Walk along the Paddington Arm from Kensal Green to Northolt

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I haven’t been keen on canal walks recently – finding the towpath restricting my desire to drift and wander, the negation of a chance find at the end of a random sequence of turns. But yesterday I found the removal of choice liberating, locking myself onto the path at Kensal Green then chuntering along like a rickety barge till sunset and my need for beer and food got the better of me – which was around 4 hours later at Northolt, where I stumbled upon the beauties of Belvue Park and found a table at the back of the village pub across the green from St. Mary’s Church.

This branch of the Grand Union Canal offers a scenic slideshow of what remains of the ‘West London Industrial Belt’ – a zone that once employed around a quarter of million workers.
Delicious chocolate odors drift over the water from the United Biscuits factory at Harlesdon. Joggers, cyclists, and fisherman populated the canalside till I passed through Perivale then the people melted away and it was just the swans, ducks and cormorants.

A field in England

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As bucolic as anything you would find in the ‘traditional’ countryside – our precious Leyton Marshes, a step away from Lea Bridge Road. Once part of the ancient Lammas Lands (open access grazing pasture for the people of the parish between August and March).

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Through the trees and down across a ditch and you are across the Parish boundary on the Walthamstow Marshes – again former Lammas Land. I couldn’t help noticing that there was more signage than on the Leyton side and which also looked in generally better nick – or am I succumbing to local rivalries and insecurities.

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What they don’t have in Walthamstow is this seductive pumping house near the Essex Filter Beds. You have to love the use of glass bricks and its overall symmetry. You expect it to house more than a pump, which is merely a front for what is actually an imaginarium.

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You suspect that whoever attempted to break through the wooden door wasn’t attempting to gain access to this glorious pump. They may have thought it would open a Stargate … or perhaps provide a place to kip for the night. I hope they weren’t too disappointed – I certainly appreciated being able to have a sneaky peak inside.

(There’s more on the marshes in This Other London)

Snaresbrook

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‘Hope Lodge’

Hope is a place in Snaresbrook (with echoes of West Hollywood)

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I came to admire the gothic revival architecture of the orphanage designed by Sir Gilbert Scott (he of the Albert Memorial and St Pancras Midland Hotel) and William Moffatt (1841). The other people in the grounds were beating a hasty path to the Snaresbrook Crown Court as witnesses, barristers, friends sucking anxious fags outside, “Yeah I know a bloke who got banged up for turning over the same place”

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The Eagle Pond – formerly Snares Pond. This is a high ground of gravels – there’s water everywhere – you need good boots when walking through the forest here.

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Is this a remnant of the Saye’s Brook / Sayers Brook that gives Snaresbrook its name, now reduced to a muddy ditch at parts and elsewhere running along a concrete culvert.

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Apparently there were two streams running through Snaresbrook, across Wanstead and into the Roding – the Saye’s or Sayers Brook and the Holt. All around London these tiny tributaries have been buried, lost, ignored but they’ve stamped their names all over the A-Z – the Saye’s Brook has its named called out regularly on the 6 o’clock news, “Today at Snaresbrook Crown Court”.