Rivers / Water

How to listen to a river

When I visited London for a three-month curatorial residency at the Delfina Foundation, I wanted to understand how anyone could belong here – not in terms of their passports, and certainly not as bodies penetrating or being ‘protected’ by Fortress Britain, but in terms of their relationships to the land, and to the water that cuts into its heart and spreads its tentacles under and over the city. One thing I observed was that even people who had lived in London for decades did not feel connected to the city’s environment; they felt instead tied to people.

As Māori, when we first meet each other we are generally asked the question, Nō hea koe? This essentially asks, To whom do you belong? When we formally introduce ourselves, we begin by naming ourselves as being of and belonging to a mountain and a river, before outlining the waka (canoe) we come from, our marae (ancestral house) and the ancestors we descend from. When we as Māori recite this introduction it is known as a pepeha, and in identifying the names of places and people, we create both a timeline of foundations that express who we are, but also to whom we belong, and how and why we exist today. Our pepeha can also describe who we are, our names, our ancestral places, and the waters that sustained our ancestors.[1]

For instance, I would say

Ko Tainui me Mangopiko ngā awa.

I am the Tainui and Mangopiko river.

In our complicated cosmological system and worldview, rivers and other waterways are conceptualised as both or either atua (gods) or living ancestors, who have their own life force and spiritual strength. As Indigenous people, we communicate our identity through acknowledging these rivers as atua (gods) or tīpuna (ancestors), and as a living part of who we are. As descendants of this river, we are their mokopuna. A way of understanding the etymology of a word like mokopuna is to think about the word puna, which, for Māori, is a fresh clear spring of water and the only mirror we ever knew before colonisation.[2] Meanwhile, moko refers to the traditional practice of mark-making on the skin, with the lines tattooed across our bodies representing our whakapapa.[3] A word like whakapapa means ‘to layer’. It is the way we order the world, and it connects us to all living and non-living ancestors, as well as to the natural world and all beings that inhabit it. So, as mokopuna of these bodies of water, we are their living, embodied reflection.[4]

Whether we are ancestrally linked to our places or have travelled there by boat or by aeroplane, the facts are that we have moved across water, that our bodies are made of over 80% water, and that water sustains all life. We are connected to each other through social links, but also through our shared physical relationship to water.

My ancestors were subjects of the British Empire, and Aotearoa (or New Zealand) was historically a British settler colony that remains a part of the British Empire. My ancestors are Māori, British, Irish, and Jewish, and to settle in Aotearoa they travelled across the world from Glasgow, Halifax (Nova Scotia), Kilkenny, and Lancashire. Visiting some of these places, I found it hard to feel the same connections I feel to my own whenua. The word whenua intimately entwines my body to place; it means both ‘placenta’ and ‘land’, as when babies are born we bury their placenta in the places that are sacred to our ancestors, physically and spiritually linking ourselves to the land.

In many ways, I felt like I could never belong in London, despite my social ties there and my belonging to what is essentially a mini-Britain. While living there, I acutely felt a lack of this connection to land – or a lack of the sacred – although I knew that it hadn’t always been this way. I wanted to understand both what the waterways weaving under and over this city meant to people, but also if there was a way to reinstate the sacred, and whether that could be achieved through this connection to water.[5]

I was brought up in a city blighted by the pollen of London plane trees every spring – a place called Dunedin, or Dùn Eideann (‘Edinburgh’ in Gaelic). Everything is named by and after Scottish settlers, besides the regional name of ‘Otago’, which is a mistranslation of Ōtākou, its Māori name. Many of these settlers moved to Dunedin for economic reasons; over half were agricultural labourers and farmers who sought land after the significant reorganisation of lowland agriculture in Ōtākou. After the New Zealand Company’s dodgy acquisition of 40,000 acres of land for just £2,400 from the iwi (tribe) Ngāi Tahu, the Scottish settlement of what was then called ‘New Edinburgh’ began. Those agricultural workers cleared the rolling Ōtākou hills of all native forest and introduced gorse bush as hedges, thereby moulding the physical landscape to resemble that of Edinburgh.

While both cities contain hills and extinct volcanoes (Dunedin Volcano, Arthur’s Seat), much of Dunedin was deliberately planned by the surveyor, Charles Kettle, in order to emulate Edinburgh’s characteristics. One of the city’s so-called ‘founding fathers’, Thomas Burns, erected a statue of his uncle, the poet Robert Burns, in the centre of the Octagon, an area ringed by Moray Place and shaped just like Moray Place in Edinburgh. We even have a river called the Water of Leith, although its real name is the Ōwheo. Not unlike Edinburgh’s Water of Leith or London’s Thames, the Ōwheo darts in and out through the city then exits into the sea. Upstream in the Ōwheo there is a waterfall named Unu-unu-a-kapua-i-te-raki, where in precolonial times ceremonies were performed to heal injury and illness. The river carried the sickness away downstream, where no one could consume the water, fish, birds, or even firewood. There is work being undertaken by the Ōtākou Rūnaka and the Kāti Huirapa Rūnaka ki Puketeraki for people to know the Ōwheo, but as the process of renaming takes a long time to untangle and our ties to empire have long been a source of pride, this process of unlearning takes the patience of time.

While living in London, I learnt that a number of rivers in the UK have been declared ‘dead’, such as the Lim and the Wye. A river is declared ‘dead’, biologically, when it is so polluted that it can no longer support any aquatic life. I see this as an opportunity to understand the sacredness of water, through its fragility and the political impacts it carries. Water, like many other national assets, was privatised in the UK under the Tory leadership of Margaret Thatcher. The Regional Water Authorities, which controlled the water in British drinking glasses, taps and rivers, was privatised under legislation such as the 1989 Water Act, where Thatcher’s government sold off the management of water in England and Wales to the figure of £7.6bn.[6] One of Thatcher’s primary goals was to promote the privatisation of public services, because she argued that the private sector would be better able to manage these assets, but what it really did was enable the transfer of wealth to private hands. Following the 1987 election – despite opposition from everyday people, trade unions, environmental groups, and even members of her own party – Thatcher forced this privatisation through by writing off debt and significantly subsidising the investment, making water companies seem more attractive to purchase.[7] There are no rivers in England that have good chemical balances, and only 14% have a ‘good’ ecological status, according to Environmental Agency data from 2020. This is through agriculture, wastewater and urban pollution affecting the bodies of water throughout England, with these private companies failing to prevent sewage discharges, particularly during flooding, which is expected to increase as the world warms.[8] How could reinstating the sacred help save the rivers in the UK specifically, but also reorientate the emotional and spiritual connections that everyday Londoners feel to the place where they live? How could it help us feel as though we all belonged here? I could answer if I knew more about the histories of the city’s waterways, and how an Indigenous worldview could help us listen to their voices – even those hidden beneath our feet.

The name London is a Middle English word, developed from the Proto-Celtic *Londinjon, meaning ‘place that floods’. For thousands of years, its many waterways sustained the myriad communities who have lived in London. As a series of wetlands, this region has allowed people to grow food, and to build shelter.

Everywhere I went in the city, I noticed large deposits of native plants from Aotearoa that were planted on land that has been ‘reclaimed’ from the water, such as the Victoria Embankment Gardens. Perhaps one reason for their abundance is practical, as robust plants such as harakeke are frequently planted in areas prone to flooding, as well as in and around wetlands. A feature of colonialism is that it is also ecological. Tī kouka trees, koromiko, harakeke, and kōwhai in different stages of bloom on the other side of the world at the wrong time of the year remind me of my hybridity and capacity to be and belong to many people, places and environments. The term ‘hybridity’ to me is most useful when thinking through these ideas; it was developed by the postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha, who wrote that cultural identity is always formed in a space that is contradictory, messy and ambivalent.[9] The hybridity of plants and their ability to adapt offers us a space where we can think about other forms of resistance, where we could create new forms of expression and identity – especially culturally, where we can reorient the way we engage with the world around us.[10] This opens questions around how we could (re)form relational bonds with this world that is so deeply embedded into the extractivist way everything has become. Again, we know that things weren’t always like this. We also know that we are like this because we have been shaped by the ongoing effects of colonialism, a logic that believes in endless growth, and a drive towards social, cultural and ecological categorisation and domination. This process is not often ascribed the recognition it deserves, particularly when we think about the bodies, plants and objects which belong to the worlds of both the coloniser and colonised. When we exist in diaspora, our linkages to the places where we belong often play out in different ways.

This fluid mode of thinking about my body and its capacity to belong to a place led me to the mystery surrounding the London plane tree. Over 60% of trees in London are London planes. They are an unforeseen result of the meeting of two immigrant trees from the far corners of the plant world. According to the Woodland Trust, the London plane’s parents were the Oriental plane and the American sycamore, which come from two different continents on opposite sides of the world. It is thought they hybridised naturally in Spain and made their way to Britain at some point in the 17th century. We could again relate this process to what Bhabha speaks of when he describes hybridity as a process of cultural mixing and transformation: through such encounters, plants like the London plane resisted and adapted to a new environment where the physical body of the tree itself could be fluid.[11] Plane trees currently make up 70% of the trees in the town I live in, Kawerau. While I appreciate that they came into existence through a process of colonialism, not unlike my own body, the wheezing and asthma I experience during spring from their presence is harder for me to appreciate.

The whenua, or soil, in most parts of London is made up of large deposits of clay, which has meant that there has been a continuous practice of making and building here, whether this is bricks, cups, bowls, etc. However, the bedrock of the soil is also chalk that accumulated on the bed of a warm sea in the Cretaceous period over 65 million years ago. The clay-heavy soil is not ideal for certain kinds of agriculture, but it is easy to tunnel and makes very good bricks. Potters and brickmakers moulded objects, homes, tunnels, and the city we walk over with their hands. In the area near the Delfina Foundation where I lived, I noticed the way old Edwardian townhouses were built up around green spaces or squares, which my friend Dan told me would have once been the building sites for the houses that surrounded them. I like to imagine builders, gardeners and potters exchanging soil and clay in order to make the things that have shaped our lives and environments.

The city’s untidy edges conceal this layered history. Beneath our feet are the traces of the past, both near and far. Some histories are more obvious than others that are buried or eroded, but they are there if you choose to look deeper.

While in London, I worked in Kilburn, in the borough of Brent. Kilburn’s name has a number of origins: it could come from a stream, ‘Kelebourne’ or ‘cold bourne’, which used to flow from the Westbourne river.[12] Additionally, it could come from ‘kiln’ or ‘kilnbourn’, in light of the history of clay workers in the area using the uku (clay) beneath and transforming it by fire into tiles.[13] The area of Kilburn grew around where the Kilburn Brook crossed Watling Street (now Edgware Road). This was an ancient trackway, used by the people who lived here long before the Romans.[14] The Kelebourne Stream, from which Kilburn partially gets its name, originated in Hampstead and flowed southwards through West Hampstead.[15] Near Shirland Road, it joined the River Westbourne, which then flowed into the Serpentine lake, and gradually into the Thames. Whenever I got off the bus or the Overground, with every step I took I reminded myself that this road I walked on was ancient, that millions of bodies had walked along it over thousands of years. I kept wondering how far below the tar-sealed road was the river. I imagined it clear and silky, laden with eels, fish and aquatic plants. I wondered if it used to be the kind of water used in ritual to cleanse the body. In fact, the Westbourne was, and is, a sacred spring known for its medicinal properties. It is connected to the Kilburn Priory – a small monastic community of nuns, established between 1130 and 1134. Found where the river met Watling Street, the Priory was established for the three ‘pious and charitable’ ladies-in-waiting of Queen Matilda of Scotland.[16] Here, it was said that there was a holy well or medicinal spring. In the 1770s, there was also a ‘spa’, which made use of the chalybeate mineral water from the Kilburn Well, discovered near the Bell Inn in 1714.[17]

The Westbourne is one of London’s ‘lost rivers’. It was not ‘lost’ exactly, but culverted following the summer of the ‘Great Stink’, when the stream became a part of the sewage system. The Great Stink occurred in 1858, following a population explosion in the city and an overflow of cesspools around it. The city had outgrown its waste disposal methods and that waste began to clog the river it flowed into – the Thames. That summer’s hot weather revealed how badly the river was clogged with human effluent and industrial waste, leading to an oppressively foul smell and the spread of waterborne diseases such as cholera and typhoid fever. Known as ‘miasma’, the stink itself was believed to spread these plagues through its smell, while really, microbes lurked in the water that people continued to consume. The Great Stink led parliament to swiftly pass legislation to update the waste management system, commissioning the engineer Joseph Bazalgette. As London’s sewers had not been updated since the time of Henry VIII, Bazalgette’s plan required the building of an extensive new underground system that would funnel waste downstream from the city and dump it into the Thames Estuary at high tide. In addition to over 1,000 miles of new drains under London’s streets, the plan required the use of six intercepting sewers alongside many open streams and ‘lost rivers’, such as the Fleet and the Westbourne.[18] These waterways would also carry huge flows of waste out into the sea. The new sewerage system was completed in 1875 and Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s government passed the second Public Health Act, as well as the Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act (1875) and the Rivers Pollution Prevention Act (1876), which intended to clean up rivers and the water supply.[19] This same sewage system is still largely in use in London. Although today it is wholly inadequate and afflicted by fatbergs (deposits of waste that clog pipes), Bazalgette’s system acknowledged that access to water and how we dispose of waste were issues of public health. Alongside the more efficient waste system, the proliferation of education and studies on public safety and water meant that the spread of waterborne diseases like cholera subsided. The swift actions undertaken by these Victorian politicians, health advocates and engineers reminds me of the whakatauki (proverb):

Ka ora te awa. Ko ora te iwi.

The river is well, so the people are well.

In 2014, through an act of the New Zealand parliament, we granted legal personality to a natural feature, Te Urewera – the mountainous region bordering Hawkes Bay and the Bay of Plenty. This means Te Urewera has the same legal status as an individual person. This led to another act of the New Zealand parliament passing in 2017, when the Whanganui river became the first river in the world to be recognised as having legal personhood, as being an indivisible and living being.[20] This was brought on by pressure from the various tribes who have resided along the river for 700 years, and who regard the river as an ancestor and as sacred. While considering the river a ‘person’ was regarded by some as divisive, because the Whanganui river is an atua or god, it is a way in which we can try to protect it using legal frameworks. The law was designed to uphold the mana (integrity, power) and mauri of the river, which has been hugely polluted through mismanagement. It means that the river can be argued for in court – and although the law offers little protection, it does mean that the river can have a better chance.[21] The Whanganui river is now Te Awa Tupua: the sacred river. In a Māori worldview, everything is interconnected and contains mauri. Mauri is the life spark or essence inherent in all things, as they contain the residue of ancestors through whakapapa (genealogy). Other Indigenous communities are also using legal means to protect their ancestors, such as the people of Ekuanitshit (an Innu community in Eastern Quebec, Canada) and their river, Mutuhekau Shipu (the Magpie river). The Andean countries of Ecuador and Bolivia are also enshrining the legal rights of nature or Pachamama, Earth Mother. The latter utilised an ethic of the Quechua peoples of the Andes known as sumak kawsay, which denotes a ‘good way of living’ (buen vivir in Spanish) – a fullness of life lived in harmony with nature and other people.[22]

Within Western environmental histories, there is a gap in knowledge around what we can learn through the act of listening. In his recent book, The Strange Stillness of the Past: Toward an Environmental History of Sound and Noise, the academic Peter Coates asks this question around what we can learn of water’s histories by listening.

One of the rivers I belong to is the Mangapiko, which – although it is blighted by the sediment of a nearby quarry – is a part of a complex system of interconnected rivers on the Kaimai Range. It is said that my ancestors used to listen to the river, as it carried news of life, death, war, and other events. It is said that it used to sing, but now so many of these waterways are polluted by agricultural and industrial runoff that they are silent.

This led me to wonder what a river like the Westbourne might say, and what we could learn from it. Could it ever be acknowledged for its sacredness again? Could it ever be healed and in turn regain its healing properties and become, for example, a restorative spa again, like it had been in the 18th century? These waters were and are still sacred, but have been instrumentalised for the purposes of waste management. This was in the 19th century, so surely we now have better ways of dealing with waste and ensuring that if our rivers are well, then the people will also be well. I really don’t know the answers – but what I do know is that water has never been more essential, sacred, revered, and integral to the wellbeing of every person in every society. Perhaps, like a number of other communities in the world, England should grant its rivers legal personhood. This might help to save and to restore their mauri, or life force. Maybe if we started to listen to the swells and ripples of the waterways running under the asphalt and concrete beneath us, we could start to understand more about our past, and begin to think of new ways to protect these lifelines for everyone.

Although its sacred properties are asleep, the River Westbourne still flows. You can still hear it if you put your ear to a drain in the middle of the road outside Kilburn’s Priory Tavern, or if you find a particular pipe at Sloane Square station. Not all is lost. It still speaks, in muted tones, beneath the sound of cars riding over the top of it.