Rockingham Streetnote
Heading north from the Elephant & Castle, towards Borough High Street and London Bridge, you’re on Newington Causeway, whose name preserves the marshy history of the area. Take the first right, onto our dog-leg street. It runs level for fifty yards, under the railway bridge, then slopes down gently into what the archaeologists call ‘the Rockingham depression’. On your left a sign, skewed away, says Tarn Street – an inlet of concrete, as broad as it’s long, going nowhere. A little further, past Meadow Row, a blurt of Nashville echoing from the Hand in Hand, and our unfrequented road makes a right-angle, back north towards the river, towards the ancient junction where the pilgrims used to gather for the start of their Canterbury jaunt, where footsore legions came tramping up from Dover, aching for the baths. It‘s lined by blank tenement blocks in dark brick, standing back behind black iron railings, some of which are still what they were – field hospital beds left over from the First World War, stood on their sides and welded end to end.
If you’d turned down here three hundred years ago, you’d be sinking in a stewfen, an osiery – only good for eels and withies. A bit later, maybe, with pick and shovel, to ditch it and pile foundations in the sucking clay, so that some thousands more of your class could cram the last, least habitable land in Southwark.
You probably weren’t wise to be wandering here in the later nineteenth century. Best to keep going, to the Elephant and points beyond. See the one-horned Indian rhinoceros at Surrey Gardens, the circular glasshouse and three-acre lake, the nightly pyrotechnical tableau of Vesuvius erupting. Look in at the meeting under the railway arches, and make fun of the Children of God, the Walworth Jumpers, whirling ecstatically, who say they will never die. Then join the ten thousand, congregating at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, where Spurgeon will preach for two hours. (The imposing frontage, which is all that the Blitz left standing, now hides a standard Sixties office block and faces, across the unending traffic, wide-eyed and disbelieving, the shape of things to come – Britain’s very first Shopping Centre.)
Maybe you went this way before the fishers and the tillers of the soil were settled, safe on their islands in the saltmarsh. Have you got no metal? What are you carrying in the deerskin bag, to trade for blades at the flint workings that they’ve buried beneath a B+Q on the Old Kent Road? That far back you can walk dryshod, the sea still locked in ice on a fine Neolithic morning.
Relax. The Celts won’t be coming for thousands of years, with the Romans hot on their heels, and the coastal raiders after, dragons twining on their banners, pointing the place out to each other as Wealawyrd, the ward of the Gauls, the Gaels, the Celts, the Welsh. All those names are lost in the mists of the future, and the land does not yet belong, by grant of King Edmund, to Nitard his minstrel; nor yet to anyone. It’s a long while till Babbage will be born here, to assemble the Universal Difference Engine, or Faraday to tame the electron; a long, long while till the Little Tramp leaves his native lanes and alleys. Listen. You can hear them in the tunnels, where the echo makes them loud…
©2005 John Gibbens
