Half the BBC lives in Kentish Town, although to me it's a Capital Radio-blaring migraine in 3D. I associate it with those yellow police signs carrying the headline "Did you see what happened?", followed by some or all of the following words: "youth", "youths", "serious assault", "1.30am".
Twenty-five years ago, however, it inspired a brilliant history book: The Fields Beneath, by Gillian Tindall, which was prompted by an inscription above the door of a Victorian terrace house in Kentish Town: "The fields lie sleeping underneath". If you walk through Kentish Town having read the book, you see ghosts on all sides, but you will be glad of their company. In a way that I, as a baffled and appalled northerner, find very soothing, Tindall explains Kentish Town, quells it, puts it in context. I was particularly struck by these words in her opening chapter: "Kentish Town lies neatly in the valley of the Fleet . . ."
The amazing thing is that word "neatly", but then the lost rivers of London once determined a great deal. These tributaries of the Thames are almost all entombed in concrete now, and sometimes turned into sewers. Today, the Fleet itself is a cavernous storm relief drain. When a downpour starts, there comes first along the tunnel, as Eric Newby once noted, "an apocalyptic wind", followed by the roaring waters.
When London is eventually invaded by domestic coalition forces (which will comprise Yorks and Lancs in uneasy alliance, with the likes of Notts and Lincs brought along for PR purposes) one pretext for the action will be the liberation of the London rivers. It's not as if they took up much room, but no, they had to be suppressed to make way for even more lovely houses and roads - and that after having been defecated into for hundreds of years. The only one that's prospered, the Thames, is the only one big enough to stand up for itself, although the Fleet did manage to wreck the construction of the Metropolitan Line in 1862.
Sometimes, feeling like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver ("One day a real rain will come . . ."), I fantasise about the minor waterways of London having their revenge, and these dreams begin with the bursting of the gargantuan pipe, containing the River Westbourne, that's slung across the platforms of Sloane Square Tube station. On a rainy day, I swear I've noticed that pipe start to judder, with shaky rivulets forming on the outside . . .
If this sounds anti-London, my response would be threefold. First, yes, it is anti-London; second, I believe it to be a mark of the true cockney that he is in favour of the Thames tributaries being kept above ground, a fact manifest by his habit of going fishing every day in the River Lea; third, the Thames tributaries, all 20 or so of them, are going to break back through to the surface one day, either on our terms or theirs.
