London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City

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Chivers is not gloomy - in fact, he rarely wears his non-family feelings on his sleeve and the general air is one of nostalgia and love for his city - but you sense his own awareness that things are not quite right without his ever actually putting his finger openly on what is wrong.

The book weaves the incidents of the life of a thirty-something catholic family man into walks through the debris that is London and with the geology, archaeology and history involved in tracing eight of the (mostly) more neglected underground (mostly) rivers and streams of the capital. I don’t write poetry anymore. I started in my teens, and I see that as training. Training in language and training in sound. There are leaps of imagination I’m asking the reader to follow me on in the book, which probably come from that training as a poet. I think the surprise of that I would see as a poetic technique that I’ve taken into long form.

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Chivers’s writing feels refreshing and necessary, a genuine, lyrical appraisal of contemporary life.’ Will open readers' eyes to what is around and below them [...] Its delight in exploration is matched by a thoughtful meditation on grief." The only complaint is that the maps are pretty and schematic but it is not always easy to follow the travels unless you have a street finder at hand. There are also times when the precise course of the journey appears a little unclear and does not seem to match the cast of the map. In the third chapter of the book, you mention the idea of liquidity and what you call a liquid city. Could you maybe tell us a bit more about that concept and what it tells us about London?

Time and time again, consciously or not, Chivers shows us streets, wastelands, rivers clogged with waste and pollution and 'nature' present but struggling to survive and break through despite the best efforts of its guardians and its underlying geographical reality. Tom Chivers, with the forensic eye of an investigator, the soul of a poet, is an engaging presence; a guide we would do well to follow.' Iain Sinclair In that chapter, liquidity is used as a pun on financial liquidity. Following that particular river [the Walbrook] was exciting, because you were following this submerged stream. This hidden history for an area, which is generating huge amounts of capital now. So, there’s this strange dissonance created by that particular experience.

Gentrification is such a loaded word. When I went to Elephant and Castle, which is an area that’s special to me, having grown up not too far away – it always had this magnetic quality – to see that amazing shopping centre being demolished for this new development… However, the developers might promise they will do this and the other, but we all know that luxury flats are always at the core of these new developments. Tom won an Eric Gregory Award in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Prize in 2014. He has performed at numerous events and venues including Dasein Poetry Festival, Athens; The Eden Project, Cornwall; Ledbury Poetry Festival; London Literature Festival; Moray Walking Festival; Poetry International; The Sage Gateshead; Soho Theatre and The Thames Festival. London at the beginning of the 2020s is as different from, say, London in the 1990s (my last residence decade) as the latter was from the London of the 1970s (when I first arrived). Its multiculturalism is now embedded, its 'different ideology' established and its detritus piling up.