by MW Bewick
Hattie also remembered that when my father was a child he had described the river as a yawning snake, which to me seems precocious. To him, snakes meant danger, and the space below the bridges was filled with slithering horror. They found things in rivers too. It said so on the news. Whatever people secreted in the unfathomable water eventually washed up. [read more…]
by Juno Baker
Steve dreams of King Canute, sailing through Brixton on a Viking longboat, gliding past the Ritzy yelling in a smug nasal twang, “Oy, Steve! Thought you were getting a Waitrose round here?” He watches Canute’s ship disappear up Effra Road towards his flat. There’s Shelly, all dressed up on the back. She smirks at Steve as if to say she’s too good for him now. King Canute puts his arm round her and shouts something else, but he can’t hear it. [read more…]
Reservoir Geese
a photo by Lucy Munro
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A Short Journey Downriver by Mark Sadler
Twice a day, when the tide is high, the Thames floods the broad, low-ceilinged underground channel from which the Granville emerges. During the autumn and winter, as the temperature drops, these back surges create localised fogs that linger along Upper and Lower Thames Street. The river that London buried alive rises like a ghost through the porous layers of paving to reassert its claim upon its former overground course. [read more…]
Old Canary Wharf Pier
some photos of the old pier…
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St Paul’s Cathedral gleams, Southwark Bridge looms, and a middle-aged man – grey suit, substantial build – unsteadily dribbles a small purple balloon with silver ribbons down the empty, moonlit, riverside walkway.
Swaps by Chris Long
All the same, I remember them – and everyone else who lived in a council block – putting notices in the local paper looking for swaps. That is, asking someone with a house and a garden if they would swap. Even at the time, the idea seemed a bit far-fetched: of course someone with a house and a garden would consider moving to the fifteenth floor of a block of flats where, when the wind blew hard, the water swayed in the toilet bowl. [read more…]
by Jess Sully
“Nah – they’re docile,” he replied, and proved this by bending and twisting the ferret into strange shapes. It was as if he was trying to create a balloon animal. The sight of a ferret being manipulated would, in itself, have been enough excitement for me, but then the owner’s young daughter insisted on showing me her party piece. She opened her mouth and the ferret put its head in, a modest variation of the head-in-lion’s-mouth circus trick. [read more…]
by Matt Haynes
Out here, the river’s still allowed to undo its buttons twice a day and slob out across the mud with primordial glee. For one of the Thames’s more discombobulating quirks is that it’s wider upstream than down, where it’s been artificially banked and trammelled – no one paddles on the beach outside Lambeth Palace any more, not since Mr Bazalgette’s embankments went up in the 1860s and the Archbishop lost his deckchair concession. [read more…]
The sending of the first Smoke book to the printer is celebrated with a trip to Erith.
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