New River periphrastics
Neither new nor a river, they say of the New River. They say it’s a 400-year-old culvert, but it’s also a dividing line, an incredibly long and incredibly shallow reservoir, aquatically neurotic and geographically unreliable. It fragments neighbourhoods on the one hand – its embankments steep and impassable – and links them on the other – its vertical path an alignment from Canonbury to Ware. But it does so only every so often. Sometimes it is behind a steep fence. Sometimes it is underground. So while it’s true that the New River is neither new nor a river, it’s also not really a geographical feature of any kind, and its age is indeterminate, being as it is so varied and manipulated by the needs of the suburbs it surrounds. Things start in Zone 3, Old Middlesex, Hornsey and Wood Green. The New River ran entirely above ground until urban development brought its tunnelling under. There’s one such tunnel in Wood Green; the land is for the most part landscaped gardens. When the rive