Its two thirty AM on Wednesday night and while there is plenty that’s odd about changing into a tight fitting rubber suit in the back of a vintage car, what’s making me feel really uncomfortable right now is that we are right in the centre of town.
You‘ve all seen Ry’s jet-black Morris Traveller. It looks like a cross between Bonnie and Clyde’s death wagon and a hearse. Like every other car he’s had since I’ve known him, it attracts attention.
We’re parked up in that little side street down the back of the Watershed Cinema, next to where the old Wild Walk was and where the new aquarium is going to be. It’s raining and a young couple are stumbling down the alleyway, sharing the shelter of a single large coat. They glare in the window, judging by the way they are dressed they are coming back from the nightclub, in the @Bristol complex. I switch on the torch and it makes them jump. They stumble off into the night.
Ryan has his Iphone running through a tape player that he’s rigged up to live in the glove compartment. It’s plays “We all fall down” by I Like Trains. As far as I can tell it’s about waiting for death (like all their other tunes). It’s not exactly getting me pepped up for this.
There is a knock on the other window, just behind my head. It’s Ryan, his ‘I was a teenage undertaker’ features lit up by his own torch and obscured by the rain on the glass. ‘Batteries’ he says,
‘What?’
‘Batteries, you’re going to need spare batteries.’
The rubber I am wearing is not for fetish purposes; it’s a full dry suit. I am also wearing a helmet with a torch on it. We’re not dogging, we’re going underground and despite my reservations about extreme urban exploration, there’s no getting out if it. Ryan’s come all the way down from London and I’m glad to see him. The last time we hung out we went to this weird Turkish restaurant in London with my wife, my dad and one of his Artist Employees. I had a plane to catch early the next morning and although we were pleased to see each other, the whole thing felt a little forced. It was mainly my fault. Ryan is doing very well in life compared to me. (He earns about 40k a year doing video editing for big company’s, I earn minimum wage in a bar.) I kept telling him he should buy a jet ski, I kept telling him he should buy a house. Trying to get him to do all the things I would do if I ever had any money.
At Uni it was different, I was the talented one, now it seems Ryan was the smart one, the one that didn’t rely on “talent” and buckled down to learn some actual skills. At the end of the night in the Turkish restaurant, he walked back towards his tube station looking completely at ease in a way I never can in London. At that moment I had the odd thought that I might not see him again. That perhaps he couldn’t wait to leave.
But then out of the blue, here he is.
Not including the various canals there are two rivers that run through the heart of Bristol: The river Avon and the river Frome. People barely see the Frome now. Most of it was covered over in 1893 and the rest in 1938. What’s left of it now flows beneath the houses and shops and offices of St Judes and Broadmead, the only clue to it's existance being the street names above: River, Anchor and Broadweir among others. The river used to come out from a large rectangular opening where the boardwalk and ferry dock is next to where they park the falafel van and the crepe wagon. Back then with the right equipment and with no one around to stop you, you could just get into the water and follow it back through the city, all the way back to Wades Street in St Jude’s. But the truth is most people would just get to Castle Park then get lost. According to our map, under the park it becomes part of extensive flood defence that should the Frome rise too high, splits the river up and sends it to various outlets along the Avon. One at Bristol bridge, one all the way down at Gaol Bridge near the Louisiana. It’s pretty much a rabbit warren down there. Of course there aren’t any actual rabbits, there are however a lot of rats.
Even as Ryan is pulling the two bright yellow, rolled-up inflatable canoes down off his roof rack, I am still not sure how we are going to get into the river with all that decking they’ve put in down there. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he says, and points at the canoe he wants me to carry. I heft it up onto my shoulder. I feel a smuggler with a barrel of duty free whiskey. The two of us leave the little service alley off Cannons road and enter the waterfront. Torches off, we revert to the silent language of hunters. From now on in it is all nods, whispers and hand signals. We stick to the shadows. Move in quick little runs. There might not be a lot of people around right now, but there is a lot of CCTV in town. In one of the trendy little bars we pass I can see a group of staff enjoying an after-shift drink, they are still in their black and white uniforms but with their shirts no longer tucked in, the manager's tie is loose. One of them has her shoes off. Thankfully they don’t see us, they are too busy talking about how the night has gone, who fancies who, which manager is the biggest jerk. I wonder what happens if we do get spotted.
We are doing this in the same week that Andrew Ibrahim, the Bristol based amateur-extremist, was found guilty of plotting to blow himself up in the Galleries and was sentenced to ten years in prison. Perhaps they will think we are here smuggling explosives under the heart of Bristol, or casing the joint for some later attack. I don’t want to be the next to catch a decade for a crime I am yet to commit.
We’re a bit different to Andrew though; we don’t have the hard-drive full of propaganda, or the u-tube videos of us testing explosives. Also, I’m pretty sure the only link either of us have to Al-Qaeda would go via Kevin Bacon. I wonder briefly if I could mount a defence based on the right to ramble.
We reach the boarded up Crepe wagon and head down the steps to the decking and the ferry dock. I get increasingly nervous. I could see as we went down the steps that the taxi rank just a couple of hundred meters away was still full of cabs. There’s no privacy in this city, even at two thirty at night. I am sure that the only reason we are not spotted is the rain distorting the vision of the cameras, just as it distorted the face of that couple through the car window. I can’t believe they bother watching them too closely when it’s raining, people don’t get into fights or mug each other when it’s wet. They just want to go home and get warm. It’s different when you’re wearing a dry suit though. All this water, it’s mostly just noise.
‘How are we going to get under the decking?’ I whisper.
‘Were not.” Says Ryan
‘Then what the hell are we doing here?’
That’s when I see it. On the harbor wall there is a kind of sloping jetty that tourists walk down to get to the ferry. Just underneath that, there is a black empty space, a space that goes further back than the wall. Sitting on a set of stone steps, we inflate the canoes with a bike pump and quickly hide them under the sloping jetty. Once both are done we jump in. Holding my paddle in my right hand I use my left to inch along the wall towards the opening.
The opening goes in about four feet and reveals the fact that the harbour wall is not actually the harbour wall. The actual harbour wall is further back. The gap between the two creates a passageway that goes back along the dock. I move first into the darkness, it smells of damp and mold and moss, the sound of the rain on my dry suit stops. I don’t like cobwebs so rather than paddling I am frantically waving my paddle around as I attempt to navigate down the pitch-black tunnel. My shadow appears in front of me as Ryan turns on this head torch. Several smaller shadows disappear into cracks and crannies.
‘What are you doing you Muppet?’
I turn my torch on too. It doesn’t make me feel anymore comfortable. The black stones of the walls have become stained with limestone. Water seeping through the rocks is slowly turning this man made cave into a natural one. There are even mini Stalactites on the ceiling. Then I see that up ahead about halfway down the passage there is a metal grill locked up tight with a padlock and chain. It seems such a waste to have got all dressed up and come all this way only to be stopped by something like this. But it makes sense; they couldn’t just have anyone come down here. There was always going to be a locked gate somewhere.
‘End of the line,’ I say.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Have you got a pair of bold cutters?’ I’m half hoping he doesn’t because I’m feeling claustrophobic and would quite like the excuse to go back to the car, and besides, breaking and entering would totally destroy my "right to ramble" defence.
‘No I don’t,’ he says.
I breathe a sigh of relief.
‘How are we going to get past that?’
‘Don’t worry about it’ say’s Ryan
Uh oh.
Pushing his canoe past mine he blocks my view of the gate. Then he makes a show of cupping the lock in his hands and rattles and twists it. Then he stops. Looks me in the eye with what I imagine is a satisfied grin, but I can’t tell because I am blinded by his spotlight. When my vision returns I see that has got the lock open.
“Voila!” he says. I’m flabbergasted.
What I know now but didn’t know then is that Ryan’s brother James is an architectural surveyor and he came down here about three years ago with a team from the local council and a group of multinational business men called the Bristol Alliance. They wanted to make sure that the foundations for their Cabot Circus shopping centre were not going to be affected by the river. (Just for interest’s sake I’d like to point out that when this same group of international businessmen built the Bull Ring in the Midlands, they called themselves the ‘Birmingham Alliance’. According to James, at least one of them lives in Dubai.) Apparently they were originally going to have an underground car park, but opted for the one they have now, partly because of the flood risk presented by the underground river and partly because of a sight of historical interest.
Naturally James being the kind of guy he is, thought it might be a cool place to come back to, so when they sealed it up with the padlock, he kept the spare key. And it was that spare key and his brother’s description of the place that gave Ry the inspiration for this whole trip.
Even with the lock undone, the gate is quite rusty and gives off a massive squeak as we push it open. It must go down about seven feet into the water.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you had a key”
Ry laughs.
Our canoes barely fit thought the hole that the door has left in the bars, and I am worried that they might snag on something and spring a leak. They’re pretty tough though and they seem to hold up OK. The canoes are designed for Water Sourcing, a sport that involves climbing mountains and then coming down by canoe. The sides and bottom are reinforced with Kevlar; a knife would have trouble getting through these. Obviously it was Ry that bought all this equipment.
I help pull the door closed again, and being very careful not to drop it into the inky black water. We put the padlock back in place. Just as the bolt clicks shut I turn to Ry.
‘Did we actually tell anyone we were coming down here?’
‘I told you?’
‘I didn’t tell anyone.’
‘We can tell them about it when we get back.’
‘Yeah’, I say… when we get back”
I’m currently thinking, 'if '.
We edge further into the tunnel towards the point where it opens out under Broad Quay and Anchor road. Suddenly with a lot more space we find ourselves Looking up at the concrete supports that hold up our city centre. We can see the working of the millennium fountains, an intricate maze of pipes; they are all brown and covered with cobwebs. Less than a decade old and they already look like they have been here for fifty years.
This section of the river acts as a screen for lots of floating crap. There is apparently a set of bars on the wade street entrance that is meant to catch a lot of the crud, but it can’t catch smaller stuff like Starbucks cups and yogurt pots. It doesn’t catch crisp packets either. At one point I see a child’s armband and for a moment I go cold, but thankfully on closer inspection it turns out to be just an armband. It was probably lost along way up river. Up past where it skirts the motorway, Past the Eastville Park lake, which is fed by the Frome, and up and out, beyond the gray boundary’s of the city. Up there in the green, the water that now fills this liquid landfill is fresh and clear and clean enough to support a colony of endangered White Clawed Cray Fish. There are no Salmon in the Frome. Which is a good thing. I’d feel sorry for any salmon that had to swim through this shit in order to get home.
Ry says they clean out the crap once every few years or so, but it can’t have been recently. We push on; the raft of detritus gets thinner as we go. We are now underneath where Baldwin Street meets Broad Quay. It’s actually opposite the chapel that was the place that Sir John Cabot left from when he went to the America’s. That church isn’t on the waterfront anymore; it’s not even a church anymore. It’s just a grand old building next to some horrific modernist buildings where my brother used to go and get his weekly bus tickets. it now borders the kind of building which is prime real estate for crack heads and crack addicts. Not that I’ve ever seen any in there. It just strikes me as the kind of place they would like.
From this angle it’s just another part of the wall, a change from hard grey blocks concrete and shiny black kerbstones to sandstone, all be it covered with a some slimy weed that can’t seem to find a purchase on anything else. It’s a wonder that anything can grow down here without any light. And then I remember that we are here at night. Judging by the sound of dripping, there are holes. During the day there may be places where golden beams of sunshine cut the gloom, underneath these, mini rainforests grow. Complete with Jurassic park style ferns and if i'm right, what looks like a very wiry buddleia.
I ask Ryan why he wanted to come here.
‘A man can’t just sit around.’
The river takes a right turn and I can see why it doesn’t appear to flow into the harbour. The water that Ry and me are on is actually a foot or so higher than the rest of the river, which is flowing down a ten foot channel. It appears that that the whole section of covered harbour is in fact just an over flow section.
‘We are going up river?’ I say,
‘Yeah unless you fancy ending up on the Avon’
Stepping out of the canoe onto the raised wall that separates us from the running water I am glad of the dry suit. The river itself is about a foot or so deep but it is flowing quite quickly and threatens to take my feet from under me if I am not careful. Perhaps doing this on a night when it really is raining quite heavily might not have been the best idea in the world. Ryan hands me down my canoe, which slides easily over the slimy bricks.
‘Hold onto that’ he says. The canoe is actually tied to my leg with a ripcord so theoretically I shouldn’t be able to lose it. Even so I keep it close.
I hear a splash as Ry drops into the water, his light disappearing as he goes under. Before I have time to be worried, He comes up again and I laugh. The water is much deeper on the harbour side of the lip, deeper than Ryan was expecting. He comes up spitting water and grabbing at his canoe. He get’s up into the dividing wall with that look on his face like cat’s get when they fall off a TV and then pretend like they did it on purpose. Then we are on our way again.
The plan is not for us to paddle, we are going to stay close to the edge and push ourselves along the sides. As we go we come across various places where the river splits and goes off in another direction. Some of the passages that lead off are dry. Ryan stops and looks at his map. Points and then we move on.
‘Where are we actually going?’ I say. He doesn’t reply.
We start talking about university and how odd it is, how it was everything in the world. How, now that it’s over it seems all that time and energy bought us very little beyond a line on our CV. We talk about friends that we haven’t seen, Jo’s wedding, which I got invited to, but Ryan didn’t. We talk about the girls, how it’s odd to think of Gisele being married to a soldier and Becky working as a teacher. Then there’s Dory off doing her MA in Ohio, still riding high on her potential. There’s something about education, it constantly teases you with greatness. All the time we were at Bath Spa it made me believe that we were all destined to do well. Ryan is doing best at living the dream, but even he’s not completely happy, He’d rather be making real films. Saddly the jump from corporate to creative is difficult and comes with a large pay cut, most of the time a creative project with actually cost you money.
I should have done more. This wasn’t how it was meant to be. Ryan and I were teacher’s favourites, the golden boys of our year. I was going to write the movies and Ryan was going to direct. I feel like I have not lived up to my side of the bargain. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve let a lot of people down.
He changes the subject; we are almost directly under Cabot circus now. Pretty soon we will be under River Street. We will follow it all the way up to our exit at Wade Street.
‘We’re almost there,’ say’s Ryan.
‘Almost where?’
‘The Chapel’
'The what?'
Bristol suffered pretty heavily during the blitz, like a lot of the larger towns in England It’s why we have a lot of new buildings in the city centre. One of the by products of that was that the roof that covers the Frome collapsed in places, and like in the underground in London, people would come down here to shelter from the bombing.
One group seeking shelter were Bristolian Italians, until Italy changed sides they were forbidden from fighting for the allies, instead they worked making uniforms in a textile factory on River Street. In the next-door house they built a small chapel where they could pray to the Virgin Mary. One morning they woke up and found that their church had been bombed out, and that the bomb had exposed an underground river they had no idea existed. They decided to rebuild the chapel down here instead, where they knew it would be safe. Throughout the war people came to the church and while it could only fit about fifteen people, by the end it was said to have a congregation of fifty or so, they would take turns to climb down into the hole and take the holy sacriment or give confession. When they built it, Italians weren’t the most popular people in Britain and they didn’t have a lot of money, so they just built it out of what they could get their hands on. Biscuit tins lids cut in the shape of 2D candles, an Alter on top of an old butcher’s block.
We pull the canoes up onto the patch of earth. Beneath the cobwebs and dust a lot of this is still there. I guess even in these modern times, people don’t feel right stealing from a church. At the back there is a statue of the Madonna, even in the light of the torches I can see that some of the paint has faded from her wooden face. It makes her look sad. As if she has been crying.
We sit in silence for a few minutes and listen to the sound of the water. I convince myself that I can hear the rain outside hitting the pavement above our heads. A bomb once fell here. Two men died. People prayed, and now we sit. University friends.
‘Lets make a move’
‘Yeah’
We follow the river all the way upstream to Wade Street. It’s a long straight slog but it passes quickly and before long we are opening another padlock and clambering out of the river.
‘How are we going to get back to the car?’
‘We walk.’
‘Dressed like this’
‘Yes dressed like this… Unless you’ve brought a change of clothes…’
‘I think we should get a taxi’
‘Dressed like this?’
‘Yeah… Unless you brought a change of clothes?’
It took us just over an hour to get back to the car. Squelching through the city streets as the sun came up behind the rain clouds. We walked over all of where we had been under, we walked through the new buildings, through Cabot Circus, and castle park. We stopped for a moment at the bombed out church. We walked down past the old city wall, and past John Cabot’s launch. In our bright yellow suits we walked straight down past the hippodrome and this time didn’t even think about the CCTV. Together we walked all the way back to Ryan’s car.
'You know what we should do?' Said Ryan,
'We should make a movie.'
'Yeah' I said, 'We really should'
