More than a century and a half after the stream disappeared, most Londoners are unlikely to have heard of it, or to know that, where it joined the Thames, the Fleet was once almost 100 metres wide. Residents might also be surprised to learn that Westminster Abbey, where monarchs and other worthies are interred, was built on what in the 13th century was an island. The city is littered with such transformations and unexpected tales. Given how personal your book sometimes is, what can London’s lost rivers and the book itself tell its readers? Perhaps even about themselves? The book is organised into sections, each dealing with Chivers’ separate ‘quests’ within the city. This might be the tracing of a river source or an investigation into one of London’s natural features – for example, where there is a natural rupture in the clay the city is built upon. I’ll be honest – some of this didn’t sound thrilling to me initially, but the reader is in safe hands and Chivers makes his personal interests interesting to read. He's since spent years tracing London's hidden landscape armed only with his home-made geology map, a pair of well-worn shoes, and a heightened sense of curiosity. His new book, London Clay, presents his discoveries in a delicious tome of topology. London re-enchanted. From the heart of the old city to the distant edgelands, London Clay is a wonderfully multi-layered meander through a landscape at once familiar and strange. A portrait of a haunted, mysterious city and a moving work of personal memoir.”

The relationship between underlying geology, the shreds of the natural to be found at the margins of the city's structures and the human community and its detritus are core to the book even if that relationship is never formally laid out for analysis. I’m not a utopian. I certainly don’t believe that we can return to a prelapsarian paradise, It’s a city. It is a place where we’ve killed whole ecosystems. But I do think by being mindful of what is underneath our feet, I think it can teach us all to respect the geography and work with it rather than working against it. A good example of this is the Pudding Mill River. During the floods, there was that CCTV shot of a flooded tube station. That’s the Pudding Mill Lane DLR station. I wonder if decades or centuries from now others will experience the same hunger for pyscho-geology and the energies that have gone before them and perhaps still linger in an attempt to connect. This book is an interesting animal, as it is not a memoir, it is not a text book or a book of poetry – it is very much all of these things and has elements of social and personal history within it. Westminster is now the centre of our government and establishment, but it used to be a river delta in its past. He heads down into a sewer to see the River Fleet and has to shower a long time after that experience. If you know where and how to look there are still echoes of the roads that the Romans first used, Watling Street, Stane Street as well as hints of more recent London, as he searches for the lost island of Bermondsey and sees if the Olympic Park has eradicated the ancient causeway that crossed the marshes.

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The idea of secret rivers, enclosed in the sewer system across London, exerting their influence on the city unbeknownst to the residents above has a sense of the mystical about it – helped, no doubt, by my reading Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series!

Gentrification is such a loaded word. When I went to Elephant and Castle, which is an area that’s special to me, having grown up not too far away – it always had this magnetic quality – to see that amazing shopping centre being demolished for this new development… However, the developers might promise they will do this and the other, but we all know that luxury flats are always at the core of these new developments.

Of course Chivers presents a lot of tangible facts and expresses feelings (about his family past and present) but there is something else lurking behind all this, an amalgam of 'Sorge' (an appropriate German word), sadnss, love and anxiety. Maybe a dash of fatalism not helped by COVID.

I seem to have a fascination for the abandoned parts of our towns and cities – just this week I’ve been watching Secrets of the London Underground on Yesterday – so London Clay is right in my wheelhouse. London at the beginning of the 2020s is as different from, say, London in the 1990s (my last residence decade) as the latter was from the London of the 1970s (when I first arrived). Its multiculturalism is now embedded, its 'different ideology' established and its detritus piling up. Chivers’s writing feels refreshing and necessary, a genuine, lyrical appraisal of contemporary life.’ If you have any interest in what lies below our capital city, this is definitely worth a read. Even if you have no interest in what lies below our capital city, this is still worth a read – Chivers’ clever blending of disparate elements and crafting of language is a pleasure to read. In the third chapter of the book, you mention the idea of liquidity and what you call a liquid city. Could you maybe tell us a bit more about that concept and what it tells us about London?In that chapter, liquidity is used as a pun on financial liquidity. Following that particular river [the Walbrook] was exciting, because you were following this submerged stream. This hidden history for an area, which is generating huge amounts of capital now. So, there’s this strange dissonance created by that particular experience. I think we tend to forget that London really is a water city. You think about places like the Shell Centre, which is literally built on a concrete raft floating in the clay… Or Waterloo station built on stilts. I suppose if I’m doing anything with the book, it’s trying to return us to this idea that water is fundamental not only for life, but also in this city. Chivers becomes Everylondoner. The outsider who thinks he knows London from visits (including commuting) or having lived there in the past gets a subtle sense of both change and permanence, the recognisable place but also its continuing transformation when you cease to be there.