May 1st1992 marked the first day of Platform’s project ‘Still Waters’: a month of street-based actions, walks, talks and art-interventions across the Fleet, Walbrook, Effra and Wandle, four river valleys in central London.

from London Under London, Trench & Hillman
Still Waters reframed London as a watershed. It aimed to reclaim London’s rivers from their invisible, mostly sewerised state, and begin action to resurrect them. It saw the fate of London’s rivers in the context of the upsurge of a right-wing, free-market agenda in Britain at that time: Poison me, Bury me, Forget me*.
Go here for a summary of what we did on each river.
Still Waters was given a Time Out Award in 1992, and achieved major press coverage in news, environmental and arts media for its innovative approaches. For many years, Platform received a large number of national and international requests across different sectors to run workshops, collaborate, talk, or write about the issues. And meet with campaigners and engineers who were ‘daylighting’ buried rivers (although de-sewerising is a whole other infrastructural level to taking the lid off a river that is otherwise flowing normally).
The project took place along the river Fleet (Hampstead & Highgate to Blackfriars), Walbrook (Moorgate to Cannon Street), Effra (Norwood to Vauxhall), and Lower Wandle (Beddington to Wandsworth Town). The major practical impacts were that it led on to our art-ecology- energy projects “Merton Island” and “Delta” which produced locally sourced renewable power from the river Wandle. These in turn led to the founding of a new charity Renewable Energy in the Urban Environment (later joining with Carbon Descent).
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