At a conveniently narrow point, the Romans built a bridge and, in the marshes on the northern bank, they erected a settlement and fort. They named it ‘Londinium‘. There doesn’t appear to be a clear reason for this, but the name stuck, more or less, and its been there, on and off, ever since. A lot happened in between that city’s founding and my own. There’s been a lot of time, a lot of events, a lot of history, but deep down it hasn’t changed, not really. Oh sure, superficially its completely different nowadays. Gone are the wooden palisades and shacks, long since replaced by concrete and marble, glass and metal. It hardly looks like a swamp at all but deep down, below the surface, it still is. Like they say ‘You can take the city out of the swamp, but mud sticks’.
There’s a popular fallacy about modern cities. People call them ‘concrete jungles’. That’s just plain wrong. Big cities aren’t jungles, they’re swamps. It doesn’t have to be wet to be a swamp. That’s not what makes it a swamp. What makes it a swamp is what it does. Swamps pull you in, drag you down, smother you in their quagmire, envelope you in their waters, preserve you in their depths. That’s the point. Things that fall into a bog don’t rot or decay. In the absence of oxygen decomposition slows to a stall.
Instead, a swamp ingests and preserves, consumes and assimilates. Nothing that falls into a swamp is ever lost. It is bound to forever become a part of the swamp itself. Accumulation and expansion. The stench of a swamp is its warning sign, hanging over the turbid water as clear as any black on yellow builder’s sign.
‘Caution!’, it says ‘swamp work in progress’.