A walk along the River Pinn following the Celandine Route

I’d passed over the River Pinn on a number of previous walks – usually on treks heading West out of London. It always struck me as a particularly beguiling watercourse trundling down through the western suburbs. I vowed to return and walk its length and one Easter a few years ago set off to Paddington to catch the train to West Drayton and follow the Pinn from its confluence with the Colne back to its source high up in the hills of Harrow. But the rain lashed down so hard, bouncing off the pavement and forming a new river that ran down from Praed Street into the Station, that I had to abandon my venture. It was only in October of this year that I decided to return to walk the Celandine Route, a 12-mile trail created by Hillingdon Council that follows the Pinn

The River Pinn rises on Harrow Weald Common and flows through Pinner, Ruislip, and Uxbridge to make its confluence with Frays River and combined they run into the River Colne on the edge of West Drayton. It is one of the three main rivers of the old county of Middlesex. This time I decided to start my walk at Pinner where The Celandine Route starts at Bridge Street near the junction with Pinner High Street, at the point the Pinn was dammed during WW2 to provide water to put out fires.

The River Pinn at Pinner
River Pinn at Pinner

The green wrought iron railings in a lane behind some shops and offices could only be guarding something precious and sacred. Below trundles the gentle River Pinn, which I greet before the walk deviates from the course of the river through Pinner Memorial Gardens. The watercourse is picked up as it flows through Cuckoo Hill Allotments and I could follow it closely for most of the way ahead.

The Pinn leads us to the beautiful walled garden at Eastcote House which dates from the 17th Century and then to the ancient Ruislip Manor House with its majestic great barn which was built around the year 1300. There is also the remains of a Motte and Bailey Castle on the site, and a branch of Ruislip Library in the Little Barn which was built some point before 1600.

Eastcote House Gardens on the River Pinn walk
Eastcote House Gardens
Ruislip Manor House - River Pinn walk
Ruislip Manor House

It was a walk rich in history, revealing a lost world of Old Middlesex. Where the river curves around Ruislip Golf Course, the Hillingdon Hoard was discovered consisting of Iron Age coins believed to date from the 1st Century BC. They were turned up during HS2 works close to the river, leading to the supposition that they may have been a votive offering. The next site of interest we pass along the river is Pynchester Moat created sometime in the 13th or 14th Century and now slumbering in suburbia.

The rain did come down intermittently throughout the walk but at no point did it detract from the pleasure of this riverine stroll, not even when it became clear that I’d be unable to complete the route in daylight. After crossing the A40 I bade farewell to the spirit of the Pinn and headed off towards a crimson sunset breaking over Uxbridge to mull over the day sipping a mug of tea in Starbucks.

A Gallivant round St Leonards-on-Sea with Andrew Kötting

After watching Andrew Kötting’s debut feature, Gallivant at the Sydney Film Festival in 1997 I went straight out and bought a Canon Super 8 camera to make a film on my travels through India back home to England. There’s a direct line between that screening in the Pitt Street Cinema and my weekly YouTube videos today. So this trip to St Leonards to take a stroll round the Regency seaside town with Andrew Kötting had particular resonance. In fact it had too much significance to fully dwell upon.

A journey to an English coastal resort in winter is either an extreme display of confidence or a brash two fingers to Fate. I like to think I was doing both and Fate decided to answer back with howling winds, torrential sideways rain and plummeting temperatures. So we hid in the Goat Ledge Cafe to take refuge and feast on Goat Ledge Sunrise rolls filled with smoked haddock, chilli jam, fried egg, and chard mayo. We attempted to push on along the esplanade but the rain hammered down even harder and the wind clipped our ears, so we retreated to Andrew’s home to talk about Gallivant.

Andrew Kötting outside a Fish and Chip shop in St Leonards-on-Sea

The four-month road trip around the entire coastline of Britain with his Grandmother Gladys and young daughter Eden, was a visionary odyssey, capturing the eccentricity as well as the beauty of this mystical isle. It was the perfect re-introduction to end my three-year travels abroad. The psychogeographical revival was well underway in Britain when the film was released in 1996 with Patrick Keiller’s film London and the writings of Iain Sinclair. Gallivant expanded this scope beyond the capital to cover the entire island. So when Iain Sinclair’s review of Gallivant in Sight and Sound brought the two together on the streets of St Leonards, where Iain also sometimes resides, it was feared that the psychogeographical reverberances would crack the country apart – or at least swallow a kebab shop in Hackney. Instead we’ve witnessed a steady stream of collaborations that have seen Andrew dressed as a straw bear walking from Epping Forest to Northamptonshire, a nautical journey in a swan-shaped pedalo, a 24-hour walk around the London Overground, a quest to reincorporate the ghost of King Harold, and a pilgrimage to deliver a whalebone box to the Outer Hebrides.

The colonnade at Bexhill-on-Sea

We conceded defeat to the elements and Andrew took me for a drive along St Leonard’s Regency seafront, stopping to pay homage to the statue of Edith Swanneck before driving onwards to Bexhill-on-Sea. Gallivant opens on the beach at Bexhill in front of the majestic modernist dream of the De La Warr Pavilion. This year was the 25th anniversary of the film’s release and Andrew reminiscing about childhood visits here with Gladys seemed the perfect end to the day. Maybe Fate had been on our side after all.

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.”