Apologies if you were directed here by a Google search, only to discover that you’re reading about a walk through the London sewers. But then, should I feel sorry? The Black Controller recently pointed out to me that Google canalises knowledge: forcing the surfer into a narrow bore of information, which is constituted by its assumptions about what you want to know, based on the frequency with which they’ve been hit before. Put simply, the more you surf, the more of the same old shit you skid across. No wonder the virtual world seems so pissy-samey.
Which brings us to the sewers, which I descended into last evening in the charming company of Bruno Rinvolucri of Resonance FM. Bruno makes a habit of this sort of thing – and in one way it’s easy to see why: there is something INCREDIBLY strange about walking 40 feet below the surface of London in a huge shit-smeared culvert; but in another way, he has to be the most psycho geographer of us all. We started at Brixton Water Lane, where we descended into the culvert that the lost River Effra now runs in. This was a fairly stiff, near-knee-high current of dirty-dish-water-coloured fluid (it smelt of old dish water as well). After a few hundred yards we reached an inflow that made the slithery progress feel distinctly vertiginous; and shortly after that a chamber opened up to the right, and we descended another ladder into a deeper, wider-bore and drier sewer, which we followed all the way to Clapham North.
Stalactites of calcified toilet paper with ancient sanitary towels trapped in their convolutions slow-dripped from the ceiling; cars hammering over the manhole covers up above sent reverberations booming along the tube; our headtorches struck weird glissading light-pulses across the curved courses of stock bricks (which had remained paradoxically fresh and yellow in this “unpolluted” environment). The smell! Why didn’t they tell us: dish water, yes, braided with excrement – mephitic beyond noisome.
Bruno, who is as engaging as you would expect someone who has a passion for this sort of thing to be (ex-rickshaw driver, nascent physical anthropologist, favours rooms to let for £25, so if you have a queer space you need tenanted in the Oxford area get in touch), confessed towards the end of our 1.5 mile slosh that when he first began going down the sewers he found it pretty scary; furthermore that one or two of the people he’d brought down for his Resonance recordings had also freaked out. Then there came a terrible noise like a giant burp or fart-afflatus from the murk up ahead, where the tunnel widened into a high-colonic cathedral. Bruno explained that if we continued down this gently sloping chamber of shiterrors it would begin “to look as if there were a wall of water ahead of us … ” and it was out of this that these great eggy burps were coming.
“Actually,” Bruno vouchsafed as we began to inch our way back up to the surface, like Wellsian Morlocks in denim, “when you smell the rotten eggs it’s probably time to get out.” Had he, I wondered, ever spoken to the actual sewermen about these odd journeys beneath the city’s raddled hide. “Oh, no,” he replied, “I think they’d be pretty down on what I do – after all, they wear full oxygen kits and dry suits … ”
Now he told me! But, thankfully, the manhole cover swung wide and we ascended into the street I cycle down almost every week on my way to Blockbuster. The fantastical and chthonic elided effortlessly with the mundane: my favourite experience. Half an hour later, we were eating in Speedy Noodle back in Brixton.
