The Tyburn

“Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reach’d the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean”.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The "secret river" has long been an obsession of dabblers, perhaps since the times when we lived in caves, and our ancestors listened to the murmer of distant torrents tumbling through unseen chambers below. Of course there must be underground confluences everywhere we walk, but in London, the ever-layered city, these hidden places can be accessed.

map of london's smaller and 'lost' rivers. click to enlarge

Numerous 'lost' rivers flow beneath the city's streets, the most famous of which is The Fleet. Less well known is The Tyburn, which runs under a large part of the more valuable bits of the West End (including, sewer dwelling terrorists please note, Buckingham Palace) before trickling out into the Thames at Pimlico.

The Tyburn outfall at Vauxhall Bridge, pic courtesy of The Londonist

The course does not fully discharge here. The water pools and creeps beneath the city. Culverts carry the main flow eastwards under the embankment all the way to Barking Creek, along the elaborate subterranean arteries of Bazalgette, surely one of London's noblest achitects.

En route, the river's gurgle can be heard. On Tachbrook street in Pimlico, the sound of the river is clearly audible, rising up through the blank eyed manhole covers, allowing you to hear what the poet Glyn Maxwell called 'the city-licking sound of water moving slowly through the Thames like years in thought.'And in one special place, the mysterious brook is claimed to resurface and be visible - in the basement of Grey's Antiques in Mayfair.



This is such a lovely prospect and a fine sight that one wishes it to be true. Unfortunately, when you consider that the entire underground course is no longer really a river at all, but one of London's most noisome sewers (Officially The King's Scholars' Pond Sewer), the provenance of the crystal clear waters babbling through the antique shop begins to look a little muddied.

But the true pulse of the Tyburn is too strong to be contained in a chi-chi drinking trough. Tendrils curl outwards, luring the curious to unearth it's obscurity. Certainly, The Tyburn has admirers, foremost of which are the members of The Tyburn Angling Society.

Run by a property developer with tiresomely predictable faux-eccentricity, the society claims a royal charter of 959, has a Latin motto, traditions, and even a Nicholas Soames. So far, so forgettable. But their secretary, James Bowdidge, has managed to come up with a plan that, whilst whimsical and unrealistic, is also rather intriguing. Bowdidge suggests that we lay waste to great swathes of the most valuable parts of London, demolishing the buildings standing above the river's old course, and opening the poisoned Tyburn up to the air.

Berkeley Square, as reimagined by Bowdidge

Who would miss the great grey lumps of Mayfair, when we could be reconnecting the inland with the sea, irrigating the concrete deserts and opening up the scleroid arteries of the great river, letting light and air and crisp clear water run freely through the streets?

South Molton Street, by Bowdidge. Abandoned shopping trolleys and bags full of drowned puppies not pictured.

River views

Let us start with the river - all things begin with the river and we shall probably end there, no doubt - but let's wait and see how we go.

So begins William Boyd's most recent novel, Ordinary Thunderstorms. It began with the river in more ways than one according to the author:

The idea for the novel started when I read that every year in London they take 60 bodies a year out of the Thames, usually at the bend in the river near Greenwich. That's more than one a week, but you never hear about them. And then I thought immediately about the opening scenes of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and the body being pulled out of the river. And I figured out that there was a way of writing a novel in the way that Our Mutual Friend does, from the very top of society to the very bottom. It all began to come together.

I found the book curiously underpowered and often sloppily written, from the very first sentence: '...we shall probably end there, no doubt'. Well, what's it to be?

I went back to Our Mutual Friend, which contains passages like this one:

The squall had come up, like a spiteful messenger before the morning; there followed in its wake a ragged tear of light which ripped the dark clouds until they showed a great grey hole of day.

The were all shivering, and everything about them seemed to be shivering; the river itself, craft, rigging, sails, such early smoke as there yet was on the shore. Black with wet, and altered to the eye by white patches of hail and sleet, the huddled buildings looked lower than usual, as if they were cowering, and had shrunk with the cold. Very little life was to be seen on either bank, windows and doors were shut, and the staring black and white letters upon wharves and warehouses "looked." said Eugene to Mortimer, "like inscriptions over the graves of dead businesses."

This was Dickens' last completed novel and passages like the one above strike me as very modern. It appears to sit just a little upstream of another description, perhaps the most famous of the estuarial Thames, from Conrad's Heart of Darkness:

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

Perhaps it's unfair on Boyd to measure him against these two masters but there's really nothing in his book to compare - almost literally. It's a thriller so we shouldn't expect too many literary extravagances but nevertheless the language is so flat and indistinct it fails to draw us in. Here's the main description of the river from the first couple of pages:

Adam walked over to the high stone balustrade that curved the roadway into Chelsea Bridge and, leaning on it, looked down at the Thames. The tide was high and still coming in, he saw, the normal flow of water reversed, flotsam moving surprisingly quickly upstream, heading inland, as if the sea were dumping its rubbish in the river rather than the usual, other way round... [H]e didn't feel as if he were in the middle of a huge city at all: the trees, the quiet force of the surging, tidal river beneath his feet, that special luminescence that a body of water throws off, made him grow calmer - he'd been right to come to the river - odd how these instincts mysteriously drive you, he thought.

Not bad but hardly captivating. It's imprecise, it lacks particularity: 'high' (repeated), 'normal', 'surprisingly', 'usual', 'a body', 'special', 'mysteriously'. It tips its hat to the river's mystical influences but can't be bothered to do any more. You feel neither the reality of the river nor its resonances and, as a consequence, the character and his context are deprived of depth and meaning.

But how about a more contemporary comparison? This is from Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall:

He steps into his barge for the first time, and on the river, Rafe tells his news. The rocking of the boat beneath them is imperceptible. The flags are limp; it is a still morning, misty and dappled, and where the light touches flesh or linen or fresh leaves, there is a sheen like the sheen on an eggshell: the whole world luminous, its angles softened, its scent watery and green. He stares down into the water, now brown, now clear as the light catches it, but always moving; the fish in its depths, the weeds, the drowned men with bony hands swimming. On the mud and shingle there are cast up belt buckles, fragments of glass, small warped coins with the kings' faces washed away. Once when he was a boy he found a horseshoe. A horse in the river? It seemed to him a very lucky find. But his father said, if horseshoes were lucky, boy, I would be the King of Cockaigne.

Pointing out the differences seems superfluous (the river is treated brilliantly throughout her novel).

Ordinary Thunderstorms isn't a bad book; it's readable and diverting. But one gets the sense of an opportunity missed. As the doorman of a riverside tavern remarks in Our Mutual Friend, "There's ever so many people in the river." But you will look in vain for them in Ordinary Thunderstorms: the river remains firmly confined by its own pages. When Boyd begins, 'Let us start with the river...,' he's stepping into a tradition in which he barely even dabbles.