Six Things, Volume 35

River | Maps | Hummingbirds | Disciples | Clock | Ferry

Sep 16, 2023

Thing 1 – Hidden river

Look up. Look up.

Not just a birding mantra (“you never know what you might see”, which is true enough, although most of the time, yeah, it’s a pigeon), but words to live by.

Look up, and you will notice things you’ve never seen before. Architectural features, cloud formations, alien spacecraft looming in the sky.

And of course birds.

But sometimes it pays to look down as well. And not just in a “look where you’re putting your feet so you don’t accidentally tread in/on that dog shit/ice cream/small child” kind of way.

It’s fair to say that the pavements (sidewalks, US readers, because of course we use the word ‘pavement’ (‘road surface’ UK readers (aagghh I’ve got myself in a nested parenthesis loop, I hate it when that happens (although thankfully it’s a fairly rare occurrence))) in a different way) of London town aren’t necessarily its best feature.

Feel free to read that sentence a couple of times until it makes sense. Or, even better, just move on to the next paragraph.

Even I, naturally inclined to at least try to see beauty in everything – hello clouds! hello sky! hello small and slightly alarming patch of mould in the corner of the room! – find it difficult to get excited about paving slabs, cracking tarmac or manky old patches of grass littered with spent nitrous oxide canisters.

But around here, if you don’t look down you run the danger of missing these.

“The hidden River Effra is beneath your feet.”

What a thing. What a simple, delightful, thing. I find it tremendously cheering.

Because someone had the idea. And then they made it happen. And while many won’t notice, for those who do it’s a boost. A sign that someone has thought. A sign that someone cares. A sign that someone has gone to the trouble to make people’s lives a bit better, should they be in the mood for some little-bit-better-ness.

There’s a series of these pavement (sidewalk – let’s not go into all that again) plaques round our way. And someone – to whom we also doff an appreciative cap – has made a map of them.

Each plaque has those same words (in the glyphic typeface Albertus, since you ask) round the outside, but enhancing the pleasure even further is the range of designs – more than a dozen of them – inspired by the probable Celtic origins of the river’s name: 'Yfrid', meaning ’torrent'.

You can read about how these excellent things came into being in this piece on the website of their designers, Atelier Works. One detail that faintly surprised me in a ‘that seems like a lot but then I haven’t really thought about it’ kind of way is that each plaque weighs 15 kg.

That seems like a lot. But then I haven’t really thought about it.

“The more engaged and appreciative residents are, the more they will want to take care of their area.”

These unobtrusive (and honestly still surprisingly heavy) things are a prompt. A prompt to consider what we don’t see, the hidden world all around us. Not just the physical world, but the layers of time concealed beneath our feet.

Look up. But sometimes, just sometimes, look down too.

You can read about the Effra, and London’s other lost rivers, here. It includes the words ‘tadpole-haunted ditch’, and the story of the coffin that was seen floating down the Thames that time.

Effra was one of the daughters of Mama Thames in Ben Aaronovitch’s highly entertaining Rivers of London series.

My friend Dave’s in a London river tribute band (yes, yes, ‘tributary’ band, thank you for playing) called The Effras. Here’s their song Down In The Effra.

Their vocalist is Andrew Rumsey – formerly vicar of Gipsy Hill, now Bishop of Ramsbury in Wiltshire. He wrote about the Effra back in 2014, when the plaques were but a twinkle in a Lambeth councillor’s eye.

And there’s more about the plaques here, on the excellent Diamond Geezer’s blog.

Thing 2 – Maps

I like a map. And I particularly like one that presents data in an interesting, informative, and frankly pretty way.

So these maps of population density – which show very effectively just how full or empty some places are – are very much the kind of thing for which I’m prepared to put my hands together repeatedly and make a sort of appreciative slapping sound.

In short, I applaud them.

They’re the work of Terence T (@researchremora on Twitter)

Thing 3 – Hummingbirds

Another population density map, albeit of a different kind.

I’m a big fan of Laura Erickson’s For The Birds. Knowledge, experience and passion are a potent combination. Throw hummingbirds into the mix and you can count me emphatically in.

Specifically, the seasonal migrations of ruby-throated hummingbirds. What we know, what we don’t know, what we thought we knew but it turns out we didn’t. Fascinating stuff.

Laura Erickson's For the Birds

Ruby-throated Hummingbird Migration

(Listen to the radio version here.) For a long time, conventional wisdom had it that people in the eastern half of the continent should always bring in their hummingbird feeders by Labor Day or we’d tempt Ruby-throated Hummingbirds to linger too long during migration. That never made sense to me, and indeed, most hummingbird experts always disputed it. D…

2 years ago · 16 likes · 1 comment · Laura Erickson

For more detail, there’s this by Sheri Williamson, which Erickson cites in her piece. And if you do nothing else, just look at this data visualisation of the movements of those tiny birds.

Like so many nature-science subjects, the more you think about it, the more you fail to comprehend it.

May the Lord forgive me, I’m using this as an excuse to point out that I wrote a chapter on hummingbirds in Taking Flight, which remains relentlessly available and has just had this terrific review.

Thing 4 – Disciples

From 2005 to 2011, James Mollison took photographs of fans outside gigs. The fun game to play here is to scroll down slowly so you don’t see the band name just under each photo, and guess which artist/band the pictured people are disciples of.

Thing 5 – Colour clock

The simplest of ideas, beautifully executed. The colour changes with time.

Thing 6 – Wightlink ferry

Apparently this isn’t the first one of these TikTok spoofs, and they’ve been doing the rounds for a while, but it’s the first one I saw and therefore the funniest.