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 river resurfaces, it seems to do so reluctantly; the footpath is barely a stamp in the grass. Only a few moments later the river ducks beneath Bowes Park to accommodate its unwelcome house guest: the North Circular Road. There are a few of these boundary roads along the route: first the North Circ, then the M25, then the North Orbital. Each one a record of the ringways intended to skirt London, none of them finished as planned. Diving out of sight under the Circular, a simpering viaduct over the M25, and then finally, a diminutive bridging under the Orbital. The New River seems to care less and less for the space it passes the further it gets from the city. There are no tunnel sections beyond Enfield; the fake river is allowed to take up pride of place.

    It was this element, the New River’s writhing out from under the city, that I wanted to embrace by walking it. The culvert reaches the edge and it approaches itself. I had been spending the previous weeks tiptoeing around problems instead of tackling them head-on, and I resolved, by walking to the edge, there would be nowhere left to walk around. There would be only one direction: away. Upstream to the source. A directionality compelled by a single route: the New River path.

    It is neither new nor a river nor a path. It is a mixture of gravel tracings and pavement periphrastics. The path is verbose in its diversions from the parts of the river that Thames Water still keep under wraps, so avid walk-awayers have to endure road-bound Southgate SUVs and Green Lanes lorries on the way. They can also experience unawares dog walkers and a multiplicity of fly-tippers who, honestly, seem to prize a comic timing in their littering the culvert. In Palmers Green there’s a toy snake floating in the algae. By Winchmore Hill, there’s a snakeskin purse instead. It’s thematically sound, but the stuff still piles up over time; the grebes and swans build their nests in tidal heavings of rubbish. They bring their young into a world of strong Polish lager and used tissues.

    Like the rubbish, the New River comes in waves; one moment it is flush with human droppings, another it is all alive with urban ‘nature’. Its edges change too. Cross a road and the river no longer sees perfectly perpendicular gardens but a rectilinear hedging or a house bumped right against it. And the northern slant of the route sees these houses grow younger with each crossing. First the neighbourhoods of Bowes are choke-a-bloc with cars, no driveways, just cars, a Zone 4 malaise, LTN or not. Into Winchmore Hill and the corners of Enfield, the cars find their place, these inhabitants still feeling themselves beyond the embarrassment of a railway commute, but now comfortable enough to afford a home for their gas-guzzling pets too.

    Beyond Grange Hill the path is diverted because a golf course is in the way. My preconception that the whole of Enfield was like Edmonton and Ponders End is smashed to pieces as I realise that – as in every London borough, inner or outer – the posh find their enclave, and then stick to it. These folk insist on driving Hummers on perfect tarmac so that they can fit enough tees in the boot for the 11th hole. These folk are 50/50 on Brexit but more than insulated from the consequences. These folk are insulated from almost everything. Even the New River, tunnelled out of sight until they call it in for a pretty park and a pub by the waterside.

    But then, Enfield seems to fade, and London’s edgelands appear to invite themselves. The roads widen and the SUVs increase in speed. In a postwar suburban street I anticipate the end, the stopping of streets to walk around, the open green inevitable. The problem is, London doesn’t end like that. Reaching Forty Hill Estate, I encounter the perfect manicure of a farmland for display, pigs for pleasing punters, grapes for acclimatising English wine, and the ‘country house’ itself being deployed for a city wedding. Tourism has turned these country lanes inside out and the spaces even vaguely proximate to some suburban dead zone are forced into subservience. There is no edge here; there is only more walking around.

    It is neither new nor a river nor a path nor any meaningful diversion. It is a subject of London and its surrounds and every inch of its straight-snaking path plays the whim to its district; in socio-space the ‘river’ barely affects us so much as we affect it, a human construction afflicted by further human constructions and spatial relations as far as tourist attractions and Thames Water pipes. The New River is not a route. It is an amenity, instrumentalised and reorganised into the spaces of urban life. As Henri Lefebvre said, “society has been completely urbanised”, even between its fringes.