Phrases like ‘lost London’, ‘forgotten London’, ‘secret London’ make me think of pub quizzes and toilet books. That there are culverted subterranean rivers flowing under central London from Hampstead Heath to the Thames, and were once canals in Camberwell and Kensington, is quite interesting but not, for me, inspiring. This essay is about the places with rivers and canals that do not need to be sent underground, or filled in, to feel lost, forgotten, and secret.
Roman London was half a square mile, about the size of Hyde Park. In ᴀᴅ 65 it was being rebuilt after the Boudiccan revolt, and a thousand years later Greater London – over six hundred square miles – was established under the government of Harold Wilson. To move between these, imagine an immense systole, which in a second contracts the pools of the Port of London, the chambers of Thamesis, and transports you along twenty-mile tributary-arteries to places that still haven’t quite accepted their swallowing by the metropolis, and beyond to those Home County swathes within the orbit, since the mid-1980s, of the M25.
In search of day trips I have found myself walking the waterways, always Thameswards and listening to an audiobook, through this zone, the grey-green belt, river basin of the Middle Saxons, country of the coal-tax posts, what Orwell called ‘the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London’. This is from the final sentence of Homage to Catalonia, published in 1937. The following year the Green Belt Act was passed, thanks to which, even ninety years on, much of it still isn’t very built-up, hence places like Crews Hill, in Enfield, now being proposed as locations for new towns.
What are these places like? They certainly don’t have the status of Hampstead. There are horses but they’re not horsy. There are England flags, standard of the displaced cockney. The unmaintained infrastructure is what the state thinks such people deserve – blocked paths, few benches, signs for trails and greenways, put up by various authorities, that last for a couple of miles and then disappear. I sometimes wonder how much it would cost to put all this right compared to a few hours of pensions and government procurement. But maybe if they spent a billion getting rid of all the litter and dog shit, it would just come back in a few weeks. They have the quality evoked by the word ‘chase’ in ‘Enfield Chase’ – half-wooded; half-enclosed but half-wild. I like them. I like the angler posing for photos with an enormous mirror carp he’s just taken out of the Basingstoke Canal. And I like the heedless birdsong sung over the dim roar of something, bourdon note of a distant organ. This is the score of the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London’s manorial wastes.
