Water Ways

Dust on my shoes, heat. Figures approaching, disappearing. These are my main impressions of London’s artificial waterways.

I know best the stretch of the Limehouse Cut between Devons Road and Limehouse Basin, and Regents Canal between the Basin and Mile End Park. But also there are the junctions between the culverted Hackney Brook and the River Lea Navigation, where a footsore journey across Hackney ended amid light industrial units, a storage warehouse and the frazzled signs for a London “Green Way”. (See The Green of East 14 for some thoughts on the Lea itself.)

But I’ll concentrate on the waterways most familiar to me. The dust comes from the towpath’s gravelly top, which scuffs and slips underfoot. I imagine a haze of its spreading across the surface of the water, misting it with yellow.

You would think that the heat would relent so close to the water. It doesn’t, but intensifies. Some of this must be due to the warmth reflecting from the gritty towpath. More belts out from the brick walls that often rise from the walker’s level up to where the rest of London is moving. Although a hot day is nowhere near enough to start melting something like brick, the atoms within the walls are nevertheless agitated, holding onto the sun’s energy until the air next to them is cooler than they are. Then the energy passes back out of the bricks, into the air, and into anyone passing.

These warmed bricks are almost always a burnt brown flecked with black, streaked with yellow. The eye confronting a wall of them can pick out endless variations on these basic colours, but more frequently mine spend time on the shape of the building.

People live alongside the canals – in social housing, long rows of doors and balconies. Always someone moving, children coming home or adults heading out. In other places, such as where the Limehouse Cut runs by Limehouse Town Hall, posh flats have been built. These are always deserted, windows closed, the occasional bike or bit of furniture visible. All of this accommodation is fairly recent, and those old brown bricks are nowhere to be seen. But between the developments stand the walls of industrial buildings. They’re often derelict. Buddleia spread out of windows or cling in cracks running up the walls. The bricks belly out where the structure’s giving way, and the sky is pure white between the roof struts. I’ve no particular desire to see all these buildings back in production, belching out smoke and cramming workers into unsafe conditions, but it always strikes me as odd that these spaces are unused and collapsing in the heart of London.

Still. There’s something perversely beautiful about this vision of disintegration – things making new combinations of the organic and manufactured, reshaping. The movement of ducks, coots and moorhens on the regimented water surface is another aspect of the same things, as is the sweep of butterflies among the waterside trees and occasional stands of reeds. Always within a few metres there are roads and modern buildings fulfilling their designated roles. There are people of all kinds making whatever choices are available to them, determined by jobs, families and other obligations. That’s not to say that the birds, insects and plants are “free” in any meaningful sense, but what they do is not planned, not preassigned a moral role at any given moment.

That these artificial waterways, built to carry working traffic, should be outside the city’s structure in these respects is a key attraction for me. They are also echoes of older waterways that now run under concrete, through pipes, sometimes diverted from their old routes. These are the many old tributaries of the Thames (some of them are the subject of my poetry chapbook London Water). Some remain above ground for part of their length – the Wandle, Counter’s Creek (as Chelsea Creek), Deptford Creek – but in a guise not dissimilar to that of the canals I walk along these days.

There were good reasons for culverting the Fleet, the Peck, the Westbourne and the others. They were full of filth, and diseases of damp still had a higher incidence along their routes than elsewhere in London even after the burials were complete.  Regents Canal and the Limehouse Cut are far healthier waterways than the true rivers, despite the milk bottles that bob in the reeds, and the bunches of nameless matter slowly rotating in the dark water by the banks. The dads and sons fishing the Canal at the first lock up from Limehouse Basin wouldn’t have had much luck if they’d been trying in the Walbrook that runs through (under) the City.

But still, London buried almost all the rivers it began with, and dug itself others, for the efficiency of trade. Those working channels are now almost empty, except for intermittent commuters and wanderers like me, all on the towpath. The sound of ripples on their surface is clearly audible from walking distance, but once you’re up on the road they are hard to see even as a line between buildings.

A long time ago, maybe at the Museum of the Docklands not long after it opened, I heard about a campaign to unculvert all the hidden rivers. It might still be going on – I haven’t heard of it since, and it does seem a bit impractical. I often wonder what London would be like if it succeeded. I think of streets stopping short at thin lines of green water, and the white spine of rapids undercutting Marble Arch and Buck House (both on the Tybourne). But equally the resurrected rivers may turn out to be the same as the canals – lengths of uneven colour that I walk in the heat while figures shimmer in the distance like white butterflies.