Falcon Brook plaque

The lost London river of Falconbrook is the theme of my new poem for a plaque, a commission from Tideway Public Arts, at the rebuilt pumping station in Battersea, due to go on site in 2023. The poem explores ideas of history and written records, concerning the river and its surrounding land, through the etymology of Falcon brook and especially its earlier name of Hideburn.  The name and the image of a falcon rising, seems to originate with the family crest of the post-Reformation, seventeenth century, landowners.  It was called Hideburn in the middle ages, when the land was in church ownership and strips of land, ‘hides’, were let to local families for subsistence farming.   ‘Hide’, in this context, is derived from the word for ‘household’, used in the earliest human language.  I bring the idea of the household into the present day with the council estate’s communal park, concrete modernist flats and the people who live and work here.  There is also a play on contemporary usage of the word ‘hide’ and a hidden human history. 
The other main element of the poem is the stream itself.  It has two tributaries which merge into one as they descend from the hills and, at times, threaten to submerge the inhabited land, so that the river has been redirected and channelled.  In the final verse the river, the surrounding land, and people’s lives, are given equal value and foregrounded, or rise up, through the writing.  
The poem is designed with straight left and right margins to suggest a strip of land and also the containment of the river.  The internal spaces and punctuation have semantic and visual significance, as they can suggest variant readings of verse units, as well as the unwritten or yet to be written history of the area.  They can also suggest the hidden flow of the river. 
The final design and typesetting for the casting of the poem was achieved with the help of Rob Green of Doves Press and we had some lively discussions about fonts, punctuation and spacing. Tideway have used a modernised Doves font for all their public art. It was invented by TJ Cobden-Sanderson, influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement. To prevent his partner inheriting it, he threw the metal type mould into the Thames, where it was rediscovered by Green.
I would also like to thank Bridget Sawyers and Rachel Fleming-Mulford, Public Art Consultants, for their assistance and advice.

Frances Presley
January 2022