Issue Twelve, out now
Slack Water
The autumn issue is about the half hour when the tide stops and nothing moves: in the Lyder estuary, in a flooded valley in the north, and in a court case that has run for nineteen years. A new piece goes up here every Wednesday.
The nineteen-year argument over four metres of bank
A farmer, an angling club and a water company have spent two decades in court over a strip of the Nevel wide enough to stand on. Nobody involved can now remember what they wanted at the start.
Cauldwell under the reservoir, sixty summers on
The drought of this August brought the village back up: gateposts, a bridge, the school steps. Eleven people who were children when it was flooded walked down to look at it.
What the harbourmaster sees at four in the morning
Port Hallow moves eleven thousand tonnes a night and almost nobody in the town has watched it happen. A shift in the tower, from the log book outwards.
Against the wild swimming memoir
Four books in three years have discovered that cold water makes you feel alive. Nell Ardwick asks what the genre stopped noticing once it found its ending.
The audio edition
Every second Friday, about forty minutes
One piece from the issue read aloud, and then an argument about it with the person who reported it. Recorded near the water in question wherever that is possible, which is most of the time.
Standing in the Nevel with a barrister
We walk the disputed four metres with a lawyer who has never seen the river she has argued about since 2011.
The diver who maps drowned villages
Forty-one reservoirs, a sonar rig on a rowing boat, and an argument about whether any of it should be published.
A night shift at Port Hallow
Recorded in the tower between midnight and five, with the radio left running underneath.
Flood insurance, and the map that decides it
Two streets, one line drawn in 2009, and a difference of eleven hundred a year.
What this is
A quarterly about water and the people arguing over it
The Undercurrent began in 2019 as twelve stapled pages about a single culvert. It is now four issues a year, a long piece online every Wednesday, and a fortnightly audio edition. We report on rivers, ports, floods, swimming and the law of the bank, which turns out to be the same subject looked at from four sides. Nothing here is sponsored, nothing is placed, and no piece is commissioned because a photograph exists for it.
Ivo Marchant, editor
- 12
- issuesFour a year since 2019, none of them late.
- 00
- advertisersReaders pay for it. That is the whole model.
- 31
- rivers walkedSource to mouth, on foot, for the record.
- 9
- correctionsPrinted in full, at the front, never at the back.
Issue Twelve, and the eleven before it
A year is four issues in the post, everything online, and the audio edition a day early.