The Canal as Archive: Reading Robert Aickman's The River Runs Uphill

In this episode of A Curious Appetite, I’m joined by Dr Dan O’Brien to talk about Robert Aickman’s The River Runs Uphill, cultural memory, Britain’s waterways and some of the ideas currently shaping our research for The River Remembers: A Gothic Voyage through Forgotten Histories of the Thames.Originally released for paid subscribers, this conversation is now open to everyone.Best known for his strange and unsettling fiction, Robert Aickman was also a committed conservationist who helped establish the Inland Waterways Association in 1946. His lifelong campaign to preserve Britain’s canals provides a fascinating counterpart to his literary interest in overlooked places, lingering histories and things that resist disappearance.Dan and I discuss the difference between rivers and canals, and what happens when we begin to think of waterways as repositories of human experience. Canals carry histories of engineering and labour as well as water, while the communities that once worked and lived around them can disappear even when the physical landscape survives.We also explore mudlarking and the Thames as an unruly kind of archive: one governed by tides, chance and material fragments rather than catalogues and classifications. Dan shares the extraordinary story of finding an object thought to be part of a mammoth’s tooth, a discovery that stretches the history of the Thames far beyond London itself.Our conversation also considers the more difficult aspects of reading Aickman today, including passages that reflect exclusionary attitudes towards race. Rather than ignoring these moments or allowing them to overwhelm the rest of the work, we ask what responsible reading might look like and whose histories have traditionally been preserved, celebrated or left out.The River Runs Uphill becomes a way of thinking about attention itself: how landscapes hold memories of labour, migration, trade, industry, leisure and loss, and how easily ordinary lives can disappear when nobody stops to notice them.Robert Aickman beyond the strange storyThe Inland Waterways Association and canal conservationRivers, canals and cultural memoryWaterways as archives of labour and everyday lifeMudlarking, chance and historical discoveryA mammoth tooth and the deep history of the ThamesHeritage, preservation and the stories we choose to rememberReading difficult historical texts criticallyThe ideas feeding into The River RemembersFeatured book: Robert Aickman, The River Runs UphillHave you read Aickman, or has a book ever unexpectedly changed the way you look at a familiar landscape?