SF SAID

LONDON'S LOST RIVERS

From the Westbourne to the Wandle: Jon Savage's Uninhabited London photos and SF Said's London's Lost Rivers Polaroids for Maggs Counterculture, at Maggs Gallery, 50 Hays Mews. London W1J 5QJ Thursday 22nd MarchThursday 19th April, MonFri 1117.00, carl@maggs.com 0207 493 7160 www.maggs.com PV Wednesday 21st March 18.0020.00, RSVP essential

Maggs Bros Ltd

SF SAID LONDON'S LOST RIVERS

2011: SF Said accompanied writer Tom Bolton on an exploration of Londons eight lost rivers with a Polaroid camera and old film stock. 18 of these Polaroids were used as illustrations for the resulting book Londons Lost Rivers: A Walkers Guide. SF Said has worked as a speech writer for the Crown Prince of Jordan and an arts journalist for the Daily Telegraph. He has written two award winning novels Varjak Paw and the sequel, The Outlaw Varjak Paw. His photography has been exhibited by The Impossible Project in New York, and has appeared in magazines such as Time Out, Vertigo and 62nd Floor.

GHOST JOURNEYS
Wherever you live in London, youre never far from water. I used to live off Anglers Lane in Kentish Town, beside a fishermans pub that is now a Nandos, and once helped to dig out an underground tributary in Soho, where I found myself surrounded by clay pipes and animal bones washed down from the butcheries on the riverbanks. The rivers are all around us, but remain frustratingly elusive. Imagine a cutaway diagram of London from the ground up; its terraces, shops, offices, public buildings, stations and substations, extending from the few remaining single-story bungalows to the top of the Shard. Now mirror that image downwards to form a reversal, a ghost-map, a city inverted. What do we find below? Basements, tunnels, railways, ducts, security bases, crypts, wells, tubes of all kinds. And connecting them, a hidden roadmap created by the rivers of London. It has become a pub game; how many of Londons lost rivers can you name? Some of us know that London is bookended by the Brent and the Lea. More know a little about the Fleet and its tributaries, but it wasnt until I moved to Kings Cross that I realised I could see one from my kitchen. Blocking the channels with detritus and culverting them was not enough to stem the flow of rushing stormwater; every time it rains, the Regent Canal towpath opposite my window floods, water bubbling up through the cracks in the paving. Cyclists skid, children splash and adults detour around the small lake that forms, but nobody thinks about why its there. In the basement of the converted warehouse in which I live, theres a filled-in Victorian well. Further along the street, another eruption of floodwater, rising through drains and split macadam. In Kings Place, new home of the Guardian newspaper, theres another well, River Effra L extraordinarily deep. It was filled in when the old pub on this site, the Waterside Inn, was pulled down. I watched the workmen puzzling out how to demolish it. So the water pushes South, to Sadlers Wells, to Clerkenwell, to Bridewell, and finally to the river Thames itself. Map the wells, connect the lines and you start to redefine Londons topography. Overlay the result onto the most current map of the metropolis, and you understand the present. This is no mere exercise in geography, for the rivers tell you something more. I was drawn to ghost stories because I came to understand why they worked. The streets of ancient London followed the lines of hedgerows, which of necessity followed the rivers, because fields have to be watered. The lowlands were poor areas largely because they were close to the water-table and always damp. Water and fog brought respiratory illness, and early deaths created superstitions; thats why ghost stories were more associated with say, the poor East End than the citys prosperous hilly North. The sooty, partly derelict London of my early childhood was a city of ghosts. The underground rivers became sewers, and canals were often riverways remade by man, but when we think of canals we conjure Venice, not Berlin or St Petersburg or London. Especially not London. In 1849 Charles Kingsley described the environment of Bermondsey residents; the water of the common sewer which stagnates, full ofdead fish, cats and dogs, under their windows. And yet J Stewarts depiction of the notorious Jacobs Island, painted just nine years

River Fleet L

earlier, makes that cholera-riddled waterway a place of almost Mediterranean charm. This, in a nutshell, is the paradox of the lost rivers. Despite the fact that mere proximity to them eventually became enough to kill you, their mystical significance was once so strong that the Romans floated gods upon their waters. Now, with walking maps to guide us, the journey of the hidden rivers becomes clearer. Christopher Fowler, Kings Cross, 2011 Foreword to London's Lost Rivers: A Walker's Guide by Tom Bolton, with photographs by SF Said (Strange Attractor Press, 2011)

M River Westbourne

River Walbrook M

L River Tyburn

River Neckinger L

M River Effra

River Tyburn M

L River Wandle

Last River Effra L

JON SAVAGE
UNINHABITED LONDON
From the Westbourne to the Wandle: Jon Savage's Uninhabited London photos and SF Said's London's Lost Rivers Polaroids for Maggs Counterculture, at Maggs Gallery, 50 Hays Mews. London W1J 5QJ Thursday 22nd MarchThursday 19th April, MonFri 1117.00, carl@maggs.com 0207 493 7160 www.maggs.com PV Wednesday 21st March 18.0020.00, RSVP essential

Maggs Bros Ltd

JON SAVAGE UNINHABITED LONDON

1977: Jon Savage was drawn to the forgotten parts of West London by the music of The Clash and The Sex Pistols. He took a series of black and white photos of these wastelands and decayed spaces ..on an old Pentax.. with the intention of publishing them in a fanzine (see accompanying text). The 35 photos have been exhibited at Frieze and the Tate has a set in their collection. Savage is a writer, journalist, artist and broadcaster. He wrote Englands Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond, arguably the definitive history of British punk.

PUNK LONDON
These photos were taken on an old Pentax during January 1977: their purpose was to serve as an image bank for the second issue of the fanzine Londons Outrage. The location was the square of North Kensington that lies between Holland Park Road, the Shepherds Bush spur, Westbourne Park Road and the Harrow Road. The bulk of the images come from the streets around Latimer Road and Lancaster Road: the district called Notting Dale. Here, as in other inner London areas like W9 (the Chippenham) and WC2 (Covent Garden), the tide of industry and humanity had temporarily receded. Slum housing stock had been demolished, but there was no reconstruction: squatting communities like Frestonia (based in Notting Dales Freston Road) occupied the remaining buildings. Not yet the clichs of punk iconography, large tower blocks loomed like primitive monsters above the rubble and the corrugated iron. I was guided to this area after seeing the Clash and the Sex Pistols. I was very taken with the Clash, partly because their North Kensington manor was so close to mine. Songs like How Can I Understand The Flies and Londons

Junction of Lancaster Road and Silchester Road L Burning reflected their environment with precision and passion. London was very poor in the late seventies. The Clash and the Sex Pistols the guttersnipes and the flowers in the dustbin - spoke of the human cost. This focus on the forgotten parts of the city was part of the social realism that would soon swallow punk. There was, however, something futuristic in this desolate landscape. The landscape that had been cleared to allow the Westways serpentine path opened up a gap that allowed imaginative and physical space. By 1976, the ideas contained in J.G.Ballards Crash and High Rise were like spores in the wind. Like the dub reggae that saturated parts of West London, early Clash songs like How Can I Understand The Flies, with their instrumental drop-out, incorporated these gaps into their very fabric. The hyper-speed velocity of the Clashs early live shows were, in part, an indication of the energy that came from seeing Londons dereliction as an opportunity: the forgotten city as playground. These areas are unrecognisable today. There are dwellings, theme pubs, smart media offices, cars, a new leisure centre. This regeneration is better, surely, than the blasted landscape of 30 years ago. But there was a kind of freedom in Londons spaces: before it became trapped in mass media definitions and music industry marketing, Punk offered a way of envisioning the metropolis anew, of redrawing its mental and physical map, that is now impossible. (published in Frieze Issue 98, April 2006).

Demolition, Lancaster Road (with the 'magnificent' and soon to be demolished Public Baths (built 1888) in the background) L

The back of St. Ervan's Road from across the tracks M

Graffiti under Westway on the corner of Porchester Road and Harrow Road L

Graffiti under Westway looking up Harrow Road M