Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past.
Just what is the ‘here and now?’ of our existence? What exactly is this moment and when it is over, where has it gone? Several years ago whilst researching a local history project I spoke to ninety year old man, who assured me that as a boy he had fished in the river Fleet where it ran down Anglers Lane, in Kentish Town. There was no doubting the sincerity of his recollection, but it was unlikely to have actually happened since that area in north London had been developed in the mid nineteenth century, driving the Fleet and its tributaries underground.
Rivers run deep in the collective memory and in our most profound dreams.
To take a river trip in London is to experience the extraordinary confluence of the past and the present, where the ever-flowing Thames acts as the connection between past and present, between the ‘now and then’ of our existence. As the tourists float past towering blocks of shiny new developments, and the skyscraping homages to the god Mammon, one may glimpse decaying alleyways, wharfs and warehouses, reminders of duckings and drownings, of unspeakable pain and loss, and the quaysides where flights of rickety steps led to certain death, or the promise of adventure in far away places.
Away from the river, there is another Eden. The index of the A to Z of London reads like the litany of a lost Paradise. From Ash Tree Dell and Apple Tree Gardens, down Greenacres and Silver Tree Lane, along the Seven Sisters Road, to Orchard Avenue, Vine Lane, the Wildwood Grove, and Yeoman’s Way, and on to the Yeoman’s Acre: truly this Earth belongs to us all.
Cicely Herbert is one of the trio who founded and runs Poems on the Underground. Her poetry collection In Hospital (together with the Victorian poet W. E. Henley) was published by Katabasis in 1992.
The ‘Seven Sisters’ in 1830 The Fleet River near St Pancras in 1825 Mayday Notes Is Non-Realism Hypermasculine?
The A to Z of a City Cicely Herbert reflects on the streets and waterways of London past and present.