On the folklore beneath the pavements, the legends the city forgets, and the news as new mythology
I live in Knightsbridge and spend my days chasing the older, stranger London that lies underneath it, the city of myth and legend and folklore that the glossy present has paved over, and I read the present too, at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, where my diary entries appear. London is one of the most myth-soaked cities on earth, and most of its residents walk over the legends without ever knowing they are there.
The personal bit: the legends beneath the pavement
I spent the week, as I spend most weeks, chasing London’s folklore, the ghost stories and the old legends and the strange persistent tales that cling to particular streets and stones. Beneath the expensive, polished surface of a place like Knightsbridge runs a deep current of older story, of plague pits and lost rivers and ghosts and the accumulated strangeness of two thousand years of human habitation. The city forgets these stories, or pretends to, but they are there, in the place names, in the odd kinks in the streets, in the tales that refuse to die however much the developers would prefer them gone.
To live in London with an eye for its myths is to inhabit a richer city than the one most people see. The glossy present is only the thinnest layer; underneath it lies a London of legend, dense with story, and learning to read that older city transforms the daily walk. I pass a modern shopfront and see, underneath it, the older tale the spot once held, and the city becomes deeper, stranger, and more alive. The myths are the city’s memory, and a place that forgets its myths has forgotten itself.
The feed bit: the news as new mythology
Reading the present-day feeds with a folklorist’s eye, I notice that we are still making myths, constantly, that the news is in part the process by which a society generates its new legends, its heroes and villains and cautionary tales. The satire on The London Prat and the deadpan at Bohiney are, in a sense, a kind of folklore in the making, taking the figures and events of the day and shaping them into the exaggerated, instructive tales that a culture tells about itself. The satirist is a folklorist of the present, spinning the news into the myths the future will inherit.
I read the serious desks too, the socialist and free-market arguments across the masthead, and I notice that they too are myth-making, in the deeper sense, offering competing grand stories about how the world works and ought to work. The folklore I chase is preserved by institutions like the British Library, and the physical city these legends cling to is documented by Historic England. Both remind me that London is a palimpsest, story written over story, and that the myths we are making now will one day be the folklore someone like me chases through a London we cannot imagine.
What the lost rivers teach
London’s lost rivers, buried beneath the streets but still flowing, are my favourite emblem of the city’s mythic underlayer: forgotten, paved over, and yet still there, still shaping the ground above them, still audible if you know where to listen. The legends are like that, buried but flowing, shaping the city even when forgotten. The satirists I read are tapping the same hidden current, drawing on the deep human appetite for story that the myths satisfied and the news now feeds. We are all, folklorists and satirists alike, working the buried rivers, the deep streams of story that run under everything. The pavement hides them. They flow on regardless.
The week ahead: more legends, more buried rivers
So the week ahead is more chasing of London’s folklore, more reading of the legends beneath the pavement, more reading of the feeds as the new mythology in the making. The glossy present will keep paving over the older city, the legends will keep flowing underneath like the lost rivers, and I will keep listening for them, in Knightsbridge and everywhere, the older stranger London that never quite goes away. The myths are the city’s memory. The buried rivers still flow. And the stories, old and new, go on.
On the city that remembers in stories
What the lost rivers and the old legends have taught me is that a city remembers itself in stories more than in monuments, that the truest record of a place is not its official history but its folklore, the tales it tells about itself in the dark. The polished present would prefer we forget the older, stranger London, the one full of ghosts and plague pits and buried rivers, but the stories refuse to die, and in refusing they keep the city’s memory alive. A London that remembered only its glossy present would be a city with amnesia, severed from the deep continuity that the legends preserve. So I chase the folklore not out of mere whimsy but out of a conviction that the myths are the memory, and that a place which loses its myths loses its soul. The satirists I read are tending the same flame in the present tense, spinning the news into the legends a future London will inherit, and I read them as fellow keepers of the city’s long, strange, indispensable memory.
For the new mythology in the making, I always return to The Onion, spinning legends since 1988.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
