A walk through Tottenham following the lost river Moselle which rises in Highgate Woods and makes its confluence with the River Lea near Tottenham Hale.
This was a walk I did in two sections in January and February 2022. The first walk starts at the confluence of the River Lea and the Pymmes Brook at Tottenham Hale and we find the confluence of the Moselle and the Lea by Markfield Park. We follow it through Markfield Park into Markfield Road and then along Broad Lane through Tottenham Hale to Scotland Green and then to Tottenham High Road. We pass the new Tottenham Football Stadium and follow the Moselle along White Hart Lane and into Tottenham Cemetery where we see the river running along a culvert. We pass the 12th Century All Hallows Church and end our walk at Bruce Castle. More info here
In the second walk we pick up the trail of North London’s lost River Moselle at Bruce Castle Tottenham and follow its course through Lordship Recreation Ground, through the Noel Park Estate to Wood Green. From here we cross the New River into Hornsey and Priory Park then across Crouch End Open Spaces to Queen’s Wood Highgate where the Moselle rises.
This lost river walk along the Hackney Brook is guided by Tom Bolton’s book ‘London’s Lost Rivers – A Walker’s Guide, Volume Two. Thanks Tom. The course of the Hackney Brook starts just off Holloway Road in North London and then crosses the road cutting across Seven Sisters Road to Tollington Road and from here to Hornsey Road and round the Arsenal Emirates Stadium. We follow the river as it runs parallel to Gillespie Road, past the old Highbury Stadium then crosses Blackstock Road bound for Clissold Park in Stoke Newington.
The brook runs along the northern edge of Abney Park Cemetery, crosses Stamford Hill, Hackney Downs, Amhurst Road, Mare Street and runs parallel to Morning Lane in Hackney. We then walk along Wick Lane into Hackney Wick. The Hackney Brook makes its confluence with the River Lea just past Old Ford Lock.
The brilliant morning sunshine was calling me out to the London fringe. This urge is best answered with a return to the London Loop. I started my circuit of London’s 150-mile orbital walking trail in January 2018 when feeling just such a push, with no intention of walking the whole thing. Hence I started with Section 17 from Enfield to Cockfosters, walking in the opposite direction to the TFL maps. And I’ve been chipping away at it ever since. My last foray onto the London Loop had been a year ago more or less, I obviously didn’t want my quest to end, but 2025 seemed like the right year to finally close the Loop.
Section 1 must be the most dramatic section of the London Loop. From the roadside of the A2, to the River Cray, the Crayford Creek Road industrial zone. The Dartford Creek in the sunset was stunning, QEII bridge arching away into the distance. The wind turbines, the reflective water, the flood barrier, then the path beside Erith marshes in the dusk. A large boat chugged along the Thames. As I entered Erith town centre in the dark I was starting to feel like a new person even though nothing had actually changed. That is the power of the London Loop.
What was I doing chasing ghosts on the Suffolk coast, staying in a nearly empty Orwell Hotel in Felixstowe named after the river that gave Eric Arthur Blair his pen name? George Orwell saw a ghost just up the Suffolk shoreline in Walberswick and wrote about it in a letter to his friend Dennis Collins in 1931. “I happened to glance over my shoulder, & saw a figure pass along the line of the other arrow, disappearing behind the masonry & presumably emerging into the churchyard …” (George Orwell Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters vol. 1). But it wasn’t those kinds of ghosts that I was hunting. The fact that M.R James had set one of his better known ghost stories in Felixstowe was a coincidence.
Orwell Hotel, Felixstowe
What brought me to Felixstowe was the influential writer and theorist, Mark Fisher, who was largely responsible for popularising the term, Hauntology. Fisher lived, and sadly passed away, in Felixstowe. I’d decided at some point in the past, when trying to wrap my head around the idea of Hauntology, that I’d need to visit Felixstowe in order to fully understand the concept.
Hauntology had first been used by Jacques Derrida in his book ‘Spectres of Marx‘ (1993) in a political context following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Fisher wrote in his 2013 book Ghosts of My Life – writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, that he’d found Derrida “a frustrating thinker”. Fisher had broadened the use of the term and applied it to electronic music, TV and film, exploring the idea of the persistence of the past in the present, often manifesting as a sense of spectrality or haunting. Fisher pointed out how some critics had claimed Hauntology was just another name for Nostalgia. Which raised the question of, nostalgia for what exactly? Lost futures? Unrealised utopias? The idea would follow that somehow we’re haunted by these lost futures. There’s a nostalgia for them, but they’re also present around us. They haunt us, they follow us around. It’s an interesting idea. This could also be applied to the landscape, and I wanted to explore the landscape Mark Fisher had been walking at the time of his writings on hauntology.
My plan to follow the route taken by Fisher and Justin Barton for the recording of their album On Vanishing Land, north along the coast, then inland to Sutton Hoo, had been thwarted by the winter closure of the ferry crossing over the River Deben. Instead I decided to walk south along the coast to Landguard Fort then follow the River Orwell past the U.K’s largest shipping container port and as far towards Ipswich as possible in the available light.
I filled up on the fried breakfast buffet in the grand dining room at the Orwell Hotel, where the only other diners were two solitary men slurping down plates of baked beans. Setting off along the seafront, I passed the mansion built in 1865 for a gun cartridge manufacturer where Augusta Empress of Germany stayed with her family in 1891, putting Felixstowe on the map as a place to come and look at the sea.
I’d read somewhere that Felixstowe was the first place to have permanent beach huts. So it was the home of the beach hut more than the home of Hauntology. Maybe we were haunted by the lost future of the beach hut and bathing German Empresses.
Plodding along the Suffolk beach it was impossible not to think of W.G Sebald and his Suffolk schelp recounted in The Rings of Saturn. In his review of Grant Gee’s film inspired by the book, Patience (After Sebald 2011), Mark Fisher wrote of how he thought Sebald’s book would capture the Tarkovsky-like landscape of the Zone that Fisher saw in the remains of pill-boxes, martello towers, and looming cranes. Instead he found that Sebald had “morosely trudged through the Suffolk spaces without really looking at them …The landscape in The Rings of Saturn functions as a thin conceit, the places operating as triggers for a literary ramble which reads less like a travelogue than a librarian’s listless daydream”.
Fisher wrote about the ‘weird and the eerie’. And you saw that in spades around Landguard Point with its defensive structures and eerie robot-operated port where huge cranes shuffled shipping containers producing a symphony of metal music clanking, chains swaying and hydraulic sighs. He had a vision of staging a hauntology event in Landguard Fort.
The walk along the seafront to the port had taken three hours – the whole morning more or less. I needed to double back in a wide loop to circumnavigate the vast port, stopping for a large cafetiere of coffee in the Rainbow Tea Room which was so quiet you could hear the clock ticking on top of an antique dresser. My placemat was printed with a map of the Desborough Hundred, taking me back to home ground and the formation of the Desborough Hundred Psychogeographical Society with my sister Cathy in 2004. I was reading Herzog’s Of Walking In Ice which seemed the perfect companion as the chill wind whipped in. Herzog’s walk from Munich to Paris had also taken place in December but in far less clement weather.
By the time I’d rounded the container port and reached the River Orwell there was only an hour or two of daylight left. I wouldn’t make it anywhere near Ipswich, but I was more than content with the walk. The high banks that protected the marshes from the flood waters put me in mind of walking the River Blyth near Southwold – just north along the coast. And as I did a lap of Trimley Marshes in the dusk, I started to plot my return to walk the Orwell from Ipswich then continue along Mark Fisher’s Suffolk coast.
In January I was incredibly fortunate to be given a tour of St Anne’s church, Limehouse designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor. Built the early 18th Century, St Anne’s is regarded as The Cathedral of the East End. The church is currently raising funds to restore this majestic church to its former glory and has an exhibition about Hawksmoor’s six London churches. Our tour around the church includes a visit to the crypt with the vaults of wealthy families of the maritime East End as well as some surviving relics of the Second World War.
The iconic Red Lion Leytonstone has re-opened under the ownership of Urban Pubs & Bars with an impressive refurbishment. Purchased from Antic in September 2024, who had recovered the Red Lion from its time as a South African themed pub called Zulus (I avoided the place during this period), Urban have added the Red Lion to their portfolio of 52 London pubs which also includes the recently acquired George & Dragon Wanstead.
There’s been an inn called the Red Lion, or Red Lyon, on the site since the 1670s. The image above shows the pub in the early 19th Century. The current building dates from 1870.
To be honest, I was a touch concerned about what Urban would do to my beloved Red Lion based on a brief visit to the George & Dragon at Wanstead (I really need to go back for a proper look). But all my fears were assuaged, and the reported £1 million refurb is absolutely spot on. They’ve retained what made the main section of the pub work well but improved the seating, particularly around the perimeter of the room. There are ample screens showing live sport. The bar looks really impressive.
But the highlight has to be what they’ve done with the garden and the old ‘stables’ bar, which is truly impressive. Gone is the old dirt floor with scattered picnic tables, replaced by heated booths, a covered area, and screens. The back room ‘stable’ is a comfortable bar with screens for live sport. It was also great to see the staff so happy in the new place.
I’ve yet to see the new ballroom upstairs, host to many legendary gigs in the 60s and 70s, but I’m told it matches the standard of the other areas of the pub. We had a roast at the weekend which was decent, although I wouldn’t say was an improvement on the old Antic Red Lion and the roast at the Leytonstone Tavern is better (I recently had an incredible roast at The Queens, Crouch End for around the same price so that’s become the comparison).
After all this praise I have one small gripe. There’s a distinct lack of cask ale. So far there’s only been one cask ale on tap on my recent visits and that has run out on one occasion and on Saturday there was no cask at all. Keg beers (IPAs, lagers etc) come in at over £7+ a pint which is a bit steep for Leytonstone I feel, £5.50 a pint for cask is acceptable. But it’s following a local trend where some of the businesses are charging central London prices (local coffee shops are often more expensive than similar central London establishments). We don’t want to see the diverse range of locals that use the Red Lion priced out of this brilliant boozer.
