Following the Mayes Brook from Chadwell Heath to Barking

Scanning my list of walks one weekend when heading out to shoot a YouTube video, the Mayes Brook lept out at me. How had I not walked it before. I’d be tracking the tributaries of the lower reaches of the River Roding during the lockdowns of 2020-21 and walks tracing the Cran Brook, Loxford Water and Seven Kings Water, and the Alders Brook had been some of my most memorable walks of that period. Somehow the Mayes Brook had slipped through the net. So one hot day at the end of July I set out to pay tribute to this ‘unlost’ river guided by a blog post by the brilliant Diamond Geezer.

Catching the tube to Newbury Park I walked along the Eastern Avenue, one of London’s great romantic highways. The sky seems wider above the Eastern Avenue – you sense the vast expanse of the North Sea at the end of the road at Lowestoft. It gives the passage into Chadwell Heath a more epic tone than merely passing from Redbridge into Barking and Dagenham. Likewise the art deco glory of the Plessey Factory beside the road, now defunct it seems, but once part of the defence electronics manufacturer from Ilford that’d used the Central Line tube tunnels between Leytonstone and Gants Hill as a wartime factory. You can still see the squat brick lift entrances nestled discreetly between the houses along the Eastern Avenue.

‘Chadders’, as my friend exclaimed when she saw where my walk started, is where the Mayes Brook rises, just to the north of St Chad’s Park. I wanted to make a link between this eastern spring and the St Chad’s Well at Kings Cross near the banks of the River Fleet. It seems St Chad of Mercia was associated with wells and springs although I couldn’t find a link to the area. But it gave me something to waffle about in the video.

This first half of the walk was a classic (sub)urban lost river walk – following hints and clues through the streets and alleyways, or in my case following the course as described in Diamond Geezer’s blog, through Chadwell Heath and Goodmayes and back across the border into Redbridge. There was a wide expanse of water in Goodmayes (Good Mayes Brook) Park which you assume is fed by the Mayes Brook, as the Cran Brook, Loxford and Seven Kings Water all feed park lakes along their course. But the river itself remains hidden until you approach Mayesbrook Park where it’s been successfully daylighted and brought back to the surface.

Leaving the parched earth of Mayesbrook Park, the brook once more disappeared from view and further on flowed above ground, but was not accessible to the walker for the entire way. A fortunate side-effect of this enforced detour into the fringe of Barking was that it took me past the magnificent Elizabethan Eastbury Manor House, built by Clement Sysley.

I did miss a short open section of the Mayes Brook before it crosses the A13 but picked it up on the other side as it ran wide and free across River Road. The last view I had of the river was as it made its final passage through the industrial buildings towards its confluence with the River Roding. From here those waters that rose beneath the ground in a modest street in Chadwell Heath, would flow into the Thames and out into the wild seas.