Journey into Deep London: Tom Chivers (62 AD)
Tom Chivers, author of London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City
In this episode we visit London in 62 AD, barely twenty years after it was first established by the Romans, to traverse its lost landscape and hidden waterways. Our tour guide is the author Tom Chivers, whose book London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City uses the city’s geology to understand its rich history.
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Walking around London, you can’t help but notice the incongruence of architectural styles and its windy, idiosyncratic street plan. Twenty-first century glass and steel stands next to elegant eighteenth-century churches. Pubs that have been pubs since Richard III was on the throne can be found nestled in between seventeenth-century townhouses.
Look even closer, Tom Chivers tells us in this episode, and you’ll start to notice even more of London’s history emerging. Press your ear to a manhole and you might hear the sound of an ancient waterway gushing underneath. Go mudlarking along the Thames and uncover fragments of the past buried in the riverbed. Observe where the city’s horizon dips and rises and imagine the hills and valleys that the Romans would have looked out on when they first arrived.
This is the imaginative journey that we take in this episode of Travels Through Time. The London we visit is barely twenty years old and the first ever written record of its name, “Londinium”, dates from our chosen year, 62 AD. The city was in recovery from the devastating attack it faced at the hands of Boudicca’s rebels the previous year, who burnt and massacred everything they saw. Incredibly, the effect of this fire is still visible today in the form of a thick red layer of burnt debris that remains under the city’s surface.
We walk along the banks of the river Walbrook, explore the marshy wetlands of the “Westminster Delta” and meet Harper Road Woman, a Romano-Brit whose skeleton was dug up on the margins of the Rockingham Anomaly in Southwark.
London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City is published by Transworld/Doubleday and has been described by critics as “an absorbing and poetic psycho-geology of London” and “entertaining, enlightening and deeply moving.”
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Show Notes
Scene One: 62 AD. The river Walbrook.
Scene Two: 62 AD. The Westminster Delta.
Scene Three: 62 AD. The Rockingham Anomaly, in Southwark, to meet Harper Road Woman.
Memento: A shoe. “I like the idea of the wearer’s footprint being retained in the soft leather, and also to imagine what kind of ground the sole has stood on/walked across.”
People/Social
Presenter: Artemis Irvine
Guest: Tom Chivers
Production: Maria Nolan
Podcast partner: Unseen Histories
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About Tom Chivers
Tom Chivers is a writer, publisher and arts producer. He has released two pamphlets of poetry, The Terrors (Nine Arches Press, 2009; shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award) and Flood Drain (Annexe Press, 2012), and two full collections, How To Build A City (Salt Publishing, 2009) and Dark Islands (Test Centre, 2015). His poems have been anthologised in Dear World & Everything In It (Bloodaxe Books, 2013) and London: A History in Verse (Harvard University Press, 2012). Tom is also the founder/director of Penned in the Margins, a multi-award-winning publisher and performing arts company which joined Arts Council England’s National Portfolio in 2015. From 2008 to 2011 he was co-director of London Word Festival, for which he commissioned and produced a wide range of productions and events, receiving a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Breakthrough Award for his work.
His non-fiction debut London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City is published by Transworld/Doubleday.
Featured images
Maps of areas discussed
Map of Southwark
Map showing the River Walbrook
Map of Westminster
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