Northern Quarter: Forever Temporary

Buxton: 29/12/06

Post Hiatus

I haven't maintained a steady stream of posts recently. I could throw out a number of reasons for this (like working 6 days a week now).

However, I have also been contributing to the urbisblog.
Check out: www.urbisblogs.org

Victoria Station: Abyss / "As Above So Below"

The three of us, one after the other, entered a new section of the cellar hall. The dull glow of the electric lighting continued on, illuminating both sides. Thick piping ran along the upper walls, caked in dust. I imagined that these must be the gas supplyor water lines to the station above.

At this point the flooring had a less solid feel to it, as if it was the surface of something hollow. Strangely, it arched upwards – in a way barely perceptible to the eye, but certainly disorienting with each step.

The manager, who was in the lead, turned round and stopped the two of us.
“Can you hear it?”
In the silence a deep rumbling emerged. Initially, thinking in terms of the gas supply and the maintenance of the station, I thought it was the sound of some generator operating in this underground belly.

“That rumbling – that’s the river. The Irk. You’re standing on it right now.”

I stared in surprise, despite knowing all along that this is what we had come for.

“We’re on the bridge over the river right now. You can feel the slope of the arch. That’s the bridge, and the river is right below us”.

There is something surreal about this, something even more disorienting than anything witnessed so far. The dark, dirty cellar floor – a lowest point, had suddenly become a bridge – a highest point. It was a physical and conceptual revolution. We were standing on the halfway-house between two worlds. Far above was the daily life of commuters, arrivals and departures, station pubs, ticket staff and newsagents. Down below was the subterranean world of a forgotten river.

The manager turned to lower side of the wall – below the pipes. A small metal hatch, rising perhaps 3 feet from the floor stood out from the brickwork. The manager stood next to it and fumbled through his keys before inserting one into the door’s padlock.

“This is the door to the Irk”.

The padlock came off and the thin metal hatch swung open. A Gust of surprisingly cool and fresh wind blew through the cellar, immediately followed by the powerful roar of a torrent of water echoing up from below.

It was pitch black. Peering in but seeing nothing, I still had the sense of something abyssal. There was no doubt about the massive cavern below.

The security guard pulled out his torch, turned it on aimed it through the door. It flashed into the cavern, the beam of light suddenly bringing to life this darkness.
But only in glimpses.
The light began at the lowest point, were a dark moving mass of water flowed a good forty feet below. It tumbled down a slope, which after a few moments of adjusting to the darkness, I could see was entirely made of brick. The fact that I could make out the brickwork acting as a river bed, only showed how shallow the river was at this point. This wasn’t the torrential waterfall I had thought I had heard after the hatch opened. The cascade of water was simply amplified and amplified some more as the noise bounced upwards.

The manager turned his torch on. Together the two lines of light illuminated more and more of the deep space.

A beam cast its light to the very back, at the top end of the cascade. Here the light simply dissappeared into a morass of darkness. But what was visible was the great bend in the river. Its origins veered off to the right. The Irk did not run straight under Victoria Station, but weaved its path through this underworld.

A beam rose up the side. It unveiled a sheer forty-foot face of brickwork. These bricks were dull grey and barely perceptible after unknown years spent in the dark. What was striking to me was that this whole chasmic world was manmade. Crafted by humans but forgotten.

Maps of Manchester as far back as 1650 show the Irk as a culverted river, although it still remained on the surface. A century later, sketches of the Irk flowing past Chetham's Hospital school appear with its manmade boundaries very apparent.

By the 1840s Engels describes a river with a slum-city rising above it, creating a new street level, overcoming the river from above. It was only natural that the Irk, in the end, would be buried.

Staring through this hatch down to the river 40 feet below, was to stare back in time.