River Graveney Walk (Part 1: Norbury Brook)

The Norbury Brook - which becomes the River Graveney downstream, and eventually flows into the Wandle just beyond Colliers Wood - is, as I've said before, an elusive beast. It rises, according to Wikipedia, 'somewhere near Lower Addiscombe Road' but becomes visible from Heaver's Meadow. Anyway, in the absence of any clear idea where it actually runs between those two points, and on the basis that green spaces are a) more pleasant to walk through and b) possibly there because of unstable ground due to a buried waterway, I've designed my own meandering route for the first part.

Unusually for me, I'm also going to make these instructions as clear as possible as I can't see that anyone else has posted a guide to walking this brook, so this is a warning in advance that this will probably be a long, picture-heavy, not especially chatty, post. 

From Addiscombe Tram Stop:

Turn right and walk along the right hand pavement until you reach East India Way. There will be a number of other roads leading off to the right before that, and the park you're heading for runs along the back of these, but those roads end in spiky metal fences rather than gates.

Anyway to walk the length of the park East India Way is best. Pass under the arch and walk straight ahead.

According to Croydon Council website East India Estate (a conservation area over the other side of Lower Addiscombe Road from where you are) is on the site of the former East India Trading Company Military Academy. I'm not sure if this road was also a part of that academy, but it seems likely. Boggle, if you like, at the concept of a private company being allowed to train an army to protect its interests abroad. Friends and shareholders in high places? Or pure Imperialism?  

At the end of East India Way there is a footpath and gate into Addiscombe Railway Park. On the left is the community garden, and if you look back you can see central Croydon, which is casting multiple buildings up to the sky at present. Croydon was heavily bombed during the Second World War (presumably because of the airport and the good train links to London and the Coast) and came back with a lot of concrete 'space age' type buildings that look dated now but must have seemed like the clean, uncluttered future sixty years ago. I think it's trying to pull the same trick again, but although I wish it luck, I'm not sure it's going to work a second time.

Is it just me or does this look unnervingly like a grave? Here lieth the body of Addiscombe Railway. 

You want to walk the full length of the park and come out at Blackhorse Lane tram stop. Climb the steps or ramp up to the bridge over the tram line and turn right. Bear right onto Woodside Green, ignoring Elmers Rd, which is before it. 

At the green itself, with it's war memorial, bear left and then turn left down Dickenson's Lane. There is a path straight ahead at the end which takes you to Brickfield's Meadow. A noticeboard on the right will tell you all about the brick factory which used to be here, which is just as well because I can't remember a word of it beyond those bare facts. 

This is actually a lovely spot, even in the drizzle. Keep walking forwards - a pond should appear on your left. You can go round the pond at the top or down to cross the small and muddy bridge. 

Brickfield's Meadow 

At the top right of the pond (from the end you originally approached it from) and with the pond to your back head through the car parks or stick to Christie Drive to get to Davidson Road. 

Davidson Road runs parallel to roads called Canal Walk and Towpath Way, which sound promising, but if the brook is here it's firmly underground, so you may as well turn right into Davidson Road at the end of Christie Drive, and once at the end of Davidson Road left into Tennison Rd, which will take you over the railway line. On your right is South Norwood Rec, and on your left just a bit further down is Heavers Meadow (it's signposted and just before the Zebra crossing). 

Down this same dead end is also Heavers Farm primary school (I keep wanting to put an apostrophe in both of those, on the basis that surely Heaver must have been a person or people, but history, or at least google, if not forthcoming about who or what Heaver was). 

Internet sources are forthcoming about the fact that Heavers Meadow is a water meadow, which I can confirm from direct observation.

A tarmacked path runs up the left hand side to keep you dry, alongside a metal fence the other side of which the brook will eventually appear, fenced off. 

The reasoning behind culverting these natural streams in London, which has been going on for a good hundred years or more, was to speed water out of an area as fast as possible and prevent flooding - but doesn't always work, can cause problems downstream and often involves deep concrete channels in which water rises very quickly (hence the fence). Some areas are now trying planting and encouraging their local brooks to take a more meandering course to slow them down and create green corridors. If anyone were to try that with this brook a water meadow would seem the place to start it. 

Taken through the fence. Most of the pictures on this section are taken through fences or over walls meant to deter people getting in the river. 

As with the Railway Park, you simply walk to the end of Heavers Meadow until you get to Selhurst Road, where the brook goes underground again. Over the road to your left is Selhurst station.  

This very attractive rondel is outside the station, and made by artyface.

For the next stretch you need to be the other side of the railway line. The easiest way to do that is to go under the railway bridge by Selhurst station and directly right up Edith Rd. You can then turn right into Dagnell Park or walk up a bit further and wait until Eileen Rd (what is the story behind these roads being named Edith and Eileen I wonder? Sisters? Daughters? Or just 'we had to name them something'?) either way you will get to Saxon Rd, where you turn left and then right into Whitehorse Rd. You should be diagonally opposite a small church/chapel. 

Cross Whitehorse Rd but continue along it to Bensham Manor Rd (I've explored the road with the chapel in it and the housing estate and found no sign of the brook at all). 

Turn down the second road on your left, Swain Rd, and walk along the left hand pavement. About halfway down is Treetops Court, and if you turn in there you will find the brook has resurfaced, running between the car park and a row of properties each with it's own small bridge. Here the pedestrian is only protected from it by a wire fence, and a low one of just four wires at that, which seems at odds with how it's fenced off elsewhere, but may be because these are newer builds and as I said, attitudes have changed. Go back to Swain Lane and continue walking down the left hand pavement, and then turn right, and next right again into Ecclesbourne Rd. 

If you're taller than me (and most people are) you may be able to see over the wall halfway down Ecclesbourne behind which the brook is. If not you can do what I did for many of the pictures I took on this walk, which was hold my camera up above my head and tilt it down to snap a picture to look at later. Thus:

I won't post all these. They're all quite similar, although some have a much better feel for how deep that culvert runs (you can see how it would be treacherous) and in others you can see how surprisingly fast the water flows. 

At the end of Ecclesbourne turn left back into Bensham Manor Rd again. A little way down is Bensham Close. If you turn in here and walk to the end (it's not very long) you will come to the brook without any fencing at all. Again, this seems to be because it is a newish development. 

The banks are also thickly planted with some kind of bulb. This will probably be a very nice spot in full spring. 

Retrace your steps to Bensham Manor Rd and turn left at Seneca Rd. If you're a completist, turn left again up Boswell Rd to find another wall hiding the brook, and then retrace your steps to Seneca, walk along Seneca Rd until it becomes Lucerne Rd and you will find another wall almost immediately doing the same thing, again retrace your steps to the corner of Lucerne and Boswell Rd and turn left up Boswell Rd to the Brigstock Rd (I promise these instructions make more sense in situ!). 

This is the main road through Thornton Heath and unmistakable as an outer London high street. If you cross Brigstock Rd (carefully! This is the road where someone beeped his car horn at me because he wanted to park on the bit of pavement where I was standing. He wasn't particularly antagonistic, mind you, he just thought pavements were for parking on and to be fair to him when I looked around it was clear he wasn't the only one.) you'll find Brook Rd straight ahead, but first turn left to walk a little way down Brigstock Rd to find a low wall over the brook. 

Now go back to Brook Rd. The brook itself runs round the back of the houses. You can turn left up Quadrant Rd to get another pic very similar to the one(s) you have and then retrace your steps, or just keep straight ahead as Brook Rd turns into Carew Rd and arrives at Thornton Heath recreation ground. 

There is a community garden on your right just inside the gate, with a fine showing of daffodils right now, but you want to keep left along the path until it meets the brook (again behind a fence) on your left hand side. It you keep walking you will pass the other park entrance with it's bridges over the brook and eventually hit the fences of people's back gardens at the far end. Turn round and go back to the entrance with the bridges and cross the brook. 

Turn right along Bridport Rd and right again into Braemar Avenue. Again there is a barrier, this time about a third of the way down the road, but you can see the brook (or at least the channel and lush growth) around it. 

Incidentally if you've done all this, I estimate you've done at least six miles walking (I'd done more than eight, what with the diversions). We'll go just a little further to Norbury, and you can get a coffee or bail out until next time.

Continue down Braemar and turn left, then left again into Strathayre Avenue. Just before the road on the right (Dalmeny Rd) the brook runs diagonally under Strathayre, but it appears to be behind people's gardens or front hedges and there's only so nosy I'm prepared to be. 

Anyway you want to go down Dalmeny. Walk along until you get to Ederline Avenue on the right. Along Ederline is a metal fence, and on the other side of the road a metal fence and gate. Brook still there, running along behind the terraces. Sadly despite a strongly worded notice from Croydon council basically saying 'this is not a dumping ground and we will fine you' one side has been turned into a dumping ground at this present time. Continue along Ederline and turn left into Norbury Crescent. 

Turn right at Manor Farm Rd and under the railway line. You can read about the Manor (and later the farm) on Hidden London here. There is also an antique postcard of the farm for sale online, but from the picture it just looks like a farm. Big house, field, pond. 

There is a short curved stretch of the brook on your left as you come out from under the bridge (picture again taken through the fence). 

Turn left out of Manor Farm Road into Norbury Avenue. Continue along the right hand pavement until you come to a footpath and allotments, Turn down the footpath, which runs over the brook and at the end of the path turn left through Norbury Park.  

According to the map there's water diagonally across Norbury Park to the row of yellowish brick buildings opposite - actually there's no water but just a lot of quagginess underfoot (maybe it floods sometimes?) anyway aim for those yellow buildings and you'll find the brook surfaces again in the usual concrete channel. Walk along with the brook on your right, and continue straight ahead through the car park when it ends. 

I want to say you're now on Norbury High Street, but apparently it's not called that. Left for the train station, either direction for pubs, cafes, restaurants, buses. Straight ahead on the other side of the road the brook becomes the River Graveney, which I'll come back to in part 2. 

Effra, Graveney, Falcon, Quaggy, Wandle, Walbrook, Tyburn, Fleet.. (U A Fanthorpe - Rising Damp)

London's lost rivers don't lie that deep - over the summer the Beverley rose high enough that cars could not get through. The Falcon regularly floods beneath the railway bridge in Clapham near the pub that bears it's name, and if you walk it's length - from Tooting to the Thames - there is more than one place where you can stand over a grating and hear it rush away below. 

I know this because over the summer I 'did' a few of the South London rivers (The Effra and Falcon and Peck) following the routes in London's Lost Rivers by Tom Bolton (both volumes), as well as the Hogsmill, which is mostly above ground, and some confused wandering around the Graveney, a small tributary which feeds the Wandle, and has an irritating habit of being buried near the railway line or lost behind things like the Lidl car park. I'm sure there's a route with more river and less road though, and when I've worked it out will post it here. 

The Wandle itself is, Bolton says, as much mislaid as lost. I've always known where bits of it were, Carshalton Ponds or the back of Plough Lane football ground or snug around Savacentre (as was) and Merton Abbey Mills, which used to be a mini Camden, but largely consists of restaurants now. I've fished dogs out of it and sat in the William Morris drinking next to it and walked from Waddon Ponds to where it enters the Thames at Wandsworth. Big efforts have been made to make a feature of the Wandle since I first became acquainted with it, and mostly they've been successful. 

So I've been wondering, as a fan of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series, if or when the Wandle would make an appearance, and was pleased to see her turn up recently in Tales from the Folly, although I did feel, reading that book as a whole, that it was a completist sort of book - it would make a very poor introduction to the series. Or, to put it another way, I was very happy with it as a borrow from the library, but I don't feel any urge to own it.

I feel the same about What Abigail Did that Summer, also in the same series, but that's for completely different reasons. The book is clearly either written for children or so children can read it, and would be a grand introduction for a child of about eleven up. 

As those who read the main stories will know, Abigail is Peter Grant's cousin (I don't think a first cousin, but extended family who live close by), and she's at that cusp between childhood and adulthood - in some ways very adult for her age, due to her home circumstances and the unavoidable awareness about how a young black girl is perceived, but in others very much an innocent still.  She has the kind of freedom that comes with being old and wise enough to be allowed out alone and the less happy freedom of knowing your parents won't notice because they have more pressing things to worry about. 

(It's significant, I think, that children's stories like The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Bedknob(s) and Broomstick(s) and Carrie's War all begin with children evacuated to live with strangers.)

What really drew my attention though is that the book is set almost entirely on Hampstead Heath, which is a lovely backdrop for this kind of freedom, and creates a little world of it's own with set boundaries that can be mapped.  

Which is why it was the catalyst for my finally walking the three lost London rivers that run down from Hampstead to the Thames (using the Bolton books again). 

Westbourne, Tyburn and Fleet are good walks for late autumn. You begin on the hill in Hampstead Heath, which despite the simmering summer heat in Aaronovitch's book has always seemed to me an autumn sort of place: hot coffee and muddy dogs and golden turning leaves, and then by the time evening comes early you're in Holborn or Victoria or Marylebone, well lit and well populated.

Some bits near the quaggy, nascent Fleet may feel secluded for all of ten seconds before you hear dogs or families approaching. 

Buckingham Palace Gate (almost under which the Tyburn runs)

Tyburn

Camden (following the Fleet)

Westbourne - one of the Mews this river runs under

This is the pub that was illegally knocked down before it could be listed (also along the Westbourne). The builders were made to rebuild  They've done a nice job of it. 

Along the Fleet. This would be Abigail's ends, I think. The architecture is bolt-together concrete, but there's a brave show of plants, especially for November. 

Along the Westbourne. 

One from the Wandle

The Elusive Graveney

One from the Hogsmill

Walking Distance - Merton/Sutton borders

The curious thing about living in a large city like London is how little your focus can be on the area you actually live in. You can't pop home for lunch from a job with a commute of an hour, and friends tend to be made from work colleagues, and they work centrally too, an hour or more from their homes, and those all in different directions. 

Add to that bigger and better shops and museums and art galleries all drawing you in from the periphery, and you might never be at home enough to really consider the spaces that surround it. 

Lately though, with all of us spending so much more time at home, there is scope to notice. 

For myself I'd describe the area I live in as a liminal space - not suburb but not London proper - and you don't have to travel far before you cross a border, whether the borough border between Merton and Sutton, or on the smaller scale that between Morden and Mitcham, as delineated by the Wandle river. The road my block sits on is the London Road in places (because it runs into London) but where I am it's Bishopsford Road, because it's here the river was forded. 

History sits in layers in these places. Mitcham, for example, is at ground level very visibly a village with a duck pond and a green and a church and a cricket pitch and a weekly market and a more than respectable amount of history. A long-standing stopping place between London and the coast, now sadly overlaid with a purpose built and dated shopping arcade and suffering from that main road slicing in through. 

Morden seems to have consisted of big country estates until Metroland - the tube, and slum clearance - created vast estates of the other sort where all the houses might look more or less identical around their squares and crescents of well mown grass, but were of a decent size, with amenities and good transport links, and surrounded by plenty of open space. 

It follows that if you come up any of the major roads in a car or bus your main impression of the whole area will be a line of kebab shops, nail bars, closed pubs and small local convenience stores, but walking is a very different experience. It is possible, for example, to walk along the bank of the Wandle almost full length in both directions, and the path is well maintained.

The stretch closest by me goes through Watermeads, currently closed due to bridge repairs, but another not far away runs through to Morden Hall Park, some of which is owned by the National Trust. The buildings and car parks (and garden centre and charity book store) are closed at the moment, but the park itself is still open, and you can walk the mile or so to the tube and shops at Morden through here.

Another runs along the edge of Poulter Park, a large open space that is home to the rugby club, and has it's own green corridor (once you've crossed the road) running up the hill two miles all the way to St Helier Hospital in Sutton. 

Past St Helier another green corridor runs to Rose Hill Park, divided into east and west parts by the Brighton Road (which may have led to Brighton once but now seems to disappear somewhere just before Gatwick).

Moving from east to west again a metal pedestrian bridge and a hundred yards or so of pavement walking takes you to Reigate Avenue recreation ground (that pedestrian bridge crosses Reigate Avenue, which may very possibly lead to Reigate, or at least definitely goes in that general direction) then the same straight line takes you to Sutton Common recreation ground (which is in Sutton) and into Lower Morden Lane (which is semi famous locally for going all out with the decorations at Christmas) and pedestrian gates (or gateways, Merton and Sutton don't always bother with gates into large green spaces) into Morden Park, which Wikipedia tells me was - again - 'once a country estate', and which I seem to have taken the world's most boring photo of.

But what I wanted to capture was in the middle there on the horizon is Merton council buildings, including the library, and closer on the right the leisure centre, currently closed (and another place I want to come back to for coffee and a nose at the swimming pool when we can do such things again). You may also be able to make out the dome of the mosque if you can enlarge the picture - I've been there on open house day and would recommend it. Not only did we get a tour of the building, but tea, and they had aerial photos of what the site was like when Express dairies had a milk depot there. It's sandwiched between tube and rail lines, so would have been ideal.

(Has anyone ever written a history of milk and the social history around it? Someone surely should.)

Walking through Morden Park takes you unsurprisingly to Morden, and from Morden you can hop back into Morden Hall Park (see first picture) and follow the river home.