek (later Chelsea Creek) runs through Notting Hill and Earl's Court before joining the Thames by the luxury flats of Chelsea Harbour. It runs partially through Kensal Green cemetery (where Isambard Kingdom Brunel is buried) and has become associated with Notting Dale and North Kensingston. The poorest part of Kensington whose name comes with associations of piggeries, poverty, and now the Grenfell fire. Impressive feats of industry like the Westway and Lots Road Power Station flank its course.

The Falcon Brook was a rare south London inclusion so it's a part of the talk I listened to intently. Several branches of it join together in Streatham before crossing Tooting Common and reaching the Thames at Battersea Creek (Battersea, like Bermondsey, was once an island - the clue is in the names:- sea/sey). The Falcon pub in Clapham, one I've been in (too) many times, was once a tourist attraction in its own right and people visited it to see a hollowed out elm tree (the things people did before television and the internet) and sit at its famously long, and round, bar. In those days the station was called Falcon Bridge station but took the name Clapham Junction despite being in Battersea in an attempt to steal some of the visitors of its more upmarket neighbour.

Last up was the Bloomsbury Ditch. Or the Cock and Pye Ditch which I'm definitely calling it from now on. An odd series of rectangles around Covent Garden on Tom's map, he explained it once ran round a large field called Seven Dials (now the name of a famous junction in the centre of Covent Garden) and had two channels that ran down to the Thames, one roughly on the course of what is now St Martin's Lane, the other following what became Drury Lane.

This was all, or at least mostly, information I didn't know and Tom delivered it with a skill and a panache that I fear my blogged account is missing. Best of all he ended the evening, during the Q&A, by saying that one of the main campaigners for upkeep and care of London's waterways is none other than former Undertones vocalist Feargal Sharkey. A good heart these days may still be hard to find (though clearly Feargal has one) but, it seems,  good rivers are never very far from our feet at all. More walks planned once this horrible coronavirus business is over. Whenever that may be.