I became a bit obsessed with London’s waterways during the autumn lockdown. The canals of the East offered an escape from the claustrophobia of pandemic life and I took to running by them. I learned their names and interconnections and used the brief respite from restrictions in December to visit the Canal Museum near King’s Cross, housed in a Victorian ice warehouse. By this point I’d already become familiar with the Grand Surrey Canal, which for more than a century-and-a-half was one of south London’s most prominent topographical features. But since it was finally filled in 1974, its fate linked to the demise of London’s port, under pressures from containerisation, the canal has fallen into obscurity, little known outside of Southwark. Using old maps I found online, I plotted its erstwhile course and cycled down to Surrey Quays one cold morning to see what could work. Before too long, the route became like an old friend. I discovered that it passed through an almost complete spectrum of zones and functions, and that together they materialised the history of postwar London. It was all there: big money, decay and dereliction, work and leisure. I enjoyed the ritual of repeating this cycle every now and again, my eyes peeled for traces, remnants and commemorations.
At Greenland Dock, I met a man who explained the machinery for hauling barges onto land. He mostly spoke about politics, but it eventually transpired that he’d pulled a friend from the canal at the age of about twelve, an act of bravery which apparently made the papers. I was astonished. It was event just like this which triggered the final draining - and he seemed about the right age. Either way, it occurred to me then that there’s a whole human history of this lost waterway waiting to be documented, while there are still those who remember it. Inscribed onto slabs along the central path of Plough Way, a recent development near the canal’s end, is a poem which honours the dockers and ‘watermen’ who for generations plied the canal from Rotherhithe to Camberwell. Their names are ‘long forgotten’, their stories lost to time. It’s hard to separate such gestures from the designs of those capitalising on industrial heritage. But my ambition for this project became to concentrate the vestiges of the Grand Surrey, to bring them together in one place, so that, at least for my own sake, it could be made a little tangible once again. As such, the photographs are sequenced linearly: spatially coherent but temporally intermingled.
Benedict Flett is a photographer and writer from London, currently living in Hackney. His interests range across networked photography, satellite imagery, political aesthetics, critical theory and the post-Soviet space. His work so far has mostly focused on exploring manifestations of ideology and discourses of progress on landscapes and the built environment. He studied Politics and Sociology at Cambridge between 2016-2019, where he focused on social theory, political economy and the history of political thought.