Waterscape

I was born in the parish of ———-, about the year brave General Wolfe fell at Quebec. My father worked on the new farms and fields of —————–. When wages were bountiful, he got 9 shilling a week. That went down to...

My point of starting was a Basin. Goods, bales, boxes, casks and cases … As we entered the large gas-lighted, roof-covered yard, amongst a group of Warwickshire, Staffordshire, and Lancashire bargemen, dressed in their short fustian trousers, heavy boots, red lush...

Bradshaw’s Canals and Navigable Rivers of England and Wales 1904 is a wonderful read. The prose searches for an encyclopedic series of formal and logical cross-references so as to eradicate any possibility of even the slightest ambiguity or lacuna. The result is...

I sailed from Bristol with a witch’s hag-cough, Spitting phlegm on the ropes and rigging All through the Atlantic’s winter storms; The River Hudson brought no relief, Just fog and headaches as we made our way upstream. Our trade went well with the tribesmen, Stroud...

A London Wave on the Regent’s Canal

William Blake might have written of Paddington:
“They groan’d aloud on London Stone
They groan’d aloud on Tyburn’s Brook’,
But this was in the days of the journey from Newgate:
‘Welcome to the Hanging Match next Collar Day … the Paddington Fair…
Watch them Dance the Paddington Frisk when our friends shall Go West…’
In short, these are Hogarthian streets, rather than a Regent’s Canal.

And this was in the days before the railways:
My Paddington train was delayed,
So I passed the time, walking past the old branch line bay,
To the platform end,
To listen to a blackbird
Herald the winter morn,
And watch the mists
Folding the hills around Stroud –
Fog hanging in the valley –
The patient passengers huddled on the platform,
Lamp-lit like a sketch from Boz
Or like a poem from Thomas Hardy.