The Beasts with Two Backs

Saturday was a busy, busy day. It started when I woke up in bed with two women and an empty champagne bottle. However, because this is the real world, the reason I was in bed with two women was because we’d passed out watching Moulin Rouge. The champagne is more complicated, and remind me to tell you about it some time.

Rashly, I had agreed to meet the Da and the Sis in London for lunch, and so I had to stagger back from Fulwell to Colliers Wood to get myself into some sort of respectable state. On the way, I decided that mobile phones should be banned on buses, purely because when you have a pounding headache and rising nausea, there is little that is more annoying than a guy sitting directly behind you, babbling non-stop for the entire journey. Well, actually, screaming kids are more annoying. There was one of those, too.

I had hoped a shower, a snooze and some lunch would take care of the hangover. Even a hair of the dog at the Princess Louise in Holborn didn’t help. This was particularly lame, as I was supposed to be meeting some of my theatrical chums at the Natural History Museum.

Our destination was the Sexual Nature exhibition, and after half an hour in line in the sun (with a hangover, I don’t think I mentioned that before) we were in. The exhibition, if you haven’t seen it, is basically devoted to the subject of reproduction in the animal kingdom. Reproduction is a hugely important part of life – if you go with Richard Dawkins’ Selfish Gene theory, it’s basically the meaning of life. But what makes this such an interesting exhibition is the incredible variety of it out there.

The exhibition covers a very wide area, from mating displays to pheromonesto  The Deed Itself to birth and those early days of life. Each section in turn covers a huge and incredible variety. Take the seahorse, where the males are the ones who give birth. Or ducks, in which the females have evolutionary strategies to deal with gang rape. Or the angler fish, for whom the males are so much smaller than the females that scientists initially thought they were parasites (any radical feminists in the readership?).

Isabella Rossellini is a strange woman.

Although such a broad topic is by necessity going to be unable to cover any individual topic in great depth, it certainly brought home the incredible variation among the many, many species with which we share the planet. We were particularly taken by the section on scent, including a rather pungent exhibit enabling you to experience the smell of jaguar piss. And there were a number of very strange short films by Isabella Rossellini from the Green Porno series. Good fun.

Following a swift cheap-and-cheerful Chinese meal, we headed over to Holborn, to the Princess Louise. As I think I’ve said before, this is one of my all-time favourite pubs, due to its pure Victorian decor downstairs, its luxurious lounge upstairs and, not that I want to sound like a cheapskate or anything, the fact that you can get a round of drinks for a tenner without descending to the accursed levels of Wetherspoons. Here, we met Shoinan for more alcohol and inappropriate conversation. At this point, my hangover finally subsided and I could return to damaging my liver in earnest.

After this, Shoinan and I decided to move on into sinful Soho to see where a couple of reprobates like us could get some more booze. We came upon the Nellie Dean, a pub we’d visited once before. This is another old-skool place, unkempt, disreputable-looking, not too crowded and not remotely trendy. Therefore, ideal for us. It’s also open until midnight, which helps. We continued to put the world to rights over a jug of Pimms (executive decision by Shoinan) before heading home.

I feel we all learnt a lot that day. Unfortunately I can’t remember any of it. Hey ho.

Captain Planet, you jerk.

There are certain topics of conversation that are perennial favourites around the office. What’s in the news, what books people are reading, why the tea tastes strangely chemical when I make it, you know the sort of thing. One that often comes up is nostalgia for kids’ TV from Back In The Day. A show everyone remembers from around the time Yr. Humble Chronicler was growing up is Captain Planet and the Planeteers. Pause for the recognition/reminiscence to kick in. Ah yeah, there you go.

If you aren’t familiar with the premise, basically it was that Gaia assembles a team of young people from around the world to fight pollution with the help of rings that gave them elemental powers in what would appear to be a rather literal interpretation of the Gaia Hypothesis. When things got too hot for our heroes, they could combine their powers and summon a superhero named Captain Planet, whose only weakness was pollution (following the lead of Spider-Man’s arachnophobia and Superman’s crippling vertigo). The message at the end of every episode was that, when it comes to stopping pollution, “the power is YOURS!” Although in practice, most pollution in Captain Planet’s world seemed to be caused by a few asshole supervillains, so really the power belongs to whoever has a gun.

But like so many of these cartoons that seemed wicked-awesome at the time, there are certain aspects of Captain Planet that in retrospect seem a little, how can I put this, embarrassing today. And Captain Planet had an unfortunate tendency to punch above its weight in terms of the issues it dealt with, making it extra-cringeworthy today. Let’s look at some examples, shall we?

Case Study 1: Captain Planet versus the Goiânia accident

Reality: The Goiânia accident took place in 1987 in Brazil. Two men broke into an abandoned hospital in Goiânia and took, among other things, an X-ray machine containing highly radioactive caesium. This was sold to a local scrap dealer, Devair Alves Ferreira. Ferreira, fascinated by the eerie blue glow and ignorant of the danger, took the caesium home and showed it to a number of friends and relatives. Four people, including Ferreira’s wife and six-year-old daughter, died of radiation sickness and an estimated 250 people were contaminated.

Captain Planet’s take: The episode ‘A Deadly Glow.’ In this episode, a couple of kids steal a radioactive source from, yes, a hospital. The cartoon adds a giant radioactive rock monster in a Hawaiian shirt who wants the radiation for himself for reasons I don’t quite recall. Does he eat radiation? Something like that. Also the American kid takes the piss out of a child undergoing chemotherapy.

The Message: The real enemies are negligence and ignorance. And radioactive rock monsters.

Case Study 2: Captain Planet versus The Troubles

Reality: The Troubles was a period in Northern Ireland lasting approximately from the late 1960s to the late 1990s during which there was extensive violence arising over tensions between the Catholic and Protestant communities and the question of whether Ulster should remain part of Britain or join the Republic of Ireland. The roots of the conflict go back to the early 17th century and although the Troubles are generally considered to have ended with 1998′s Good Friday Agreement, violence and tension between the communities remains.

Captain Planet’s Take: A weird rat-mutant who goes around spreading hate, again for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, is selling nuclear weapons in troubled areas of the world, including the Middle East, South Africa and Belfast. Because everyone is so blinded by hatred, they don’t realise that a nuclear bomb would actually destroy the whole of Belfast. Also their rage causes their accents to leap all over Ireland and sometimes as far as Scotland. With the help of the cancer-patient-hating American kid, however, they are able to put their differences aside and work together to stop the bomb and live in perfect har-mo-ny. At the end, the Planeteers are satisfied with the fact that they have brought about the beginning of the end of the Troubles. Look, the relevant parts of the episode can be seen here.

The Message: American money may have funded the Troubles, but American know-how will resolve them. And Catholic, Protestant and Scotsman alike can find peace and understanding.

Case Study 3: Captain Planet versus the AIDS epidemic

The reality: HIV is a disease that attacks the human immune system, transmitted via blood, semen, breast milk and vaginal fluid, which causes the condition known as AIDS. Although treatable, there is no cure and it is estimated to have killed tens of millions of people worldwide.

Captain Planet’s Take: A school’s star basketball player learns that he has been infected with HIV, probably due to the heinous amounts of needle-sharing and unprotected anal intercourse he’s been having lately (I forget whether they specified the reason, actually). That fucking rat mutant thing decides to use this to spread hate, which is a bit rich coming from something that looks like it came off a Nazi propaganda poster. Somehow, telling a bunch of kids that they can get AIDS from touching a basketball player means that the rat-man can take over the world. Fortunately, the Planeteers are able to educate everyone as to the truth, and presumably they halt the AIDS epidemic.

The Message: Too much Captain Planet makes you lose the will to live.

Case Study 4: Captain Planet vs Hitler

The Reality: If you don’t already know about Adolf Hitler, then I don’t think I can help you.

Captain Planet’s Take: A mad scientist voiced by Meg Ryan travels back in time and tries to sell an atomic weapon to a Teutonic gentleman who is basically Hitler but not quite. Having established our villain as a moustachioed German dictator of the 1940s, I don’t know why they’re so squeamish about saying “and it’s Hitler.” Anyway, the Planeteers also travel back in time and, with the help of the Allied forces and Captain Mullet, they save the day. On the way back to the present day, the mad scientist drops her notebook. Captain Planet doesn’t return for it and one of the soldiers comments that it might contain useful information.

The Message: Through his negligence, Captain Planet is responsible for the creation of the atom bomb. Every night, when he goes to sleep, he sees the faces of every Hiroshima victim burned into his soul.

The marriage of heron and hell

I often think the success of a party can be judged by the voyage home. If it was a lame party, the voyage home will be undertaken in a state of sobriety on the Tube. If it was a good party, the voyage home will be undertaken while in a total mess and may well involve a degree of unrelenting horror. Possibly the following morning.

So it was on New Year’s Eve. The party was held in rural Oxfordshire (somewhere called “Bicester” or possibly “Bister”), which for some reason is not served by night buses. Therefore, I had to crash and make my way home the following morning. You get some pretty funny looks when you’re making your way home in a tailcoat, a silver waistcoat and a scarlet top hat, I can tell you.

The train came in at Marylebone, and the quickest route home would have been to simply jump on the Bakerloo line and change at Elephant and Castle, but I felt like a bit of a stroll – I thought I’d walk to Euston, shooting up Baker Street and swinging through Regent’s Park as I went.

This is perhaps not the park at its best.

Regent’s Park is perhaps my favourite of the London parks (though Hyde Park takes some beating). Particularly in the summer, it’s a delightful place to walk when you have nothing particular to do, and it’s easy to get to from Chalk Farm, Camden or the West End. The park was originally land swiped by Henry VIII and used for hunting. In 1818, the Prince Regent (later King George IV) took it over and envisioned it as a rather extravagant town home for himself and his friends, commissioning his friend, the now-legendary architect John Nash, to design the whole shebang. Nash is worthy of an entry in himself, so I won’t go into too much detail beyond saying that he defined the Regency style of architecture more-or-less singlehandedly. His grand plans for the area included a palace and several large villas, but were scaled back into the park we see today. It was, for the time, extremely innovative – the standard concept of the urban park, such as it was then, consisted of rigid, regimented grids. An up-yours to nature. Nash’s concept was the first real attempt to recreate an area of natural beauty within the city, and as such set a trend for urban parkland that would last right up until the present day.

Although the park was open to the public, it was on the basis of an admission fee – well, after you’d spent all that money, you didn’t want just anyone coming in. The fee was abolished in 1835, though the park was still only open two days a week.

Fortunately, we live in more enlightened times (perhaps) and now it’s open to the public all the time. Despite this, on that New Year’s morning there were few people about. The lake was frozen over, which had I known about it at the time might have reminded me of the occasion on 15th January 1867 when the ice on the lake collapsed under the weight of skaters. The Royal Humane Society had stationed icemen nearby, equipped with hooks, ladders and hot baths, but with two hundred in the lake they were utterly overwhelmed. Local boatbuilder William Archer managed to save seven in his boat and Abel Thomas swam out and rescued two (a third attempt being foiled by the intense cold). The master of the Marylebone Workhouse, George Douglas, played a key role in organising the medical care for the victims. Despite these and countless other unacknowledged efforts, forty were killed in the disaster.

Seven years later, the park would bear witness to another disaster, though fortunately with far smaller loss of life.

Following the 1867 disaster, the water level of the lake was reduced somewhat. This might be what made it so very attractive to herons. Herons, specifically grey herons, can be seen all over the place in London, helped in no small part by the number of little rivers, canals, docklands and ponds. They hunt in shallow water, standing motionless, sometimes for hours, before striking. One thing you can’t really say about them, though, is that they’re particularly social birds. It’s quite rare to see more than one at a time. Now, in the above photo, you can see seven. That wasn’t even all of them. There were ridiculous numbers of herons in this place. A little bit freaky, actually. I don’t know if herons are capable of cooperating to, say, bring a human down, but I wasn’t too keen to find out, and left mystified.

I found the answer on my trip to the Greenwich Peninsula a little while ago – it turns out that Regent’s Park is the only breeding colony in London for the grey heron. So all those herons I’ve seen, in Brentford, Merton, Whitton, Hackney, Kingston and so many other places, all came from the same place. Incredible.

No word on whether they can bring a grown man down, though.

The evolution of evolution

As you will no doubt be aware, Saturday was Charles Darwin’s birthday (happy 202nd, Mr Darwin!) and so to celebrate, Becky B held a loosely Darwin-themed party. My own shirt evolved several frills to frighten off predators, which seemed to work, as I am still alive. I even managed to avoid a hangover the next morning, which was impressive given that I’d started Saturday with a stonker of a headache.

Charles Darwin evolved an impressive beard towards the end of his life.

I’m something of a fan of Charles Darwin and, indeed, of evolutionary biology in general. I’m no scientist, it goes without saying if you’re a regular reader of this blog, but I take an interest. Call me an evolution groupie, if you like.

I was actually introduced to the concept at a very young age – I can’t have been much older than six or seven when I came across an ape-like man in a case in the Natural History Museum. How Wayne Rooney got in there in the first place, I shall never know, but next along was a case with a model of homo erectus therein. I expressed bemusement to the Ma, who explained that, in fact, people thousands of years ago looked like apes and, further back, actually were. This didn’t seem too ridiculous to me – if every generation looks different from the last one, well, what was so strange about the concept that we might have been apes a long time ago? After all, an ape sort of looks like a human if you squint.

[PARENTHESIS: The word "orangutan" is a Malay term meaning "man of the forest." Which suggests that the people of Malaysia also saw the resemblance. Despite making such excellent librarians, orangutans are critically endangered and may be extinct in the wild by 2015.]

So anyway, I never found evolution to be a weird idea. Okay, it conflicted with the Bible on a lot of points, but I had the kind of nonconformist view of Christianity that was fairly typical of a British six-year-old (for instance, I thought the concept of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost all being the same person was some sort of misprint).

Actually, Charles Darwin’s own religious background is something of a curiosity in terms of how very orthodox it was. Creationists tend to view him as a kind of Antichrist who came up with his theories purely to make Baby Jesus cry, but in his early years he seriously considered becoming a vicar in the Church of England. Unusually in his family, he was entirely C of E in his views, despite his father and grandfather being freethinkers and his wider family being largely nonconformist. Even at the end of his life, he never identified as atheist, preferring to describe himself as agnostic – although some accounts suggest that he didn’t see any real difference between the two, except that people who called themselves atheists tended to be kind of jerky. A quick tour of any Internet bulletin board on the subject of religion will show that he wasn’t entirely wrong there.

There’s nothing particularly strange about the idea of someone taking an interest both in holy matters and in biology (although Kent Hovind can still piss right off). Bear in mind that your average Victorian clergyman was an educated, middle-class fellow with a decent income and not much to do during the week. If they were in a country parish, studying nature was an agreeable way to pass the time.

I thoroughly recommend a visit to Gilbert White’s house if you should find yourself near Selborne. White was an 18th century curate and also a kind of proto-ecologist, believing in the importance of studying wildlife in its natural habitat. This led him to discover that, among other things, birds migrate as opposed to, e.g. hiding underwater in the winter (a serious theory at the time).

Or if you’re looking for another vicar who paved the way for modern biology, how about the Very Reverend William Buckland? Perhaps the first British paleontologist, he disputed the suggestion that modern rock formations had been created by Noah’s flood and in 1824 discovered the fossil bones that he would name “Megalosaurus” – this was the earliest identification of dinosaurs. He also reputedly ate the mummified heart of Louis XIV. Nothing to do with religion vs. science, I just thought it was an interesting fact.

Yet another irony, considering the question of religion vs. evolution, is the fact that although Darwin is perhaps the most important name in modern biology, there was one significant place in the 19th century where his name was mud – the Natural History Museum. More specifically, in the office of the Museum’s effective founder, Richard Owen. Now, I don’t want to dis Owen for his work as a biologist, and there’s no doubt that without his diligent work (and friends in high places), the nation’s natural history collections would have remained a mere collection of trinkets and curios overseen by erratic curators in a wing of the British Museum. But he refused to believe in the concept of evolution by natural selection, firmly coming down on the side of creationism. It’s said that the reason the Natural History Museum’s facade depicts only living species on the west wing and only extinct ones on the east was because Owen refused to even passively acknowledge that they might be linked. This also goes some way to explaining why Darwin’s statue is in the tea room – it was a late addition.

Although in the 1860s Owen’s views were those of an intelligent if conservative scientist, within a few decades they would become less and less credible and a hundred years later would have been abandoned by all except fundies and cranks. These days, the museum even has a research centre named after Darwin.

For all the likes of Richard Dawkins might complain about a rising tendency towards fundamentalism and the rejection of evolution, I don’t think there’s that great a risk in this country. Britain is an essentially secular nation – the Archbishop of Canterbury himself admits to the truth of evolution (so does the Pope, by the way). There might be Bible-bashers ranting about how Darwin burns in hell even as we speak, and there might be scientists being patronising and rude to religious folk, but for the majority of the nation, I don’t think we really give a damn.

Mice to see you

One of my colleagues at work was enthusiastically telling me the other day about an exciting new children’s programme named Rastamouse. This, she explained, is a series concerning the adventures of a mouse who speaks patois, fights crime and possibly smokes ganja to bring himself closer to Jah. Sounds novel.

However, I would be remiss in my duties as a blogger and possibly get kicked out of the Ancient and Noble Order of Web-Loggers if I did not point out that this is not actually the first instance of a rastafarian rodent on British children’s television.

You see, back in the day (the day in question being at some point in 1988), there was another cartoon featuring such a character. The cartoon was called Tube Mice, and seems to be remembered by Yr. Humble Chronicler and almost no one else.

Those who do remember it tend to recall it as some sort of children’s version of Minder – not entirely unreasonable, as George Cole basically reprises his Arthur Daly role as the teddy-boy mouse Vernon and Dennis Waterman plays his sidekick, a punk mouse named Toaster.  The series, as the name implies, was about the adventures of the mice who live on the London Underground. The protagonists were Bubble, a lifelong Londoner (seen right – the aforementioned Rastafarian mouse) and Squeak, a country mouse newly arrived in the city. Vernon and Toaster might be allies or antagonists, depending on the demands of the story. Other characters included mouse equivalents of various London types, including a bohemian artist and an MP (affiliation unknown).

The mice lived at Oxford Circus station in a kind of underground civilisation built out of litter and other items discarded by humans. Their adventures would take them all over London, to locations as diverse as the Houses of Parliament, the Mount Pleasant sorting office and a cheese factory at Swiss Cottage. It’s interesting that it was so specifically London-based – most kids’ TV shows tend to go with a vague or fictional location, one presumes to avoid alienating foreign audiences and to make translation easier. Even the more recent cartoon Underground Ernie, despite using the classic London Transport roundel and featuring characters named Bakerloo, Victoria, Hammersmith and City, was not set in London.

Underground Ernie. I suppose this is their version of Neasden Depot or something.

As you know, there is a simple rule for judging the quality of children’s television. Namely, if you watched it when you were growing up, it was awesome. If it came after you grew up, it’s terrible. So in retrospect, I should be fair and point out that it did have its faults – the animation was distinctly low-budget, for a start. But this helped to give it a very distinctive punk aesthetic, very ’80s style. Much use was made of crazy skewed perspective, washed-out colour and ransom-note style writing. It’s a pretty unique look, very much in keeping with the setting.

The series has now seemingly faded into obscurity – I’ve only been able to find a couple of clips online, and very little by way of articles. Complicating matters further is the existence of another, later cartoon by the same name. There’s no DVD release, and I suspect it’s not likely to be rediscovered any time soon. But still, as one of the only definitely London-based London-centric cartoons, you may consider it worth a look.

Further Reading (and viewing)

 

The opening titles. One of the only clips around.
Here is an article on the series from the marvellously comprehensive Toonhound.

I get a kick out of you

Last-minute changes of plan are always good for a laugh, as I discovered on Friday when the event upon which I had anchored my weekend was moved. I shook my fist and generally cursed the fates until I received a call from Izzi asking if I’d like to go to see the High Society exhibition at the Wellcome Collection.

The Wellcome Collection is a real oddity. I never know quite how to describe it to someone not already familiar with it. Describing itself as “a free destination for the incurably curious,” it’s part museum, part art gallery. The basic theme is medicine, human biology and their position in society. There are sculptures, art installations and historical artefacts relating to these themes. Its purpose seems to be to make you think rather than to supply you with information – there is no explanatory text beyond basic captions for most of the exhibits.

Morphinomane by Eugene Samuel Grasset, one of the paintings on display.

The High Society exhibition is the Wellcome Collection’s exploration of mind-altering substances. I hesitate to use the word “drugs” because one of the points the exhibition makes is that one man’s drug is another man’s mainstream stimulant. In this country, alcohol is generally considered to be a perfectly acceptable substance, provided you don’t make a tit of yourself. In many cultures, it’s considered to be four-star Satan fuel. Is the go-getter who takes a quadruple espresso to wake them up in the morning any worse than the stoner who lights a joint to relax? These are the questions the exhibition invites you to think about.

At the start of the exhibition, we’re presented with a load of drug paraphernalia, for the broadest definition of “drug.” As well as syringes and bongs, we see coffee and absinthe (which, incidentally, is nowhere near as crazy as it’s made out to be). We then go on a tour of drugs in medicine, in self-exploration, in social interaction and in law. We see prohibition posters, photos of pro-drug rallies, psychedelic light shows, tribal rituals, paintings and books, grouped by theme but not necessarily by stance or source.

No attempt is made at any kind of moral judgment, except that portrayed within the works themselves. The overriding message seems to be that nobody knows who’s right. We see that views on drugs depend who you are, where you are and when. The Victorians thought nothing of giving opiates to help baby sleep. In the Andes, coca tea is a popular cure for altitude sickness, seen as being no worse than regular tea over here. In the USA, coca leaf means cocaine (and Coca-Cola, but that tends to get glossed over when they take the moral high ground and spray defoliant over every back garden coca plot). Maybe none of us are right. Maybe Bob Dylan was right, and everybody should get stoned.

It certainly got Izzi and me talking. Like many people, I’ve done my share of experimentation, and Izzi’s done a lot more than me. I rather wish I hadn’t been talking about this experimentation so loudly, as while I was doing so I looked up and discovered that, by a million-to-one chance, my boss was attending the same exhibition. Shit.

Anyway, yeah, both Izzi and I are fairly liberal on the subject of drugs. Speaking personally, I think there’s quite a lot that could or should be legalised. I think it’s hypocritical that I could get in legal trouble for possessing a couple of joints’ worth of cannabis, but I could then drink two bottles of whisky and seriously endanger my life with no legal intervention whatsoever. Quite apart from such moral considerations, there’s the practical fact that with certain substances legalised, they can be taxed and policed more effectively.

But maybe I’m wrong as well. I invite you to take a trip (har har) to the Wellcome Collection to see for yourself. High Society runs until 27th February, entrance is free and it’s just a short walk from Euston and Euston Square stations. It might expand your mind.

Further Reading

http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/high-society.aspx - The official website

This bacon smells funny

Well, I finished reading that book, Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead. I was disappointed to discover that actually, it had almost no mention of said black swine. This cannot be allowed to stand, since it actually sounds like a hell of a good story.

The book does briefly mention said hogs in the form of an editorial from the Daily Telegraph. from 10 October 1859. I shall quote the relevant part of said editorial, because I rather like it.

This London is an amalgam of worlds within worlds, and the occurrences of every day convince us that there is not one of these worlds but has its special mysteries and its generic crimes. Exaggeration and ridicule often attach to the vastness of London, and the ignorance of its penetralia common to us who dwell therein. It has been said that beasts of chase still roam in the verdant fastnesses of Grosvenor Square, that there are undiscovered patches of primaeval forest in Hyde Park and that Hampstead sewers shelter a monstrous breed of black swine, which have propagated and run wild among the slimy feculence, and whose ferocious snouts will one day up-root Highgate archway, while they make Holloway intolerable with their grunting.

The pigs in question started out as an urban legend – Henry Mayhew discusses the story in London Labour and the London Poor.

The story runs that a sow in young by some accident got down the sewer through an opening and, wandering away from the spot, littered and reared her offspring in the drain, feeding on the offal and garbage washed into it continuously. Here, it is alleged, the breed multiplied exceedingly, and have become almost as ferocious as they are numerous.

This pig is not in a sewer, but you get the idea.

Spooky pigs are not unknown in British folklore – Yr. Humble Chronicler’s father, Shropshire-born, notes that there was a local legend in his village of a ghostly black pig haunting the churchyard, and a white one has supposedly been seen near Newbury in Berkshire. Perhaps the pigs of Hampstead are simply another version of this? Or perhaps, if we’re to be cynical, it has something to do with the fact that Mayhew’s flushermen would “generally take a drop of rum” before venturing into the sewers. Certainly there’s no evidence to back these pigs up other than hearsay. Sewer workers have reported frogs, ducks, terrapins and even snakes down there, but no pigs. The flushermen interviewed by Mayhew mention rats as big as “good-sized kittens.”

A sewer, London, yesterday.

The story seems to have been reasonably well-known in the mid-nineteenth century, but these cryptids have been largely forgotten in the present day. Leave it up to Neil Gaiman, then, to revive the legend in what might be the best-known work of London fantasy – Neverwhere. In this book, London possesses its own subterranean Labyrinth, and its own equivalent of the Minotaur. A character describes said beast thus:

“Now, they say that back before the fire and the plague there was a butcher lived down by the Fleet Ditch, had some poor creature he was going to fatten up for Christmas. (Some says it was a piglet, and some says it wusn’t, and there was some that wusn’t ever certain.) One night the beast runned away, ran into the Fleet Ditch, and vanished into the sewers. And it fed on sewage, and it grew, and it grew. And it got meaner, and nastier. They’d send in hunting parties after it, from time to time… Things like that, they’re too vicious to die. Too old and big and nasty.”

Given that the Fleet Ditch in question runs through Hampstead, and given that for much of its length it was bricked over and used as a sewer, I’d say we have a much-embellished version of the story of the black swine. The book, if you haven’t read it, is well worth grabbing – it’s basically a retelling of more-or-less every lost myth of London. The main character, significantly, is Richard Mayhew.

It’s a shame that, whatever else we may have in London’s vast network of sewers, storm drains and underground rivers, the black pigs of Hampstead are no longer believed in. Maybe the story was lowering property values in the area or something. No, if you want sewer monsters, I’m afraid you’ll have to take the alligators of New York and be done with it, Sunny Jim.

Oink.