Two small brooks join the Silkstream from opposite sides at the Montrose sports field’s south end. A National Rivers Authority document I saw last year refers to the two brooks as if they were a single entity: - “the Tramway Ditch.” These are so-called I think because of the trams that once turned about in the area of land now occupied by Merit House, the large 1960s office block. I add the suffixes East and West to distinguish between these two “branches” of the ditch.

The sublime Merit House. Tramway Ditch West runs just to the north

Tramway Ditch West is the wider of the two and has its origins in Kingsbury, outside the strict scope of this website. It once watered a small sewage farm that stood just behind the oriental shopping centre standing by the A5 just close by. After crossing the Roman road West makes the briefest of journeys through Barnet, flowing just to the north of Merit House in a deep cut behind some back gardens before hitting the Silkstream. West is quite derelict, running past thick masses of elder that smell of cat’s piss, flowing by an old washing machine and depositing slimy silt at point of confluence. Yet I love West; there is something strident about its arrival, a sense of a stream that’s never shirked, but has always been prepared to roll-up its sleeves and get on with it. As it cuts its deep, steel-plated way towards the Silkstream it seems also to be cutting through long overlooked years, years during which it has humbly carried out some vital yet looked-down-upon service.

Tramway Ditch West hits the Silkstream

East is completely different. I suppose it could be seen as the female of the pair. Hitting the Silkstream slightly south of its opposite, East has had a tumbling sort of finale just prior to joining the mother. I believe East rises on Featherstone Hill, way up in Mill Hill. It drops down the steep-sloped back gardens of the houses on Parkside and Hillside Grove (visible from the A41) and disappears below the main road, which is soldered onto the hill’s side here, effectively forming a terrace. The stream reappears deep in the bushes alongside the former feed-road to the M1 (prior to that it was part of the railway that once ran between Mill Hill and Edgware) and then passes through a grate to journey under the motorway. It is not seen again until it makes its appearance at Montrose Fields where it edges out from the embankment carrying the electric railway between Colindale and Burnt Oak.  During its enforced absence the stream has run somewhere roughly in line with Blundell Road and, prior to that, near the south side of Woodcroft Park (do I detect the old river course as a hollow way running along just there?).

Tramway Ditch East speaks of rural Middlesex...

Upon surfacing East works its way round the east and south sides of the Montrose Sports Fields, running just inside some allotments (where it picks up a mere slip of a rill) and then through wooded land at the back of the old hospital buildings. Another slender stream joins East just here. The combined waters – still not amounting to much – are very pretty in the springtime.

When I photographed them last week (April 2007) I had a strong sense of rural Middlesex manifesting through the mesh of vulgarity, the track-suited, muscle-headed, coffin-car idiocy of our own era. Long live East!