On The Beach

Temporal beach - time and tide
There is a tidal beach at Vauxhall on the South side of the river with views down to Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament and up to Battersea Reach with its power stations and gas works. To the left Vauxhall Bridge spans the Thames on three sturdy buttresses,the traffic rumbling overhead in an unending stream of rushing metal, lights and humanity that never seems to cease  night and day.

The river is singular in destination but many tributaries join their waters to flow through the Thames Basin and out towards the North Sea through the disappearing marshes and gravel pits of Gravesend and Tilbury, the last home of the Dartford Warbler, a toe hold in the wastes of scrap yards and pylons. The Tyburn runs down from Marble Arch and emerges from a stygian cave just the other side of the Bridge beneath one of the last old buildings surviving on the north embankment. To the South side of Vauxhall bridge at river level is the outflow of the River Effra, one of the lost rivers of south London, long since covered over and channelled into underground culverts. The rivers name appears above the arched portal. Its tunnel mouth looms like an entrance to the underworld, marked by a strange wooden beacon whose purpose I can only guess at. 

                    Tyburn tributary                                                          Effra tributary

Further down river the Quaggy quaggles its way through Catford and into the Creek. The Creek runs down from Deptford through the fast disappearing remnants of riverside industry to join the river just before Greenwich. Greenwich with its embarrassment of cultural  and historical riches, Naval, architectural and astronomical, a temporal ground zero. What has not been gentrified round here has been swept away, the old wharf names and riverside works and wharehouses fade, remembered if at all in a new street name, Quarter or Quadrant perhaps.  Further down river past the Isle of Dogs, Mud Chute, runs The Lee navigation on the north side. The names of the reaches like a magical litany. Pass the arsenal and down to Woolwich. Tugs bring gravel up to the cement works at Deptford. The bridge still rises to let them in and out of the Creek.

 South London is littered with lost and underground streams just as the waterways themselves are littered with the detritus of the city. Garden fences, footballs, shopping trolleys and all the other usual suspects find their way. You can catch glimpses of these underground rivers where they run into the light for brief spells or sometimes a name can be a clue - rivers ran through Camberwell and Stockwell along Coldharbour Lane and Brixton Water Lane and riverside Lambeth was marshland  recalled in the name of Lower Marsh Street. In fact South London is/ was riddled with brooks, streams and little rivers some ran mills and tanneries most became open or bricked in sewers.
 Not facts but osmosis...  this river of information has just seeped in somehow, like rising damp. Have I been infected with spores, a factoidal fungus, the mycelium running everywhere beneath the surface unseen. A map of invisible tracery that burst forth fruiting bodies that split to scatter factoids to the wind and rain and I am not about to check the veracity but I bet if you listen at that drain cover at the corner of the street, the one that has a miasmic fog issuing from it on a dark wintery night, listen and you will hear the gurgling of the rushing waters below your feet.

On the fore shore that appears twice a day, among the shingle, flints and mud I sense times flow. This place is thick with the past hovering just out of view. At dusk, the liminal hour, the perimeters blur. Here and now a time slip away, yesterdays blend. The river is conductor and connector. Screw up your eyes and the river blurs and runs. Pagan platform, offerings to the river god. Roman crossing, and oyster beds. Buddicca firing the city before death and defeat. A river dense in traffic. Tall ships, sloops and rigs, tugs and steamers, ropes and tar, ship yards, chandlers, the smoking stacks of potteries, a ramshackle water front, river men cries, dark steps and alley ways, drunken singing from the pubs, gambling dens, snugs and brothels. The dockers, the docks, loading and unloading - sugar, spice, tobacco and all the treasures that the trade winds can bestow. The agonies and misery, the prison hulks, slavery and transportation all passed this way. Vestiges and ghosts still squat along the shore smoking long pipes and are themselves just shadows - reflections from an endless edifice of glass and spectral towers that hover shimmering in their place, just coming into sight and stretching far as the eye can see down to the rivers bend past Nine Elms to Battersea. The future river front.

The evening sunset lights the shore stretching shadows over the dark water and rendering everything in chiaroscurio with an extraordinary intensity.
Beyond Vauxhall bridge the river shines silver and bronze. Ripple tides catch dusty pink from the pollution haze as the sun dips and slides towards its broken reflection. The embankment walls rise emerald green above the tide pools as evening lights begin to blink on their sulfurous trails stretch across the rivers black.

The river sweats

Oil and tar

The barges drift

With the turning tide

Red sails

Wide

To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.

The barges wash

Drifting logs

Down Greenwich reach

Past the Isle of Dogs.

                            From The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

Above crouches MI6. M for monster, M for Menacing. Squat and lowering on a leaf and litter blown terrace. Posture defensive, it hunkers down. A ziggurat, sacred dwelling place of the ancient god of war or an abandoned prop on the back lot of a sci-fi film. A vast gun emplacement from a future war.
 At embankment level small knot gardens peppered with fountains perhaps attempt to recall the long lost Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, but this is no Xanadu and it is the Thames that churns muddily by not Alph the sacred river. The small temple of apollo structures on the river front appear as if abandoned, empty and open to the air these summer houses of a forgotten mystery cult are really barren dystopian cyphers, an architectural joke, no fauns play here. One is caged in and autumn leaves have blown through the bars but it is not clear whether they are meant to keep something out or something in. The building is crouched and watching, these fountains and follies are its venus fly traps. It sits on the fore shore like the remnant of some great city of which the builders are long since gone and the purpose of which is forgotten. Does The Man In The Maze wander this wind blown spit?

Along the wall where the tides rise and fall these guardians stare out. Gripping rings in their teeth as if some giant ship might someday need to moor up here. Meanwhile from the bridge silent figures watch the ever flowing waters.