The Pigeons in Deptford
a short history
The pigeons walk down Deptford High Street, their beaks swivelling magnets, scrutinising the market stalls, appraising the day’s offerings and doling out their unique pigeon-judgement with a look from their intelligent eyes. It is well known that impressing a Deptford pigeon is a decidedly difficult pursuit. You can’t just throw something in their general direction and expect them to hop around after it like a magpie or squirrel. A pigeon’s curiosity is something slower, wiser and older, something not so simply pulled along by impulse.
Long before there were humans on the banks of this river, there were pigeons. They arrived before us and they intend to be here long after we are gone, an aspiration apparent to anyone who has had the privilege of understanding their language. Human linguists have found clues hidden in the sounds of pigeon speech: in their melancholy ‘cooing’ and ‘vuuing’ and mournful ‘hooing’ and ‘vrr-vrr-ooing’. The pigeons string these syllables together to form elongated words describing humankind, our structures, our inventions, our roads and our foods. Their language navigates the human world but did not originate with it. For example: the pigeon word for tower or spire contains the qualifier ‘tuu-vuu’ meaning ‘another’ or ‘again’, and it has thus been theorised that the pigeons knew towers before we built towers, knew cities before our cities - ancient places lost to time, perhaps built by the pigeons themselves. Of course, this is conjecture on the fringes of contemporary linguistic research and we will never know with any real certainty the secrets at the genesis of the language of the pigeons. What we do know for sure is what we can observe today.
Not caring much for gentrification of any kind, the pigeons in Deptford tend to walk past the artisan coffee shops, giving any fallen crumbs of gluten-free bread a wide berth. Preferring, as well, to keep to rooftops well-worn by feet from pigeon generations past than spend too much time on the modern roofs of the new-build flats populated by solar panels and peculiar wildflower carpets. Every week a new shop opening on the high street in place of an old business, every month a new squat block of terracotta bricked ‘premium housing’ springing up beneath a swinging crane, perplexing the flight paths of the pigeons. In the matter of gentrification however, Deptford is a few good years behind the round-the-clock projects of Lewisham central, where determined developers descend in droves, digging the earth, erecting skeleton spinal cords of white concrete one hundred metres high and implanting golden cladded towers where before there stood only empty lots, those oft overlooked sanctuaries of the city pigeon.
Almost entirely unbeknownst to the human population of London, the pigeon London assembles and organises, above and beneath us, with unpretentious efficiency. Pigeon focus groups, committees and councils convening weekly, monthly and annually, disagreeing, agreeing and compromising, all with a clearer sense of duty than their human counterparts. Decisions are made promptly where necessity requires but, for the most part, the system of governance exercised by the pigeons succeeds because it has been set up to succeed: avoiding entirely the entrenching of views and hostility between factions that are the hallmarks of the two-party system. Pigeons are known to change their minds (both at the societal and individual level) and eschew the categorisation of political views as either left-wing or right-wing - in part of course, due to the pigeons having one of each.
Perhaps though, what is of the highest significance in the superiority of pigeon society above that of the humans is the unrivalled ability of pigeon populations to hold on to group wisdom over the centuries, while comparable human communities repeat the same cycles decade on decade with each new generation distrusting the previous and being treated with derision and condescension in return. For the pigeons, knowledge flows clean and clever through the overlapping layers of their generations, sharing the secrets of the city, the roofs and the sky, from river to spire, churchyard to dockyard.
The pigeons remember when there were kings and queens in Deptford. For it was the king himself, King Henry the Eighth, who chose Deptford as the spot on which to build the royal dockyard five hundred years ago. The pigeons remember the cows too, coming every week on great cargo ships, baying and mooing, one hundred and fifty-thousand brought to Deptford each year, carried frightened across the sea for thousands of miles only to be slaughtered at arrival on the docks themselves, before the invention of refrigerated meat. And they remember too, long before the cattle and kings, a millennium ago, when this was the site of a deep ford (Depeford) on the road from London to Dover and Lewisham was the Saxon: Liofshema.
We have known for some time of the efforts of the pigeons to map out the expanding city; regional regiments of four to six birds, tasked by their local pigeon council to fly out on fact-finding missions, reporting back any changes in the landscape. However it has only recently come to light that the specific unit of pigeon cartographers commissioned with the mapping of Lewisham Central disbanded in protest in 2018, throwing up their wings in exasperation and abandoning the project altogether, declaring the region: ‘Trr-vrr-ooo’, meaning ‘the place where the roofs cannot make their minds up’.
But all that is yet to come for Deptford. At this moment in time it is not clear if the pigeons are aware of the forthcoming plans for Convoys Wharf, the site of the old Deptford Dockyard. When it comes to predicting the future, the pigeons prefer the studying of ancient portents and omens, rather than the reading of glossy brochures and pdfs authored by city developers and property groups. The pigeons follow a larger story, one in which homo sapiens rise and fall in a single chapter.
It is with acute certainty that I can say: the pigeons know us well. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of our understanding of them, much of what we once knew about pigeons is now long forgotten. Hundreds of years ago, the people who lived on the banks of The Thames had no end of stories about the pigeons and although a few stories still survive to this day, the vast majority have invariably slipped from mainstream knowledge.
One such tale holds that pigeons can transform themselves into other creatures at will. An account from the diary of a Yeoman of the Guard on duty at the Tower of London describes a pigeon that “didst turn to a mouse” to run faster across the castle roof before jumping from a gutter pipe and transmuting back into a pigeon mid-air as “wings ope out again from its vertebrae to fly it across the river”. Other accounts from the City of London have pigeons transforming into small grey fish, swapping their feathers for fins and dropping into the river to be carried downstream towards Deptford and the docks. Another story, perhaps the oldest source we have, asserts that all the animals in the forest, all the birds in the sky and all the fish in the sea are just pigeons in disguise, adventuring over the world in different forms for many years, before one day returning to the true shape of a pigeon in their old age.
Even today there are accounts of pigeons with seemingly magical properties. Last week in Bermondsey, a report was made to the Metropolitan Police in which a local pigeon allegedly flared up into a bright yellow burst of light in order to surprise a packet of crisps out of the hands of a small child. Earlier this summer there were reports of Deptford pigeons glowing blue in the early evening on the telegraph wires of Clyde street. I went myself to see them a few nights later, walking with the dog under the golden lamp post lights, dandelions glinting silver in the banks of the road, but I did not find any phosphorescent pigeons.
I was in the churchyard of Saint Paul’s at 5pm yesterday, sheltering from the first big September rain with the pigeons and squirrels. I watched them wait together at first, one flock of birds and mammals but when the rain began to thin the squirrels ventured out in twos and threes, leaving the pigeons to demonstrate their well-known proverbial patience. The squirrels chased each other in the grey and the green between the gravestones. The grass still yellow in places, the hottest days of summer now gone, a warmer summer than we’ve ever had, since records began, warmer still than the times even before that, when the pigeons alone kept the records.
Thunder came then and the squirrels jumped and ran while the pigeons stayed stock-still beneath the trees listening to the full meaning of the thunder until its last garbled grumble when, getting a complete understanding, the pigeons lifted up as one, sixty wings taking thirty birds into the sky, the great grey release displacing the fallen leaves as the pigeons dispersed, surrendering the churchyard to the rule of birds better suited to the rain, a lone magpie arriving in the branches above, calling a plaintive goodbye.
It has been almost a decade now since I first met the pigeons here. Perhaps it was coming to Deptford so empty of anything else, so out of connection with other people that I found such solace in the pigeons. I am glad I landed here. I am grateful for Deptford. The other paths I could have taken are so far behind me now to have fallen out of memory. Even my most well-kept and oft-handled stories, the memories I preserve and the things I tell myself about my own life are all now like pigeons in the distance, cooing on the other side of misted glass.
Lastly, I leave you with the words of the pigeons themselves - for in my time amongst them I have been fortunate enough to translate a few of their aphorisms and adages. I transcribe six here:
1. “There are but two pursuits truly worthy of the time of a pigeon: the finding of a good snack, and the eating of it.”
2. “Pigeons worry so the parakeets don’t have to.”
3. “When sharing a crisp with a fellow pigeon, beware: they will want the bigger half. When sharing a crisp with a crow, beware: they will want both halves.”
4. “Daydreaming is the destiny of the domestic cat, freedom the privilege of the pigeon.”
5. “Most birds sing out loud and boast, pigeons compose silent poetry.”
6. “Your eggs have hatched, your fledglings flown, now comes the difficult and ever-renewing intricate business of actually living.”