Walking the River Quaggy – South London’s Magic River

The River Quaggy, or Quaggy River as it’s marked on maps for some of its course, has beguiled me since I first heard its name mentioned after a screening about twelve years ago. I encountered it for real in Lewisham Town Centre when doing one of the walks for my book, This Other London, and passed it briefly on a walk tracing the River Beck. So one day in November I set out to walk a section of the Quaggy, starting at Lewisham Station where the Quaggy and the Ravensbourne meet before the conjoined rivers become the Deptford Creek and flow into the Thames. The River Quaggy rises at Locksbottom in the London Borough of Bromley and is known as the Kyd Brook in its lower reaches.

On the first walk, this gentle river led us through Lewisham Town Centre to Manor Park, formerly a pig farm, then to Manor Gardens Park with its fantastic library situated in the 18th Century Manor House. We then returned to a stretch of Lee Road to Lee Green and followed the river into Blackheath where we were thwarted by locked park gates and the black of night ended the first walk.

The Quaggy at Manor Park, Lewisham
The Quaggy at Manor Park, Lewisham
The Quaggy at Sutcliffe Park, Eltham
The Quaggy at Sutcliffe Park, Eltham

I returned just over a week ago to pick up the Quaggy trail in Sutcliffe Park, Eltham where the Quaggy is free of its culvert and allowed the flood parts of the surrounding parkland, before it’s corralled back into a concrete channel to make the journey through the suburban realm. It passes beneath the South Circular Road and once again through sports grounds. We walk beside its waters along Mottingham Lane before it enters the grounds of Capel Manor College. Picking up the river on the other side of the College I arrived at Chinbrook Meadows just after sunset to see the Quaggy running free once more meandering through this charming park. My South London river odyssey ended not long afterwards in the dark on New Street Hill looking across at Sundridge Golf Course, where, somewhere between the bunkers, the name of this magical watercourse changes to the Kyd Brook.

What a fantastic walk, at every turn a wonder, making me more determined than ever to dedicate the coming year to walking London’s rivers.

Epping Forest walk from Loughton to Honey Lane Plain

You don’t need a reason to go for a walk in Epping Forest – ‘the people’s forest’. Just grab a copy of Buxton and an OS 174 map and off you go. I headed for Loughton where there’s a fetching new sign on Station Road (in the thumbnail above) – be great to see more of these around the forest fringe inviting people to abscond into the woods. Up the steep slope that leads to Loughton Camp then on to High Beach and down across Honey Lane Plain to the thatched stone cattle trough that I’d seen in J.A Brimble’s London’s Epping Forest. A light drizzle started to fall, so I headed back the way I’d come over down past the Kings Oak and Loughton Camp arriving in Forest Road in the last of the light.

Glorious Central London Gadabout

Charing Cross Road, Trafalgar Square, St James’s Park, Buckingham Palace

The sun shone down on Central London on Remembrance Sunday. Leicester Square was packed. There was electric in the air in the unseasonal warmth. The West End was alive once more. I was bound for St James’s Park but the side streets leading away from Charing Cross constantly tempted – West Street, Lichfield Street, Cecil Court. The light danced in the fountains on Trafalgar Square. Kids climbed Edwin Landseer’s lions guarding the bunker beneath Nelson’s column. The marching band thumped out their racket on Horse Guards Parade and people strolled hand-in-hand through the leaves of St James’s Park. It was a glorious day.

Walking the Essex Coast from Frinton to Walton-on-the-Naze

A half-term escape to the sea. Not just any sea but the North Sea which had been calling me all summer. So we boarded the train at Stratford bound for Frinton-on-Sea and walked along the coast, past beach huts piled high along the seafront, to Walton-on-the-Naze. Reaching the Naze Tower on the crumbling coastline, Felixstowe in view to the north, we turned and headed back for the early evening train back to London.

Walking London’s Civil War Defences – Islington

This was a walk that I first did in 2005 and blogged about here. I’d stumbled across an article by Guy Mannes Abbott published in the Architects Association journal that linked the Civil War Parliamentary defences of London to the progressive architecture of the London Borough of Finsbury in the post-war period. The idea that the streets that I walked home in the dark each night were part of a ‘utopian enclosure’ was incredibly beguiling.

“The forts mark an area known for its spas and radical reformers and which, in the seventeenth century, Wenceslaus Hollar represented in a series of etchings showing extensive earthworks. They protected an area that would become the site of the largest and most ambitious plan ever for the social regeneration of London and which remains a paragon of what could be achieved with social housing. Spa Green, Bevin Court and Priory Green just north of Finsbury are all positive manifestations of a politically committed and revolutionarily ambitious approach to collective works, but – conscious of what there was to fight for – Tecton also produced a plan for an elaborate system of defences and network of communications with uncanny echoes of the Civil War forts.”

from ‘The Malignants trecherous and bloody plot against the Parliament and Citty of London which was by God’s providence happily prevented May 31, 1643’
from ‘The Malignants trecherous and bloody plot against the Parliament and Citty of London which was by God’s providence happily prevented May 31, 1643’

I’d been intending to make a video of this walk for my Walking Vlog series ever since starting it in 2015, but had delayed and delayed as I considered that a true walk of London’s Civil War defences should at least cover the section north of the Thames from Wapping in the East to Pimilico in the West (where the Lillington Gardens Estate that stands of the site of the fort has an oddly fortress-like appearance). But then, first I encountered the southern ‘line of communication’ while walking the River Neckinger, followed by reading an article in London Archaeologist debating the location of the defences around Whitechapel. I was faced by an edifice of research that was difficult to penetrate.

Eventually, the landscape called me. The original walk of the Finsbury Forts was too rich not to capture on camera, and so I headed out on the day the clocks went back to retrace my steps from 17 years ago. Picking up the traces of that walk on the edge of the City of London I headed up Goswell Road to Mount Mills and then followed the deep entrenchment across Northampton Square to the site of Waterfield Fort, now occupied by Spa Green Estate. From here I progressed down Rosebery Ave to Mount Pleasant Fort before ascending Amwell Street to the Fort Royal which occupied a commanding position on the crest of the hill at Claremont Square near the Angel Islington.

Walking the Gores Brook – Dagenham’s mythical river

A comment on a recent YouTube video alerted me to plans by Thames21 to uncover the section of the Gores Brook running beneath the ground in Parsloes Park where the river rises. Loving the eastern rivers as I do, this was a tantalising invitation.

Although culverted in the 1930s, the buried sections of the river in Parsloes Park are marked on my 1950s Geographia atlas. Also using manhole covers as a guide I followed the course of the buried river to the edge of the park before finding it running above ground in Goresbrook Park. This gentle stream then crosses beneath Ripple Road, and past Dagenham Asda where the 145 bus terminates.

1950s Map of Parsloes Park showing the Gores Brook
View of pylons at Dagenham east London
confluence of the Gores Brook and the Thames
confluence of the Gores Brook and the Thames

From here our riparian adventure plunges us into a dramatic post-industrial landscape created by the ghost of the Ford Motor Works at Dagenham as we walk along Chequers Road, crossing Dagenham Dock Station and passing beneath the A13 road. Turning into Choats Road, we once again meet the Gores Brook and follow footpath 47 to the point where the Gores Brook makes its confluence with the Thames at Horse Shoe Corner.

Wycombe on the day of the new King

Mayor and Beadle of High Wycombe, September 2022

Somehow it was so apt to be in Wycombe on the day the new King was proclaimed at the Town Hall two weeks ago. I wondered whether the ghost of Dr Martin Lluelyn popped along. He’d been physician to both Charles I and Charles II, attending to Charles I on the scaffold before his execution and then served as Mayor of High Wycombe in 1671 when residing in Crendon Street. Charles III is bound to Wycombe through this historical thread whether he likes it or not.

As a town it does ceremonial occasions so well with its ancient tradition of the weighing-in of the Mayor and previous heritage of building giant chair arches. I’d expected a sleepy Sunday stroll in the territory of my birth but found the crowds streaming along Queen Victoria Road.

Queen Victoria Road, High Wycombe, 11th September 2022 proclamation of King Charles III
Queen Victoria Road, High Wycombe, 11th September 2022
High Street, High Wycombe September 11th 2022
High Street, High Wycombe
Cafe on High Wycombe High Street
High Street, High Wycombe

There was life in the High Street too, a plush new cafe had opened up next to a restored building that had recently discovered to be the oldest in the town apart from the Norman church. The Octagon Centre was bereft, haunted by the ghost of its fountain where now there’s only a bare sunlit space.

Octagon Centre High Wycombe
Octagon Centre High Wycombe
River Wye High Wycombe
River Wye
Deangarden Wood High Wycombe
Deangarden Wood
Tunnel under M40 High Wycombe
Fennell’s Wood

I followed the River Wye out of the town across the Rye and then along the bottom of Deangarden Wood. Another footpath took me up the steep valley side and through a long tunnel beneath the M40 into Fennell’s Wood. It’s these beech woods hugging the Chiltern Hills, that not only gave the town and its satellite villages their identity and culture but also their industry. Bodgers turned chair legs and piled them high in their woodland camps. In the brick and flint cottages, chair caners wove the seats. On the valley floor, factories assembled the chairs that gave Wycombe the moniker of Chairopolis. This is where your Windsor chairs actually come from. Wycombe Wanderers still go by the nickname of the Chairboys, and my grandfather used to walk through these woods on the way to watch the Wanderers at their old ground of Loakes Park.

Juniper Hill Water Tower, Flackwell Heath
Juniper Hill Tower

My walk was part nostalgia trip and part recce for a piece of writing I started during one of the lockdowns and had reached a dead end. Following the narrative thread from my Mum’s burial in Wooburn cemetery had somehow led me to the location of a water tower in Flackwell Heath on the opposite side of the valley. It occurred to me that I’d never noticed this great looming structure before – even in the years when I drank and worked in the Green Dragon pub nearby and walked down Juniper Lane almost daily. The tower had grown and grown within the shell of what could become a book until it formed a significant block on my progress. I needed to actually visit the site. And here it was – a beautiful brutalist hulk hidden in a nest of residential streets. It deserves a chunk of my book (if I can ever finish it).

Ronald Wood, Flackwell Heath
Ronald Wood
View of Wooburn Green, Bucks
the view over Wooburn Green

I cut down the side of a wood that also features in the book (although I’m nervous to call it that when it currently only stands at six thousand words) and drop across the fields to Wooburn Green. After a quick visit to my mother’s grave I watch a few overs of Wooburn Narkovians at the Park remembering all those happy childhood summers spent scampering around this pitch as my Dad bowled leggies from Church end and smoked Embassy cigarettes while waiting to go out to bat.

Wooburn Town
Wooburn Town
Wooburn Narkovians Cricket Club at Wooburn Park 11th September 2022
Wooburn Park