Of Place (2): The View from Folly Bridge

My own “place” is not far away, and on the same river as that of Nash, the Thames (see "Of Place (1)"). As the Abingdon Road approaches Oxford city centre, it crosses a bridge. From the road this bridge is not particularly long, a slight lump in overused tarmac. But it straddles a great swathe of water, and still incorporates two Norman arches, at least a hundred metres away from the Thames’ north bank. Not for nothing was it named “Grand Pont”.

The Norman French gives the name to the area just south of the river. The river bed gives its name to the city – this is the site of the ford for oxen after which the Saxon town is called. And it’s claimed that Roger Bacon, the friar who devised “scientific” theories for sight, among other achievements, had his laboratory at the north end of the bridge, in a gatehouse structure that almost certainly didn’t exist in the 13th century. This “folly” is supposed to have given the present crossing its name, but equally it may also come from the Norman landowner who ordered its first construction – one Foillet.

Until 1994 the “head of the river” was a warehouse where goods coming up the Thames could be stored. The pub that now occupies the old structure still has a crane in its garden, the former wharf – now crammed with tables, and in summer with students and tourists.

My love for this place does not derive from all the history I’ve just recited. It’s the river, the view, that’s the main thing. I must make the effort to describe it. If anything writing is the defeat of the idea that “you can’t really say what it’s like.”

So – the sandstone wall rises to belly height and the slightest duck of the head shows eddies and backflows in the river as it passes round the bridge piers. As you slow to look, a bus, a row of cars, has stopped at the lights just south and just north. The thresh of engines and the stink of fumes are not overwhelming, but they clamber into the back of your mind just the same.

Where the light of the sky (usually cloudy) hits the water, it’s a flashy white, a spillage of white. Otherwise it’s like tea with not quite enough milk. Its surface is occasionally hatched over by the colours of the trees. I write this when the trees are bare, and seem ratchets of darkness on the river. But you mustn’t forget the sprays of spring blossom, the stain of green summer or the flashiness of autumn. In rain the water blurs, unsure of itself. At night long lines of lamplight drape the surface. They deepen the view out from the city’s glow. Those odd days when fog is thick enough, a sheet hangs by the side of the bridge, trailing its hem over occasional geese. I pass this way almost every day, on foot or on the bus, and I always look.

When there is enough light I see the river. It’s often swilling with boats – in summer, punts and rowboats from the hire place by the pub, and pleasure steamers, blue hulled, filled with families – and sometimes ravers accompanied by breakbeats. When it’s term time at the university, rowing crews swirl the reflective surface. All the time the narrowboats line the right bank, drenched in woodsmoke when the temperatures are low.

The water is lined with trees, horse chestnut, willow, plane. Like all trees in this country they have surprising moments – distilled greens, extravagant yellows, slimy black in a January storm. All are mature, or near it. Birds swing across the water – black, white, indeterminate brown. One February day I saw a kingfisher among the tables outside the pub. In the distance, beyond where the sides of the river seem to meet, there are hedged fields.

But changes every day mean that if I were to try to capture all the features of this place I’d be writing myself into an infinite corner. Like Nash I can only make a gesture at it – give the outline, and fill in the rest with my own perception. Which brings me to the question, why is this place important to me?

Familiarity, certainly. The history, too, although I learned most of that after I became interested. The fact that I’ve done a large amount of writing just to one side, at the pub window that gives a view of the river, or more often in the garden outside. On cold nights I’m often alone there, but for the odd shivering smoker. I watch the geese rush out between the piers of the bridge, ducks and coots drifting among the eddies close to the bank. The water churns, shifts, retreats and turns, takes the lights of the buildings and buses on the bridge. It gives back indistinct shapes of light that always seem, to be leading away from me. I write to the sound of the traffic, the birds, the voices of people on the road, the trees, the rain or swollen river.

I think that this interplay is what makes the place for me. As I stand on the old bridge I see the trees and the engines, the clouds and the buildings, the geese and the rowers, the river and its fixed embankments.

I’m sympathetic to the view that this celebration is exactly what’s wrong with modern, Western humanity’s relationship with the world: conditioned to an urban reflex we latch on to token remnants of “wildness”, grant to nature what Jeremy Harding described in the LRB as “full diplomatic status”, and generally remain unconscious of what has been destroyed to create the vision. We might also be unconscious of what’s under threat even as we stand and enjoy the view. We are placeboed into passivity while the evidence of destruction rumbles by behind, is under our feet, fills our lungs.

I can’t deny any of it. I try to remember all these things. I take a few steps where I can to reverse, halt, or, mostly, slow the pace of the damage. And I see in this view a vision of things as they are – the green world shaped by the human. Even if we died out more rapidly than the dodo, the world would still be shaped and scarred for centuries by our actions. To me some of the results have proved beautiful. I know that’s not enough.

*

There’s some consolation in the glare of Nash’s late pictures. He was a veteran of the Great War, a man in ill health, a man who saw clearly the wreckage made by the Second War. His Totes Meer, a seascape made up of smashed German planes, inspired by the debris of destroyed hardware in Cowley Dump east of central Oxford. He still had the rage to look, look, look and keep looking even though he couldn’t get near the place that loomed so large in his mind.

When I look down at the river, I can tell you where it goes – I’ve walked alongside, on the Thames Path and beyond. In south Essex I’ve watched it become a sea even before it touches salt water. But its disappearance into the horizon here seems to create the chance that it flows through any idea of the world, any place that might be. And once in a while the Thames is in flood, and the balance of things I’ve described is thrown out, creating other potential balances. Then, everything is water, except the trees. I don’t want to see that – I live on the flood plain. But still, the river will, and again I’ll have to try to understand it. Maybe it’s this murmur of destruction that gives the place its strength.