Paige Shiver’s Exhaustive Investigation into Hyde Park’s Most Mythologically Suspicious Body of Water
Dear Diary,
I have been watching the Serpentine. Not in a threatening way — in a scholarly way, which is a different thing, though the ducks do not appear to recognise the distinction. I am convinced that the Serpentine in Hyde Park is concealing something, and I do not mean the open water swimmers who appear at temperatures suggesting a total absence of functioning pain receptors. I mean something older. Something that has been in that particular curve of water since before the park was a park, before London was this London, possibly before London was anything at all.
What the Serpentine Actually Is
The Serpentine is an artificial lake constructed in the 1730s by damming the Westbourne river on the instruction of Queen Caroline. It is thirty acres of water, shaped and named for its sinuous curve, fed by what was once a natural watercourse and is now mainly managed drainage. It hosts the annual Christmas Day swim, the Summer Lido, and an art gallery. It is, on the surface, comprehensively explained.
And yet the Westbourne is real. Before it was dammed, before it was managed, before it became a Royal park feature, it was a river. Rivers in British mythology have always been inhabited. The Royal Parks official Serpentine page mentions the lake’s history but stops conspicuously short of addressing the mythological dimensions. I find this suggestive.
British Water Spirits: A Selective Survey
Every significant body of water in British folklore has something in it. The kelpie of Scottish rivers. The Grindylow of Yorkshire ponds. Jenny Greenteeth in Lancashire. The various entities said to inhabit the Thames, which generates legends with the reliable efficiency of a river that has had several thousand years of Londoners throwing things into it and occasionally falling in.
Hyde Park sits at the edge of what was once substantial marshland and managed waterway. The Westbourne wound through territory that Londoners of earlier centuries would have given a wide berth after dark. The English Heritage documentation of sacred and mythological waters in Britain notes that river and lake spirits tend to persist long after the original water source has been managed, contained, or renamed.
What I Have Observed
I have sat by the Serpentine on nine separate occasions this year, always in the early morning before the joggers arrive with their podcasts and their very loud opinions about interval training. In that early quiet there is something about the water that does not entirely behave like managed drainage. It moves in ways that do not completely correspond to the wind. The ducks sometimes go still all at once, in the way ducks do when they have noticed something below the surface that they are not going to explain to you.
I am not saying there is a monster in the Serpentine. I am saying that the Serpentine is thirty acres of water with a pre-existing river spirit tradition, and that nobody has ever conclusively confirmed the absence of anything. In the absence of a thorough mythological survey, I choose to remain open. This is also my policy on planning applications in SW1X.
The Open Water Swimmers as Possible Offerings
Every December, several hundred people enter the Serpentine in conditions that would constitute a health emergency in any other context. They do this voluntarily, in swimwear, having signed a fairly comprehensive waiver. I have begun to wonder whether the water spirit has developed an arrangement with the swimming club. An annual tribute of cold-shocked accountants, in exchange for continued calm waters and manageable algae levels. This would be an elegant mythological solution and would explain why the Christmas Day swim has been held continuously for over a century without anything going catastrophically wrong. The spirit is satisfied. The terms are being met. Everyone emerges blue but functional.
I will keep watching. The ducks will keep their counsel. The open water swimmers will keep their arrangement with whatever is below the surface. The Serpentine will keep doing what it has always done: looking like a park lake while being, underneath, something considerably more interesting.
Yours, Paige Shiver
More satire at newsthump.com.
A Final Observation on Sacred Water in the City
There is one more thing I want to say about the Serpentine, which is that it sits in a city increasingly hostile to the idea that anything cannot be explained. London has, over the past two centuries, drained its rivers, buried its springs, paved its marshes, and generally treated the landscape as a problem to be managed rather than a presence to be acknowledged. The Westbourne runs underground now, through a pipe beneath Sloane Square station that you can hear rumbling if you stand in the right spot. The Fleet is entirely subsumed. The Effra is a rumour.
The Serpentine is one of the few significant bodies of water in central London still visible, still accessible, still doing something in a publicly observable way. Whatever lives in it — spirit, myth, ecological memory, or simply the accumulated imagination of several million Londoners who have sat beside it and thought about things they cannot name — deserves, I think, to be left alone. I will keep watching. But I will not disturb whatever arrangement is in place.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
