Rivers, Rills, Streams and Hatches, Cesspool Overflows

and Drainage Ditches in the London Borough of Barnet.

A wet Tuesday morning in April: a shiny hearse, followed by a motorcade of battered family motors, turns decisively through the gatehouse of the Hendon Cemetery. As a life is laid to rest in the sopping clay a dirty-faced boy of about six screams at his mum, warning her not to wipe the snot, the grease from cheese and onion crisps and the tears from his face.

A few car-journeys along the A41(T) and they''ll be laying our boy out too. The skies will wheel, seagulls cry down the long dusky avenue of the years. Our current obsessions will sink into the past and be off no interest to anybody. I too will depart, taking with me my peculiar myopic intensity, my spiteful fancies.

A bridge crosses the stream in Hendon Cemetery

As the coffin is lowered into the hissing ground a deeper note intrudes. Deep-set within the herbage, where lines of trees and hedges meet, two gurgling streams, travelling down from the Mill Hill massif, combine and head off on a journey to Brentford and the Thames.

Follow them through, alongside a garden and under the road to their confluence with the Dollis Brook behind the parade of shops opposite the cemetery. Shoppers pass here, on Holders Hill Road. They are indifferent equally to the death-wrapped mourners and the life of the streams flowing beneath their feet. And that is how it is, isn''t it? These elemental processes of life and geology take place while we wait for buses, carry French sticks and soup home for Eastenders and SkySport.   

 
The Author surveys the wreckage...

Further up Holders Hill Road, the North Way slices through ancient Ashley Lane and rises to views of St Judes Church over on the Hampstead Garden Suburb. That quiet dead-end street, Garrick Gardens, ends at a six-foot fence propped on a retaining wall. On the other side the ground level rises in a terrace. A century ago there was a waterfall here. A rillet rising on the Sunnyhill promontory to the west had its force harnessed for the benefit of the owners of Hendon Hall, nearby.

By the time the 1966 England World Cup Squad gorged on scampi and drank their wine at the Hendon Hall Hotel, waiting for the historic final the waterfall had gone, torn out in the spirit of utility, pushed aside by Batman, by felt-tip pen. Yet the feed-stream remains, buried and traceable in alignments of alleys and roads, running straight ahead down to the Dollis where it pours out a pipe set in the embankment below the ends of back gardens.

In a sense this site is concerned with the hidden worlds. Behind the business of our concerns, our dashing and worry, the rivers, streams, ditches rills and rillets run. Though in no-way an eternal counterpoise to our ephemarality, these waterways persist, operating on a different scale of duration to our lives and traceable through the various Ordnance Survey maps produced over the last two centuries.

Three watercourses meet in the Hendon Cemetery. The southern-most flows in from across an adjacent golfcourse having risen on Arandean Hill, a mile or so to the north. Another rises to the east of the former, possibly picking up waters flowing down the long roadside ditch on Milespit Hill. It is clearly visible below Sanders Lane where that road rises to cross the disused railway that once ran between Mill Hill and Edgware. It is visible at the base of the road''s embankment, passing under a little rustic bridge close by the site of old Sanders Farm (now the entrance to a small estate and the Hendon Golf Club). It runs along Ashley Lane and crosses into the cemetery picking up another stream running down through the site of the old Mill Hill gasworks. This confluence can be seen in a mass of trees and shrubbery along the cemetery''s north edge. It is a dark and unvisited site, somehow far more dismal than the graves and weeping visitors just over yonder.

The confluence of two streams in
the Hendon Cemetery

Riverrun has been set up as the first river-survey for my mother-site Middlesexcountycouncil I have decided, for reasons of managability, to focus on the streams and rivers of London Borough of Barnet, where I happen to live. A good few months surveying land forms, scrutinising maps and books and walking have gone into its production. I must state here the debt I hold to Hugh Petrie and Yasmin Webb at the Barnet Borough Archive in Mill Hill, to Pete Knapp my long suffering and frequently terrified photographer, John Rogers , busy remapping High Wycombe and to all those others who put up with my flights of fancy, visions and rants.
 

   A stream flows through West Heath, Hampstead.
Later it will become the Clitterhouse Ditch, joining the Brent
opposite the Regional Shopping Centre

There are two basic types of text contained on this site: Factual detail of the course of the rivers prefaces each page. Where they rise, their history and descriptions of the land they move through. Interwoven with these objective particularities is a more subjective type of account, an attempt to sink down to the underbelly of the streams'' being through imagination and emotion. The two approaches often intermingle, but a broad distinction will be clear from a difference in tone and approach.

While researching for this site I often returned home with a sense of having pierced the thin veneer of appearance, of having penetrated to a place where time compresses and then disperses, many eras becoming manifest at once. I have been driven by a sense of urgency, of duty almost, to communicate what I have seen and experienced yet I suspect there will be scant interest in what I have to say. So much environmental writing nowadays is little more than a faded type of organicist ideology - picnic tables and wheelchair access amidst the native species; either that or yet another foray into the cult of the predictably "quirky" manifest in "psychogeography," "Crypto-topography" and, indeed, "Deep topography".

 

One must be attentive to detail in the landscape
when tracing rivers and waterways.

Some difficulty was experienced regarding a workable definition of what a stream or river actually is. Did I include, say, 18th century drainage ditches in that category? If so than why not surface water conduits laid to serve suburban streets dating from the 1920s? In the end I decided not to be too hard and fast about definitions. The project is as much feeling-based as concerned with specifics. If something grabbed me than in it went! For that reason I will sometimes concern myself with rivers and streams that either once existed and now no longer do so or even with streams that may never have existed in the first place.

(c) Riverrun 2004