There are so many striking poignant lines in Chris Marker’s masterful essay film, San Soleil, that I’ve resorted to reading a transcript found online. But this particular riff stuck out:
“I’m writing you all this from another world, a world of appearances. In a way the two worlds communicate with each other. Memory is to one what history is to the other: an impossibility.
Legends are born out of the need to decipher the indecipherable. Memories must make do with their delirium, with their drift. A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector.”
then..
“I think of a world where each memory could create its own legend.”
A walk from Charterhouse Square to the Clerks’ Well
There’s something in the atmosphere of the City fringe that draws me in around midwinter and the turning of the year. That once dubious territory outside the old Roman walls where rivers ran off the rising ground into the Fleet and the Thames. It’s a place of stories. So on New Years Day I set out to capture some of the magic and the mysteries between Charterhouse Square and the Clerks’ Well.
The draw at the beginning was the medieval priory and almshouses of the Charterhouse, but to get there you pass over the buried remains of around 40,000 victims of the Black Death. The water supply to this 14th Century hermitage of Carthusian monks came along the White Conduit from a source in Barnsbury which later became the celebrated White Conduit House pleasure garden. There’s still a tavern on the site but last time I looked it’d become a restaurant.
Charterhouse
There were very few people around as I looked for the course of the lost river Faggeswell, that once formed a boundary on the southern edge of Clerkenwell. I’d place the course along where Charterhouse Street runs along one side of Smithfield Market. I could have then picked up the cattle route along Cowcross Street but instead took St. John’s Lane to pass through the majestic St. John’s Gate, built in 1504 – a chunk of medieval London hiding in plain site.
St. John’s Gate
The ancient trackway of Clerkenwell Road is crossed on the way to Clerkenwell Green where I imagined the mystery plays being performed around the Skinner’s Well and the Clerks’ Well. The second of these is remembered in the name it gave to the area and also the plaque in Farringon Lane marking its location. The Skinner’s Well though seems to have been forgotten, a process that started long ago. Writing in 1910, Alfred Stanley Foord remarked;
“Skinners’ Well is there described as lying in the valley between the Nun’s Priory and the Holeburn, in which was a large fish-pond… Strype, in his continuation of Stow’s Survey (1720) say, ‘Skinners’ Well is almost quite lost, and so it was in Stow’s time. But I am certainly informed by a knowing parishioner that it lies to the west of the church (of St. James, Clerkenwell), enclosed within certain houses there.’ The parish would fain recover the well again, but cannot tell where the pipes lie. But Dr Rogers, who formerly lived in an house there, showed Mr Edmund Howard…marks in a wall in the close where, as he affirmed, the pipes lay, that it might be known after his death.”
However, there’s no plaque that I could see around St. James Church and the name lives on solely in the presence of Skinner Street.
Clerkenwell Green with its radical roots felt like an appropriate place to end the walk for the video and to look ahead at 2022. I’ve a good feeling about the coming year.
It barely needs to be stated that 2021 was another strange year – let’s leave that aspect there. But it was another great year of walks for me personally – a year that has seen my YouTube channel grow to over 40,000 subscribers (something I thought would never happen).
Winter walks
Back in January I finally made a video of my walk through London’s Little Italy that I started documenting and researching nearly 20 years ago when I lived at the Angel and formed part of a chapter in my book This Other London (which was re-printed in paperback again this year finding new readers). Then came a series of walks tracing and uncovering local lost rivers – The Alders Brook (more overlooked and neglected than lost), the Walthamstow branch of the Philley Brook (Fillebrook) which was one of my highlights of the year, and the Higham Hill Brook.
Continuing the riverine theme, it was fantastic to walk along the West bank of the River Roding with the brilliant Paul Powlesland, from Ilford to the new Barking moorings that Paul and the River Roding Trust created. It was so heartening to see all the great work that the Friends of the River Roding have done cleaning and clearing that bank of the river, restoring an ancient footpath along the riverbank.
Paul Powlesland & Jenny at the end of their epic River Roding walk
Places of transition
As Spring slowly started to emerge I explored some of the changing areas of London around Hackney Wick, Stratford and Greenwich Peninsula. These are some of the themes I dig into in my next book which should be published in 2022. I also took a trip out to the western edge of London to visit the medieval village of Harmondsworth, which is threatened by the planned expansion of Heathrow airport.
Fascinating chats
It was a great pleasure to visit the fantastic Maud Milton in her studio at Trinity Buoy Wharf where she creates the wonderful mosiac roundels that can be found at some of the London Overgrond Stations. And mentioning the Overground reminds me of the walk I did with Iain Sinclair along the Thames estuary at Tilbury talking about his new book The Gold Machine. We also discussed this onstage over two nights at the essential Wanstead Tap where I’d also had the enormous honour of doing a sold-out three-night run of talks in May.
Wanstead Tap May 2021
Wanstead Tap May 2021
River Walks & Old Haunts
I did more river walks throughout the year – the lost rivers of The Peck and the Hackney Brook, the urban watercourses of The Rom, the Wandle (with the brilliant Prof Kate Spencer), the River Pinn, and the Dollis Brook. There were also walks exploring some of my old stomping grounds around Canonbury and Camden.
Out to the Sea
Some of my highlights were walks along estuaries out to the sea – first walking the final section of the Essex Way following the Stour out to Harwich, then drifting the final stretch of the Thames Estuary to the Wakering Stairs looking out along the treacherous Broomway at sunset. On the final weekend of October I managed to get out to Orford Ness coming back on the last boat til Spring 2022. What an experience that was.
The Broomway at Wakering Stairs
Group Walks
2021 was also a year of group walks – always a great experience for me. Firstly it was some Leytonstone Town Centre strolls in the summer for Waltham Forest Council. I also created a series of audio guided walks around notable cemeteries for a wonderful organisation called Advantages of Age and then we met up for a group walk around Nunhead and Camberwell Cemeteries.
Gallivanting
Another personal highlight was going down to St. Leonards-on-Sea to spend the day with visionary filmmaker Andrew Kötting and ending our jaunt around the town with a trip to the place where his seminal travelogue Gallivant began (the film that inspired me to start making films).
City stories
In the dark midwinter days I’ve found great comfort revisiting some of the locations that I started exploring and researching in the early days of this blog, recording wanders around the territory of Bunhill Fields, St Luke’s and City Road, and then a couple of days before Christmas, linking together a series of resonant points around Fleet Street.
I’m a little taken aback, to be honest, when I look back over these journeys across the year as a whole, and it makes me excited about the year ahead.
