Clissold Park, 2024. Photo: Lesley Lawson.
My obsession with London’s lost rivers all began with the Covid lockdown.
Every morning, at first light, I would pace around Clissold Park—1,000 steps from my front door—alongside likeminded walkers, dog people and huffing hipsters. The 54-acre park was originally the grounds of a stately home built in 1793 by anti-slavery campaigner Joseph Hoare and taken into public ownership in 1888. Paradise House, as it was then called, is a Grade II listed building that hosts park offices and is rented out for weddings and private functions. At the time of writing, the café on the ground floor is closed due to a tragic history of poor food and mismanagement. But therein lies another tale…
I have one favourite spot in the park, between the great house and the old church, where the path diverges to create a triangle of exquisite proportion. When walking here I often think of Elizabeth Crawshay who must have gazed out of her bedroom window across these trees hoping to catch a glimpse of her forbidden love, the Reverend Augustus Clissold. Reader, when Elizabeth’s father died in 1834, she married him, and they gave the park its name.
Clissold Park has always been an important recreation ground for local people, many of whom are flat dwellers with no gardens of their own. In 1937 Virginia Woolf commented that it “smelt of Clissold mothers; &cakes and tea: the smell – unpleasant to the nose – of democracy.”
Wallace and Gromit befriending schoolchildren, Clissold Park, 2021.
(Wallace has now passed away). Photo: Lesley Lawson.
The park is also home to lakes and rivers where waterfowl breed, and egg-eating terrapins linger. During my lockdown walks I became aware of two competing theories about these waterways. One is that they were formed by an underground river, which has since disappeared. The second theory involves a living river that runs through the park, feeding trees and London’s water supply. Being of analytical frame of mind I made it my business to get to the bottom of this.
Like most myths, there is truth in both these tales. The two lakes were originally fed by Hackney Brook, a tributary of the Lea River, until it was driven underground in mid-1800s to become part of London’s sewage system. Hackney Brook is one of London’s some dozen lost rivers that lie beneath our feet.
The second waterway was part of the New River, a 40-mile-long canal constructed in the early 1600s. Neither new nor a river, it brought water from springs in rural Hertfordshire, to the New River Head, near Sadlers Wells in the heart of London. Here it filled a circular pond from whence it supplied the wealthy of the city with fresh(ish) water.
At some point in the park these two waterways had to cross, though it is not clear where or how.
Originally the New River flowed in a loop around Clissold Park and southwards through Islington to the Head. But in 1946 it was stopped before it reached the park and diverted to feed the water reservoirs at Stoke Newington. So, the river that seems to drift so elegantly past Clissold House is just an ornamental vestige of that once great canal.
After Clissold Park the New River all but disappears, but its route can be traced through signs and symptoms—a strip of allotments, unusually large gardens, a wide grassy path in the middle of an ordinary street.
Petherton Road, once a river, 2024. Photo: Lesley Lawson.
Further south it is remembered in The New River Walk, an ornamental strip of parkland that accommodates a short stretch of the original canal, including a late 18th century watch hut.
The New River Walk, Canonbury, 2024. Photo: Lesley Lawson.
Throughout its lifetime, the New River Company was obliged to station guards at points along the route to keep it clear of debris and prevent fishing, swimming, and no doubt, defecation. So many Londoners regarded the canal as a rubbish tip that by 1886 it was heavily polluted, and the southward stretches were enclosed (culverted). In compensation, the water company provided free water for public swimming baths.
Although this stretch of the canal is no more, mementos of its past abound. Islington Green boasts a statue of the first CEO of the New River Company, Hugh Myddelton. Ghostly traces also remain in street signs and place names…the New River Café, the Pump House, River Place, Park Bridge. North Londoners, like me (until a new years ago), pass these landmarks daily without curiosity or concern.
Residents enjoying the repurposed New River sluice house, Clissold Park, 2024.
Photo: Lesley Lawson
If you look, you will find such evidence of past waterways across the entire metropolitan area of this city, which was once a giant floodplain. London is indeed a city of rivers lost and found.
References:
Mrs Woolf & the Servants, Alison Light, Penguin Books, 2008, pp 254 – 255