so much as use it as a tool. I see myself as part of the same tradition as Carlos Castaneda. Whereas he got in touch with the spirit world through his use of Mexican psychoactive funguses, I buy cheap beer from Pricecutters in Highbury Vale and walk around muttering to myself, getting a clicking sound in my right knee (an old hurdling injury). I am also keen to reclaim these drinks from being the beverage of mad drunkards and to create a new form of Special Brew literature. Funnily enough, I found a book by Benjamin Clarke, a Victorian Hackney man who wrote a book called Glimpses of Ancient Hackney and Stoke Newington, in which he says that Hackney Brook used to be regarded as a river of beer. The Woolpack brewery, near Hackney Wick, churned out barrels of the sort of stuff that Londoners loved (and love) to drink – soapy mouthwash with no head. Discovering the alchemical secret of turning water into beer – it’s every man’s dream.
As my head buzzes pleasurably, I look up the road and see the river valley ahead of me. I’m ready to do the walk. But first I need a piss (beer into water reverse alchemy technique).
The northern branch of Hackney Brook apparently starts at Tollington Park, around Wray Crescent and Pine Grove. It’s just off Holloway Road, which is packed with people – dark-eyed lads with eighties jackets hawking tobacco; pale-faced chain-smoking girls with bandy legs and leggings tottering along with prams; huge-bellied tracksuit trouser blokes waddling from café to pub with a tabloid under their arm; Grand Victorian department stores turned into emporiums of second-hand electrical tat; eighties-style graffiti; students queuing at cash points; geezers flogging old office equipment piled high on the pavement. At no. 304 lived Joe Meek, the record producer of songs like ‘Telstar’, strange futuristic pop classics. Dang dang dong dong ding deng dang dung dooong. He must have been influenced by the strange atmosphere of this neighbourhood with its crazy adrenalin-fuelled rush of bodies, bumping against each other like electrons in matter, Oxford Street’s ugly sister.
I had been hoping to see some kind of plaque or ramblers’ guide at the start of the walk, possibly even a fountain bubbling with pure spring water. Instead I am faced with a large fenced-off mass of earth, a secret building site, with a lonely blue prefab building. Men with yellow hard hats stand around holding stuff – clipboards, balls of string, spanners, a spade. It’s a tried and tested workman’s trick. Hold something functional just in case the ‘boss’ happens to be driving past in his silver Jag and looks over. ‘Hmm, good to see Smithy is working hard with his ball of string.’
There are two ways of looking for a river’s source. You can do it the proper way with geologists, maps, digging equipment and people from Thames Water saying ‘please hold the line’. Or you can look for puddles. And right in the middle of this mass of dirt is a large pool of standing water. This must be it. At the far edge of the site is a JCB digger-type thing with tank tracks next to a big hole. It looks as though the blokes with yellow hats are planning to cover the water with the big pile of dirt. Then it dawns on me that this is the Area 51 of London rivers. They were finally trying to eradicate all trace of the famous Hackney Brook. Why? And who are they?
I quickly make a sketch of the scene on a Post-it Note, then retreat. One of the yellow hats spots me and mutters into a walkie talkie to one of his mates about five yards away, who is fidgeting with his ball of string. I quickly cross the road, staring into my A to Z, and pass a severe old grey brick Victorian house, the sort I imagine Charles Dickens had in mind when he described Arthur Clennam’s mother’s house in Little Dorrit: ‘An old brick house, so dingy as to be all but black, standing by itself within a gateway. Before it a square court-yard where a shrub or two and a patch of grass were as rank (which is saying much) as the iron railings enclosing them were rusty … weather-stained, smoke-blackened, and overgrown with weeds.’
And into a big estate. I keep looking behind me to check the men with yellow hats aren’t following. Who are the yellow hats, anyway? Historically, the yellow hat has denoted royalty – crowns and stuff (or religious folk with yellow auras/halos). Geoffrey Plantagenet, father of Henry II and precursor of the Plantagenet dynasty, was so-called because he wore a sprig of yellow broom (a Druid’s sacred plant) in his hat so his soldiers would recognize him. His daughter-in-law, Eleanor of Aquitaine, is credited with the creation of the Knights Templar, forerunners of the Freemasons. Whereas I watch a lot of Bob the Builder with my daughter – the show is about a bloke with a yellow hat who talks to machines and a scarecrow that comes alive.
A quick detour around the modern Iseldon (original name for Islington) village with its strange dips in the road as it goes down the river valley, and where the two heads of Hackney Brook would have converged, and then I head onto Hornsey Road, alongside the Saxon-sounding Swaneson House estate with its dank sixties/seventies shopping arcade with laundrette, grocers and chemists. When I was a kid I used to have books which showed what the new exciting world would look like, and most of the pictures were like the shopping arcade of the Swaneson Estate. What a crazily drab world must it have been in the sixties, with its Beatles harmonies, cups of tea and cakes, that we were suckered into thinking these shopping centres were the height of futuristic sophisticated living? To the left are some tired swings, then further up some beaten-up cars. Some local creative has recently taken a crowbar to one, leaving it like a smashed flower, powdery glass on the road, bits of ripped metal folding outwards. There’s a large pool of unhealthy-looking standing water, then another car, this time with no wheels. I have walked onto a set from The Sweeney, perfect for handbrake turns, jumping on and off bonnets, pointing a lot and calling people ‘slags’. It’s not so easy to find these bits of bombsitesque London now, even compared with five or six years ago. English Heritage should get areas like this listed.
Further up is a seventies-style Vauxhall estate car written over with some classic full colour graffiti. It should be in a gallery. But as a Time Out journo might say, (Mockney voiceover) ‘London is, in a very real sense, its own gallery.’
At the edge of the dirt track, near the road, is a sign for the estate managers who own the site – ‘state’ has been cut out of the sign, probably by some bright spark anarchist. Smash the state, please fuck the system NOW. That’s what Crass wanted, back on Bullshit Detector.
The living that is owed to me I’m never going to get,
They’ve buggered this old world up, up to their necks in debt.
They’d give you a lobotomy for something you ain’t done,
They’ll make you an epitome of everything that’s wrong.
Do they owe us a living?
Of course they do,
Of course they do.
Do they owe us a living?
Of course they do,
Of course they do.
Do they owe us a living?
OF COURSE THEY FUCKING DO.3
‘Do they owe us a living?’, Crass
Back on Hornsey Road I walk through the tunnel under the mainline railway to the north. The walls have the peeling skin of a decade and a half of pop posters. At the edges I can make out flaking scraps from years ago – Hardcore Uproar and Seal plus multiple layers of old graffiti.4
I’ve wandered away from the course of the river. Access is impossible due to the railway lines and the Ashburton Grove light industrial estate,
