the wooden-sided river passes the cricket pitch and under a little bridge, it’s a bizarrely rural scene, a snapshot of how the whole landscape might have looked when the river was first built. Trees hang down over the banks, the water is clear. The river winds quickly across the north side of the park then disappears under Green Lanes, in the direction of the Woodberry Down Estate, where it disappears behind a fence and railings. Woodberry Down sounds like something from Rupert Bear. By all accounts it was actually like that (not the talking animals bit) until relatively recently – photos from 100 years ago show the New River meandering gently through water meadows past trees, stationary men with big moustaches and a little country cottage. The view is still good, though, and it’s easy to imagine standing on a gentle hill looking down into a green valley of farms and rolling fields, and across Tottenham and Walthamstow marshes.
Naturally there was a danger that, people being people, the New River would soon get clogged up with all the usual debris – shit, blood, pigs’ intestines, sheep’s brains, the rotting heads of traitors, bloated corpses of drunkards who’d fallen in, everything that at that time clogged up most of the waterways of the city. The New River Company decided to combat this by building paths on each side of the river and employing walkers, big burly moustachioed men who would patrol the river and have their pictures taken when photography was invented. These walkers had the power to fine or even imprison anyone they caught throwing rubbish or simply pissing into the river.
By the mid-nineteenth century most of the water supplies in London were once again polluted. The cholera epidemic of 1849 would eventually be traced to the contaminated water supply at Broad Street in Soho. Thanks to the New River Company’s vigilance, their water remained pure and drinkable but as a result it was too expensive for the poor of London. The philanthropist Samuel Gurney spotted a gap in the charity market and under the auspices of his new and snappily named the Metropolitan Free Drinking Fountain Association, opened London’s first drinking fountain in Snow Hill, from water pumped (and bought) from the New River.
I cut across past Manor House, named after the old manor of Stoke Newington which stood nearby. Manor House is a big strippers’ and showbands’ pub, or at least it would have been in its glory days. I walk along the rumbling and dusty Seven Sisters Road for a quarter of a mile until the New River appears on my left looking very sad, chained up, covered in green American algae, another of those crap Stateside imports up there with grey squirrels and confessional TV, with a shopping trolley and plastic football set fast in the gunge. At Sluice House Nine (Kurt Vonnegut’s London novel), on Newnton Close, in the shadow of three big tower blocks, I am finally able to get back down to the river and walk alongside it as it winds past the East Reservoir, still covered in algae scum. There’s a sense of boundary here between the self-conscious bourgeois charm of Stoke Newington to the south – with the reservoir and trees, a church spire, Victorian rooftops, it could be the countryside – and the more uncontrolled and more recently built-up area around Seven Sisters Road to the right, a canvas of white council slab flats, shopping trolleys left upturned, kids playing football (two kids are trying to juggle a ball then the smaller of the two nicks it off the big one. The big kid knocks him over), an old people’s haven with three plastic benches like a prison. These tower blocks, another part of the huge Woodberry Down Estate, are quite spectacular.
The scheme had originally been planned in the early twenties when it was decided to get rid of much of the Victorian architecture in the area (Victorians hated Georgians, Modernists hated Victorians, we hate the Modernists – those fucking bastards), although not finished until 1952. Its four eight-storey slab blocks with projecting flat roofs in parallel rows were designed in a ‘progressive Scandinavian style coloured in the pale cream like Swiss municipal architecture’ according to the bloke in the little Turkish grocer’s shop across the way on Lordship Road.
The reservoir is a haven for birds and their human sidekicks, birdwatchers. Looking back, where the river meets the road, is my favourite view of the New River – a blanket of green covers a small sluiced section dotted with cans, blue girders, a red plastic football, aerosols and bottles coming up for air like gasping fish, the three identical tower blocks of Stamford Hill rising in the distance like silver standing stones. There’s ducks too, one old lad with four duck chicks – well, not chicks, they’re ducks, and one younger male with a dodgy leg who’s just been beaten up, probably in a fight over the duck harem, which waits in the background ready to change allegiance at a moment’s notice should the old fella peg it suddenly.
Across the road on Spring Park Drive is a fifties estate. A fat woman shouts out of a sixth-storey window to her daughter below, ‘Oi, get me some leeks.’
‘I don’t want to get leeks,’ says the girl.
‘Get me some fucking leeks, you little bitch,’ shouts her mum.
‘I don’t want to,’ says the girl and the mother is looking very, very angry. Get the leeks, go on, for a quiet life.
‘I don’t know what leeks look like anyway,’ the girl shouts up, then runs away. A right turn and there’s an old wooden bench on a patch of grass that once would have had old lads sitting down looking over the view, now it just looks onto the health centre. Look, there’s the window where they had the wart clinic. Ah, those were the days. Across Green Lanes again into the back streets and onto Wilberforce Road, with its rows of massive Victorian houses where there are always big puddles on the tarmac. Only 150 years ago all this area north of here up to Seven Sisters Road was open countryside with two big pubs, the Eel Pie House and the Highbury Sluice alongside the river, where anglers and holidaymakers would hang out. Then, in the 1860s, the pubs were pulled down and everything built over in a mad frenzy. If you compare an 1850s map of the district and the 1871 census map you can see the rapid growth of residential streets in Highbury and south Finsbury Park.
On Blackstock Road there are a couple of charity shops and a huge Christian place, all with great second-hand (or more likely third-or fourth-hand) record sections. Their main trade, however, is in the suits of fat-arsed and tiny-bodied dead people and eighties computer games (i.e. Binatone football and tennis – which is just that white dot moving from a line one side of your screen to another). They also have a fine selection of crappy prints in plastic gilt frames – mostly rural scenes, Italian village harbours and matadors. I buy a lot of crappy pictures in gilt frames and paint my own crappy pictures of London scenes over them, most recently Finsbury Park crossroads on top of a Haywainy pastiche. It’s cheaper than buying canvases and you get the frame thrown in too.
Now on Mountgrove Road, the old accordion shop is empty, the estate agents have moved, the graphics company has closed up, the electrical shop has been turned into flats. This was originally a continuation of what is now Blackstock Road, called Gypsy Lane, but it’s been cut off, like an oxbow lake. Cross over my road and you’re suddenly into very different territory – there’s an invisible border I call The Scut Line with cafés and corner shops on one side, nice restaurants and flower shops on the other. It marks a boundary of the old parishes of Hornsey, St Mary’s and Stoke Newington. The mad drunken people of Finsbury Park and Highbury Vale don’t stray south of the line, marked by the Bank of Friendship pub (‘bank’ possibly alluding to a riverbank). People would stand on one side of the river here and shout at the poncey Stoke Newington wankers – ‘Oi, Daniel Defoe, your book is rubbish!’
The course of the New River has been altered several times in the last 400 years. Originally it flowed around Holloway towards Camden, but in the 1620s it was diverted east to Finsbury Park and Highbury. Since these early days most of the winding stretches were replaced by straighter sections and its capacity was increased to cope with the capital’s increased demand for water. This meant taking water from other streams, to the fury of people whose livelihood relied on the rivers, such as millers, fishermen and fat rich red-faced landowners who just liked complaining. Later on, pumping stations were put up along the route which pumped underground water to add to the river’s flow. Until recently the New River still supplied
