A walk along the Dollis Brook

I felt the Dollis Valley Greenwalk calling me last week. There’s something about the winter light that I associate with that part of the world that sits alongside rivers, suburbia and Nick Papadimitriou. This would be a walk through Nick country, although I didn’t realise at that point just how literally.


The image I had in my head that inspired these thoughts was of the Mill Hill Viaduct in a winter sunset. I had to get out there if only for a few hours. I may not have bothered making the hour-long journey to Brent Cross to do a 3-hour walk pre-pandemic that would only cover a section of a 10-mile trail. But my attitude has changed over the last 18-months to seize these impulses for the joys that they deliver.

Arriving at Brent Cross tube station on the Northern Line I half-expected to see my old walking buddy Nick waiting for me on the wooden bench in the tiled ticket hall as he has done on a number of occasions in the past. Although I hadn’t told him of my spontaneous decision to walk one of his beloved rivers of the London Borough of Barnet, in his role as genus loci of the area, it wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d sensed my intentions. But today the bench was empty and I used it as a place to set up my camera equipment to film the walk for my YouTube channel.

After suffering a short section of the North Circular I found the path onto the River Brent and the Dollis Valley Greenwalk, near the former location of a series of large houses Brook Lodge, Brent Bridge House and Decoy House. This early course of the Brent feeds into a large pond associated with the grounds of these houses. Over the road was the point where the Dollis Brook becomes the River Brent after its confluence with the Mutton Brook.

Nick Papadimitriou, Southgate 2008
Nick Papadimitriou, Southgate 2008
The Dollis Brook
The Dollis Brook

The walk ahead was everything I’d imagined and more. Sunset kissed 1930’s suburbia, slices of parkland beside the brook with excited dogs scuttling over bronzed leaves, and the beguiling Dollis Brook gently flowing through it all from its source on the Hertfordshire border.

I passed beneath the mighty Mill Hill Viaduct in time to see the sun aligned with the apex of its giant arches and approached Totteridge and Whetstone just after sunset. It reminded me that a visit to this area in 2015 to film the situation on the Sweets Way Estate first alerted me to the existence of the Dollis Valley Greenwalk and I vowed to return to do the walk. And over six years later here I was.

At home that evening I took down Nick’s magnificent book Scarp from the bookshelf. I wondered if the Dollis Brook got a mention. Nick had after all dedicated a significant amount of time documenting the rivers of Barnet and that was his major project when we’d first met in 2005. I opened the book at random and on my second flick of a page landed upon his reference to the Dollis Brook and the role it played in the early years of his life in the 1960’s. “I would go down to the brook with my sister and two brothers and we would walk what seemed like miles along the watercourse in either direction.”

The London Perambulator – a possible sequel

London Perambulator

The Lockdown has caused me to excavate the rushes I shot in 2008 for my documentary about Nick Papadimitriou, The London Perambulator. It almost feels like an act of ‘Deep Topography’, diving into what Nick describes as ‘storage vats of regional memory’. Here the storage vats are hard-drives of footage shot on a series of walks through Nick’s territory around West and Northwest London – Finchley, Stonebridge Park, Perivale, Feltham, Wormwood Scrubs.

London Perambulator

walk from Stonebridge Park to Perivale

It’s been a strangely comforting and therapeutic experience. It could be the memories of a simpler time, before ‘the virus’. Also a period when I was very much learning how to make a documentary (a process that never ends). There’s the nostalgic aesthetic of Standard Definition video tape as opposed to Ultra High Definition (4K) video clips recorded on a SD card, the camera running as it roves across the landscape looking for a subject to settle on. There’s some good stuff in those out-takes that didn’t make the final cut that premiered in the East End Film Festival at The Whitechapel Gallery in April 2009.

London Perambulator

 

Even though I have more pressing concerns in these troubled times, I can’t help spooling through another clip when I sit down at my computer, finding gems I’d forgotten about, such as Nick talking about a planned prose sequence called ‘In Praise of Industrial Middlesex’. This was shot while we walked through a Wembley Industrial Estate, a place we’ve returned to at least twice since for subsequent projects.

London Perambulator

And there’s the murky December day we went to the former site of Ashford Remand Centre, now HMP Bronzefield named after the Bronze Age settlement that was discovered during the building of the state of the art prison. Small references that got lost in the construction of a broader narrative.

London Perambulator

I still don’t know what I’m going to make from these clips – I’m enjoying the process of rediscovery too much to impose a framework around it. The initial film was given form by three ‘expert’ interviews with Iain Sinclair, Will Self, and Russell Brand, talking about Nick and his practice. I’m tempted now to  just let the footage speaks for itself without explanation.

 

A walk along the Clitterhouse Brook with Nick Papadimitriou

 

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Cricklewood Lane

The other day I found myself crossing over the A41 where it intersects with Cricklewood Lane. This bridge instantly triggered memories of walks with Nick Papadimitriou, starting in the summer of 2005, that often took us over this metal bridge with the Hendon Way pulsing below and views of the distant high ground that would later become the subject of Nick’s celebrated book, Scarp.

Clitterhouse Brook

The Clitterhouse Brook

It’s been a few years since I last walked with Nick, following a period of time when we made The London Perambulator, then our radio show on Resonance fm, Ventures and Adventures in Topography. So I was delighted to find him there stood beside the Clitterhouse Brook on Child’s Hill (ok, I rang on his door). Nick spontaneously suggested we walk the length of the Clitterhouse Brook to the point where it makes its confluence with the River Brent at Brent Cross.

Clitterhouse Brook

The Hendon Way

We crossed Basing Hill Park where the water laid heavy on the path, and then walked along the Hendon Way, taking the subway beneath the road to Clitterhouse Recreation Ground.

Clitterhouse

Clitterhouse Recreation Ground

The Clitterhouse Brook

The Clitterhouse Brook

“Clitterhouse Farm means ‘clay house’ farm. Earliest known origin of this farm dates from c.1321 when it was owned by John de Langton. Up until around the 1770s it was a manor and was owned by St Bartholomew’s Hospital from the 15 th to 20th centuries. ” The survey by Cranfield University mentions that some of the farm buildings still exist in one corner of the playing field.

(Geophysical Survey of Land at Clitterhouse Playing Field, Brent London, 2015)

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Tin Town

We followed the brook into a postwar housing estate that Nick said was know locally as ‘Tin Town’, due to the metal cladding on the houses.

Clitterhouse

Clitterhouse

Brentfarm Cottage, Nick told me was the site of a sewage farm now occupied by a school. The Hendon Fever Hospital was also located hereabouts on former farmland sold off in the 1880’s.

Clitterhouse Brook

The Clitterhouse Brook gushed from a concrete pipe and flowed beneath the North Circular to make its confluence with the River Brent on the far side of the road near Brent Cross Shopping Centre. It was a majestic sight to see this suburban stream rushing to meet its mother river before working its way to the Thames at Brentford.

It was also great to be back out walking with Nick again.

The first radio show

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Home from the school run, put the coffee pot on and press play on the CD player without looking to see what’s loaded. The intro track starts from a CD I burnt of Andrew Bird’s 2005 live session for a French radio station. I’d used this tune as the intro music to the Resonance fm radio show I produced and co-presented with Nick Papadimitriou, Ventures and Adventures in Topography.  I’m instantly transported back to the studio at Resonance fm feeling the excitement of preparing to go live on air. Then I realise that the first broadcast was on 4th November 2009, the anniversary approaching. The first walk to record the field recordings that constituted half the programme would have been around the same time. A damp cold day out looking for Monks Park somewhere near the North Circular in north west London as described in Gordon S. Maxwell’s The Fringe of London, the book that had given us the title of the radio show and had bonded Nick and I in the first place 4 years previously. Our walking buddy Peter Knapp was there taking photos and we ended up on an even greater quest to find IKEA meatballs on the Wembley Trading Estate (the meatballs had all gone by the time we got there).

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photo by Peter Knapp

I loved making that radio show. The evenings spent editing the field recordings for Wednesday’s live broadcast, researching the next walk, recording my wife doing a reading from each featured book, Sunday afternoon walking with Nick somewhere on the ‘fringe of London’, and the pub after the show with the Resonance regulars.

John Rogers Nick Papadimitriou

photo by Peter Knapp

The show came to a natural end in March 2011, Nick head down writing Scarp, me deep into making a documentary about Bob and Roberta Smith (it was filming Bob at Resonance in 2009 that had led to the show coming about in the first place).  I then went straight into writing This Other London, and despite a couple of attempts to revive the show it just never happened. We got as far as a field trip to the Cross Ness Sewage Treatment Works in 2014 but those recordings are on a hard-drive somewhere unedited. I must get round to doing that some time.

 

 

A complete archive of Ventures and Adventures in Topography can be found here

Twyford Abbey – a deep topographic enquiry

On a wet day in February I headed out with Nick Papadimitriou and Peter Knapp, picking up the threads of the first walk the three of us did together which ended in the dark of an industrial estate somewhere near Stonebridge Park. That walk was almost 10 years ago to the day, 22nd July 2005 – the day after the failed second attack on the tube network; there was a tangible tension on public transport heading out to our rendezvous at Golders Green, the bombers were still on the loose somewhere in northwest London where we were walking.

The journey produced my first videos with Nick that eventually led to The London Perambulator. This walk was tentatively the beginnings of a kind of sequel. The only plan we had was to follow Nick’s beloved Metropolitan Water Main all the way to its terminus at Mogden Purification works. This buried pipe is an unavoidable motif when walking with Nick – it was what guided us on the first walk, it punctuates the traipses in London Perambulator, and appeared again when Nick joined me for one of the expeditions in This Other London. We needed to give it a proper homage after all it had given to us.

In the end, watching it on the screen at the Flatpack Film Festival in the Video Strolls programme I realised that the film was an end in itself – The London Perambulator could have no sequel, if that existed it was Nick’s book Scarp perhaps.

 

Read a full account of the Twyford Abbey walk here

Portal to the past at Twyford Abbey

Twyford Abbey Donald Maxwell

It’s 10 years since the first walk I did with Nick Papadimitriou and Peter Knapp, which ended around the back of an old industrial building somewhere just beyond Stonebridge Park. We’d been following the course of an underground water main from Golders Green as Nick delivered curbside sermons on how the civic infrastructure of northwest London acted as ‘storage vats of regional memory’.
It’s two years since my last walk with Nick – on that occasion for This Other London where we’d picked up a short section of the water main off Cricklewood Broadway and followed it past St Michael’s Church and across Gladstone Park. So when I mooted another walk and various exotic possibilities were floated it seemed inevitable that we’d end up back somewhere in the vicinity of Stonebridge Park and that Nick’s sacred ley line gurgling through a 48 inch pipe beneath the pavement would play a role.

Alongside the usual digital kit I lug around trying to capture these excursions (camera, field recorder, various mics and associated accessories) I lobbed a copy of Walter Jerrold’s Highways and Byways of Middlesex in my bag. Jerrold had guided me when I walked out from Sudbury Hill over Horsenden Hill through Perivale to Hanwell and in the course of that walk had teased me with descriptions of early 20th Century Hanger Hill and Twyford Abbey. It would make good tube reading on the way out to Stonebridge Park.

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When I stepped out of the station to be greeted by Nick he seemed to read my mind, I mentioned the Jerrold and the idea of taking in Hanger Hill and Twyford Abbey was tacked onto the itinerary. We moved along a now overly familiar stretch of the North Circular – a scene I’ve watched back hundreds of times when editing The London Perambulator and also glimpsed when walking along the Paddington Arm of the Grand Union from Kensal Rise to Northolt last Easter. The site where our walk had ended 10 years ago was still a patch of rough ground at the end of a mini-industrial estate. New fences have been erected, diggers chunter round on a large adjacent plot, the old bus is still parked at the end of a long driveway. Somehow despite slow encroachment this corner of London retains a left-behind feel, an eldritch zone where the fences are there to keep something in as much a keep people out.
I’m totting my camera – experiencing things mostly through the filter of a fold out screen, following Nick like this is a disorientating experience – I never know where I am or where I’m going, it doesn’t really matter. Pete seems happy just to go along for the ride too taking snaps with his Lomo Actionsampler camera, although the only action to sample is our plodding along the tarmac.

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We gaze into the fast flowing waters of the River Brent beside the Wembley Travelodge then move on along a muddy path through a spindly outcrop of trees that runs beside the river on one side and a council estate the other. ‘Where are we?’ says Nick, ‘What’s this place called?’
‘Tokyngton?’ I venture, having looked quickly at a map before leaving home.
‘No that’s further north towards Wembley’, Nick corrects.
‘Well it must be the outskirts of Alperton’, I suggest.
Pete is looking at the map on his phone but this section of grid is nameless.

Nick spots a Sparrow Hawk gliding above the Brent.

We cross the river and pass through an interwar light industrial estate of low-storey modernist buildings. We stand outside Flexal Springs (1933) and pick apart my erroneous statement that they’re art deco – Pete points out that concrete was the favoured material of European modernists whereas this interwar development seems to be resolutely rendered brick.

Hanger Lane Gyratory
We emerge near the Hanger Lane Gyratory – a churning vortex of motor vehicles spinning out of its gravitational field into orbiting suburbs. Long arms of brightly tiled pedestrian tunnels feed into a large central rotunda gathering the echoes of footsteps and conversations into an aural soup. It feels like a sanctuary from the autogeddon above, a safe haven for the traveler on foot. It’s also nice to be out of the rain – the steady drizzle that has fallen throughout the day has hardened into proper raindrops with added attitude.
We shelter in a café in the parade of shops that adorns the gyratory for as long as possible, watching the rainfall intensify and people scampering to the refuge of the subway. Eventually we accept that the downpour is unlikely to ease up and head out in search of Twyford Abbey.

On the way to the Abbey Nick wanted to check in on a mound that he has been fascinated with for around 25 years since he first discovered it. He told us that he suspected it was landfill but he had become enchanted with the large anthills that topped the mound – and I suppose the workings of this ant civilization could have stretched deep into the interior of the mound which if X-Rayed could reveal a vast matrix of ant tunnels and structures, a habitation mirroring our insect life scurrying round the city, although the ant world you imagine would be more ordered and humane.

Royal Waterside
The rain was falling hard by the time we reached the mound and Nick was disappointed that a fence had been erected stopping us inspecting the state of the anthills. I tried to console him that at least now our insect friends would be left in peace but his disappointment was tangible. Frankly in the driving rain I wasn’t keen on scrambling up a muddy mound to look at ants nests and sought refuge in the underpass.

We passed via the old Guinness factory at Park Royal redeveloped to host the Diageo offices and a new housing development still under construction that comes with the now standard computer generated imagery of the new world to come when all we actually see are piles of grey breeze blocks. A wrapper around the site yells out its ambitious boast not only to place a roof above your head (if you can afford the £420,000 for a one-bed flat) but that you will ‘FIND YOURSELF’, a spiritual quest that I suppose is what drew the Monks to the Abbey across the road.

The Royal Waterside development of 265 luxury apartments within a ‘new neighbourhood’ bemusing dubbed First Central (East Village is bad enough but at least it’s in the East – this is neither First nor Central). Any doubts that such developments are not built to alleviate London’s chronic housing shortage but to suit the overseas investment market are dispelled by the blog on the Redrow Homes website written in Chinese “From China to London Why invest in London property”. Elsewhere on the website, under the sub-heading of “Investing from overseas” Redrow proclaim, “There has never been a better time to invest in London and Redrow London are committed to making the process as easy as possible for purchasers outside the UK.”

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Opposite Royal Waterside are the locked gates to the Abbey so we move down the road to survey the site from the grounds of St Mary’s Church. Through the metal grated fence we can see that the Abbey doors have been left wide open – awnings on the balconies flap in the breeze blowing straight through the broken windows. The old Abbey building apparently being blighted – caught in planning limbo, its inconvenient Grade 2 heritage listing being slowly bypassed by the processes of nature till the structure gradually rots and crumbles. But despite the deliberate neglect this ‘cockney-Gothic’ masterpiece retains its grandeur. It was built in 1808 on the site of an old moated manor house with drawbridge, then taken over by the catholic monastic order of the Alexian Brothers in 1902 and run as a nursing home. It was never actually an Abbey.

We lament the vandalism so evident that surely it should be stopped and Pete reads off details of the planning quagmire that has produced the situation with the submitted planning application for building 25 dwellings in the Abbey and 65 in the grounds not complying with the London Plan.

We move on out of the grounds of St. Mary’s to the white traffic noise of the North Circular Road, which along with the building of Park Royal Station in 1903, had sounded the death knell for this rural idyll. Until then the Abbey and the church was all that constituted the village of West Twyford, a place Nick informs us is listed in the Domesday Book. Even so Michael Robbins noted in 1953 that, “Cows are still to be seen grazing in the fields, and it is the nearest place to London where the motorist is requested to ‘Beware Cattle Crossing’.
Our topographical patron saint, Gordon S. Maxwell described a day spent here in 1927 in Just Beyond London under the heading of, ‘The Monks of Middlesex – a haunt of Ancient peace at Twyford Abbey, missed by the growth of the mighty city’.

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The city seems to have finally found the Abbey and Nick has found a portal into the past as he suddenly disappears from the pavement through a large gap in the wooden fence where a panel has collapsed into the undergrowth. We follow him to the Abbey grounds where what appears as a long high wall thickly coated in ivy turns out to be a sequence of derelict buildings, what Maxwell describes as the ‘Home Farm’, that provided the Abbey with food. We enter the gloom of the “whitewashed cottage” described by Maxwell through an opening in the blanket of ivy. There is a straw bed where someone appears to have been sleeping. There are large holes in the upper floors giving a clear view upwards through the building to the leaden sky. We look out across the meadow towards the Abbey where the cattle grazed. When Maxwell was here with ‘fellow-author and rambler’ Rev. T.P. Stevens, he saw cassocked monks wandering the meadows and some at work “building a new rick from the new-mown hay”.

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We appear to be alone to explore the dark moldering buildings, the only light breaking through gaping holes in the roofs. The ducks, geese and pigs long gone with the monks that reared them. There is a peace here that despite the din of the traffic from the road not more than 20 yards away recaptures what Maxwell described 90 years ago as, ‘a little bit of real country still, a forgotten corner’.
Passing back through the hole in the fence is like time-travel back to the 21st Century, our return greeted by plumes of toxic rainwater splashed off the North Circ by the rampaging hoards of hometime traffic. Up ahead, the second sighting of the Wembley Travelodge is enough to signal the end of the walk as we amble back to Stonebridge Park.


 

I’ll be presenting a work-in-progress video featuring this walk at the Flat Pack Festival in Birmingham on 29th March

American Smoke meets the London Perambulator

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… By way of Croydon
Supping down some Jamboree in Leytonstone Wetherspoons (does it matter what they are actually called) fresh from Lea Bridge Road so clear from the waters of the Lea I can count my fingers gripping the glass on the far side of the ale – I turn the page and there’s my old walking partner Nick Papadimitriou working himself into a chapter about Corso, and Dylan Thomas dying in New York.
When we were schlepping round industrial estates in Park Royal and Perivale I always saw it as a Beat quest.