River Music – The Ravensbourne

el agua siempre encuentra su camino – Victor Rodriguez Nuñez, thaw/deshielos

Back along the Ravensbourne – that was my plan, although part of me was saying “why bother?”. In many ways this was a walk taken only for completeness’ sake. A few weeks before I’d walked most of the river’s last stretch, crossing between Deptford and Greenwich in the dark and unsure of my way. I wrote about it a little on Of Herons. The second walk was along the last few hundred metres of the Deptford side of the river, past the statue of Peter the Great and along to the bleak mud-and-reeds of misnamed Twinkle Park (I’m doing these walks in an hour’s break from my office in Canary Wharf). All I needed to do was go along the Greenwich side, then cut back along the Thames to the Cutty Sark and the DLR.

But Creek Road was full of the harsh air-scrape of traffic, and the pavement crowded with slow-moving people. I didn’t really catch their words, only the shape of their voices, and the odd lungful of cigarette smoke as I sidestepped them and their dogs. Children’s noise battered at the gate of a school, phones sounded, crossing bleeped. In short, it was all the racket of urban life. I don’t mind all that, but I needed to get to the bank of the Creek and get the journey over with.

Part of the problem was that I didn’t think I’d particularly enjoy the destination. The mouth of the Ravensbourne (aka Deptford Creek) is now squatted on by yet another shiny-modern steel and glass development. There are so many of these homogenised structures of moderate-to-extreme well-offness along London’s waterways that it can feel as though the whole city is being crystallised along its veins, as if in a JG Ballard story. Meanwhile the social housing across the road retains its glum 20th-centuryness.

As I said, I was doing this walk for completeness. I am a bit of a London completest. From my previous office I walked every street in the area once surrounded by London’s city walls. I’ve been to each of the churches (or their sites) mentioned in the common version of “Oranges and Lemons”. I’ve been to each church designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor. I’ve walked the full lengths of the culverted Thames tributaries that flowed near my old London addresses. Last year I systematically went to every interesting park, “eco park”, water body and building I could find within easy reach of Canada Water (partly because no one else I know has ever even got off at the station).

Sometimes going to all these places means dull plodding, as along Creek Road. Occasionally it can be scary. Sometimes it leads to amazing sights – a small City garden in the shell of a bombed-out church, the shape of a kestrel high over an industrial estate.

Water often draws me to places. I could wax lyrical about why – but I’ll leave that to Peter Ackroyd in Thames: Sacred River. All I’ll say is that in the Iron Age in particular, veneration of water was most intense. Objects were sacrificed to rivers; the Thames in London is full of such votive offerings. In Oxford, I live not far from where the Thames and Cherwell meet. On the nights of full moon some local neo-pagans gather there to celebrate the spiritual force of the two currents combining. These things resonate in my ideas, but I want to see the boundary, the line where one river becomes another, takes on a distinct name, history and combination of chemicals.

Another aspect of walking with water, especially in London, is the change it brings to sounds. How quite the city can be – almost silent, but for the punch of waves on concrete walls, the hiss of a single passing boat. Ducks, geese, cormorants, gulls may call or slap the surface, landing, but cars and voices can disappear. Once, on a clear day while I was on a “circumnavigation” of the Isle of Dogs, I heard someone singing on the Deptford side. So water and the change of sound could be added to completeness as reasons for walking down that last bit along the Ravensbourne, and they overcame my willing ness to do the trudging to get there.

No walk is just a ticking off of boxes (just ask Richard Long), but this one seemed to be getting a bit too close to that. On the left, what remained of some sort of dock at the river’s top end; on my right Waitrose and the bland faces of the flats. Ahead of me were signs announcing CCTV, parking restrictions, penalties, all the increasingly common panoply of privatised public space.

I walked on silver concrete slabs, and looked down into the Ravensbourne’s brown backwater. A few mallards bobbed around, a cormorant’s neck snaked back on itself. The bridge at the “neck” of the river – where it started a final bend before reaching the Thames – was feathered, like a horse’s ankles, with buddleia. Under the black steel span the water extended its steady colour, and the embankment walls were a dull splashed grey.

Sound has changed, as I had hoped it would. I could hear the water knocking against the edges of the estate I walked round. I heard the wind holding itself to my head. The noises of Creek Road had faded, and there were no voices, no phones. Only my steps and breathing represented the human between the windows and the water.

At the brink of the Ravensbourne, where it fed through a gap in the Thames’ side, I stopped and leant on the gleaming (ultra-new) rail. The water was defying the idea of a current.

Along the Thames the tide was coming in. Sandy beaches were submerging along the banks’ length, far past here, beyond almost all of London. Great ridge-and-furrow waves – not as wide but as clearly defined as in an old field – marched sideways across the Thames and back along the Ravensbourne. Water doesn’t always flow downhill.

There was a music to this back flow. At first I couldn’t work out what it was. It’s hard to describe without explaining what caused it. The best I can do is say that the notes were arrhythmic, hollow, staccato, and seemed to be coming wholly out of the air. They clustered and crowded, subsided, then rose again in a flurry. I had to think hard before I spotted where they really came from.

Around the mouth of the Ravensbourne, along the embanked edges of the land, run ladders of planks. Each is two or three metres long, and is separated from those either side by a few centimetres. They extend a good way above the waterline, and presumably reach below it as far as the riverbed. They sit loose from the plastic-sheeted earth of the bank itself. I imagine that they’re intended to protect the banks (and the foundations embedded in them) from the force of the current, colliding vessels and, in this case, the incoming tide.

The sound I heard was of the inflow of water striking these wooden planks. Each “ridge” in the water played along the wood, as along a xylophone. So long as the plank in question remained above the water after the wave had passed, it would resonate with that peculiar music.

At the end of Ted Hughes’ The Iron Man, the defeated space dragon enables the music of the spheres to be heard on the Earth once again. (If this sounds ridiculous to you, you really need to read the book.) This music is the sound of the universe working in harmony. The idea drew on the ancient belief that a the chord is created by the spheres of the Ptolemaic universe vibrating together. It also draws on Hughes’ conviction that humanity has lost connection with the way in which the world really works, but that by paying attention to the environment, to the “natural”, that connection could be restored:

                                “They’ve made it again,
Which means the world’s still working, the Creation’s
Still waking refreshed, our summer’s
Still all to come – “

[from “Swifts”]

I’ve written before of how suspicious I am of the word “natural” in any English environment. Still, there is much to be said for the argument that greater attention to our surroundings, to what has been incompletely built over, abstracted or sterilised, can give an insight into different ways of being in the world.

The “music” of the Ravensbourne was not a natural sound. But it was the sound of things proceeding independently of human will, of the interaction of the human and the non-human at the heart of the quintessential urban space. I wonder if understanding, or even just appreciating this sort of interaction is the key to finding a balance between human life and what remains of the “natural” world.

I couldn’t get all the way round the horrible new development – workmen were still drilling and yelling along the Thames side. I went back between the building site and a council estate, passing a closed-down pub. Its final incarnation was as “The Thames” but it had been built in the late nineteenth century as the “Rose and Crown”, according to a commemorative stone high up by the chimney. I wouldn’t have seen the stone if the pub had been open – I’d have been peering through the windows to see what sort of life went on in there. Above the chimney pots a buddleia swung like a banner of unrebuilt London.

The path led me back to the riverbank, and a view across the roofline of the Isle of Dogs. I turned away from water, and back towards the station.