Falcon Brook
By Frances Presley, commissioned by Tideway
Frances Presley has been commissioned by Tideway to create a poem for a plaque on Falconbrook Pumping Station, and the poet based her response on the Falconbrook, a Lost River, prone to flooding, as well as major redevelopments of the area and their impact on green open space. She researched the site, which occupies part of York Gardens near Clapham Junction, through Tideway’s Heritage Interpretation Strategy, ‘Babylon to World City: Civic London’ and the site-specific narrative is also related to the emergence of the new sewer system.
The poem explores ideas of history and written records, concerning the river and its surrounding land, through the etymology of Falcon Brook and especially its earlier name of Hideburn. The name Falcon Brook, and the image of a falcon rising, seems to originate with the family crest of the seventeenth century landowners after the Reformation. The name Hide Burn was used in mediaeval times when the land was in church ownership and strips of land, ‘hides’, were let to local families for subsistence farming. ‘Hide’, in this context, is derived from the word for ‘household’ used in the earliest human language. The poet brings the idea of the household into the present day with the Winstanley & York Estates’ communal park, concrete modernist flats and the people who live and work here. There is also a play on contemporary usage of the word ‘hide’ and a hidden human history.
The other main element of the poem is the river itself. It has two tributaries which merge into one as they descend from the hills and, at times, threaten to submerge the inhabited land, so that the river has been redirected and channelled. In the final verse the river, the surrounding land, and people’s lives, are given equal value and are foregrounded, or rise up, through the writing.
Frances has collaborated with typographer Rob Green to design the layout of the poem in Doves Type. The poem has straight left and right margins to suggest a strip of land and also the containment of the river. The internal spaces and punctuation have semantic and visual significance. They can suggest variant readings of verse units, as well as the unwritten or yet to be written history of the area. They can also suggest the hidden flow of the river.
The poet has conceived the commission to be an accessible work, imbued with current resonances and historic intrigues.
The poet has said:
‘When I researched the Falconbrook and its surrounding area there seemed to be very little written history, and it was almost as hidden as the river itself is now. Yet we know that history was made by the people who lived here and worked the land, alongside the river. I hope this poem and its artwork will help to reassert both our common history and our contemporary creativity’.
