1. Swamp Boy
So it is with my home town, my involuntary place of birth. It’s: the first great metropolis; the capital of the greatest empire the world has ever known; arguably the first world city, London. Turgidly, it has grown out of the marshland of the Thames estuary. Century after century it has expanded, swollen, distended and, all the while, it has revelled in its own bloated pomposity, but it can’t escape its beginnings. No amount of tarmac and pavement can suppress that. Even at the top of the ever higher skyscrapers you can’t get away from it.
Of course, nowadays its not the smell of the old marsh water that hangs like a miasma over everything. That’s long gone, like the water itself, pumped and channelled underground into subterranean rivers. In fact, and bizarrely for such a damp place, London is uncommonly dry. It struggles to keep itself hydrated. The old marsh water is collected, processed, sanitised and assimilated again and again in order to keep the new marsh water alive. They say, every glass of water you drink in London has been drunk by 5 other people before you.
No, the old water doesn’t stink any more. Its been civilised, urbanised and re-purposed. It’s the people that stink now. They are the new marsh water. London swamp has moved on, diversified, climbed up the food chain. It no longer merely assimilates organic material. Nowadays, it assimilates everything. Water and food, energy and materials, art and culture all are sucked in and converted into the substance of the swamp that is and ever shall be London.
This is where I was born and, like everything else that touches it, London made me part of itself. I’ll never escape the stink. I am Swamp Boy and this is my story.