London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City

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I like many features of this book. Following Chivers on his travels through familiar streets (and unfamiliar substrata beneath them) is extremely enjoyable; he's a knowledgeable and contemplative guide, and his narrative is peppered with sharp observations and interesting literary references. Further, his descriptions of various London neighbourhoods are vibrant and immersive, and he reveals just enough personal detail to make his presence in the text eccentric, engaging, and recognisably human. I don’t write poetry anymore. I started in my teens, and I see that as training. Training in language and training in sound. There are leaps of imagination I’m asking the reader to follow me on in the book, which probably come from that training as a poet. I think the surprise of that I would see as a poetic technique that I’ve taken into long form. This book is an interesting animal, as it is not a memoir, it is not a text book or a book of poetry – it is very much all of these things and has elements of social and personal history within it. There are maps and illustrations throughout and these complement the text. It was good being able to visualise the areas that Chivers was discussing – and I learnt some interesting geological and geographical terms that have bypassed me up to this point in my life. ‘Alluvial’ seemed to feature a lot so I might start flinging that into casual conversation now!

Tom Chivers, with the forensic eye of an investigator, the soul of a poet, is an engaging presence; a guide we would do well to follow.' Iain Sinclair London has a long history, for the past 2000 thousand years, it has grown to the financial and cultural global city of today whilst surviving several invasions, one major fire, a plague or two. Bronze Age bridges have been found but the people that made it their own were the Romans. They settled there and made their city at the point where it was possible to cross. The river meant they could control the local area and still have access to the resources and might of their empire. Tom Chivers brings a poet's sensibility to this book about the hidden parts of the capital, mixing the past with the present, the known with the unknown and his personal story with social history and geology.' Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other Exactly what is more or less permanent or transitory is unclear. The course of ancient rivers become shifted into sewers while more recent waste threatens to degrade imperfectly and become lodged in the geology.So many of us are unconsciously connected to the lost rivers. They determined the lie of the land. You can walk down Marylebone Lane: the exact bend of the Lane is the bend of the River Fleet. The curve of the architecture around St Pancras station follows the Fleet. There are lots of examples where we are unconsciously following these lost rivers. It’s a kind of startling revelation when you find out about London’s lost rivers.

In recent months, we’ve seen huge flooding. In a way, that is a warning that we need to be more mindful of how we treat water. Not just the water that comes out of our tap, but also how we build on places where water is indigenous to that landscape. He has released two pamphlets of poetry, The Terrors (Nine Arches Press, 2009; shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award) and Flood Drain (Annexe Press, 2012), and two full collections, How To Build A City (Salt Publishing, 2009) and Dark Islands (Test Centre, 2015). His poems have been anthologised in Dear World & Everything In It (Bloodaxe Books, 2013) and London: A History in Verse (Harvard University Press, 2012). Given how personal your book sometimes is, what can London’s lost rivers and the book itself tell its readers? Perhaps even about themselves? It may, of course, be a bit cheeky of a thirty-something to offer us a memoir of a rather ordinary life but that is where the charm of the book lies. The ordinary life, the humanity of Chivers, being a Londoner, a sense of place and a sense of the past combine to give a feel for London today.No city can survive without water, and lots of it. Today we take the stuff for granted: turn a tap and it gushes out. But it wasn't always so. For centuries London, one of the largest and richest cities in the world, struggled to supply its citizens with reliable, clean water. The Mercenary River tells the story of that struggle from the middle ages to the present day. Chivers becomes Everylondoner. The outsider who thinks he knows London from visits (including commuting) or having lived there in the past gets a subtle sense of both change and permanence, the recognisable place but also its continuing transformation when you cease to be there.