THE UNLOST RIVERS OF LONDON Strawberry Vale Brook Finchley → Friern Barnet (2 miles)
[Strawberry Vale Brook → Bounds Green Brook → Pymmes Brook → Lea → Thames]
This fruity stream sounds like it ought to be pastoral bliss, and once it was, but then Finchley and the motor car intervened. Thankfully a short section survives unculverted, so it's not entirely lost. Let's go meet the founder of the National Trust. [1895 OS map]
The top of Strawberry Vale, once upon a time, was by the moated Manor House at the Finchley end of East End Lane. St Theresa's School covers the site today, and a synagogue, and a psychotherapy and counselling centre. The brook ran east alongside Squires Lane, before suburbia intruded and a flank of Edwardian houses covered the edge of the meadow instead. The neighbourhood's still smartly manicured, and within easy walking distance of Finchley Central - look, you can see the platforms from the north side of the next bridge. On the far side is the fortress HQ of Pentland, who hold the strings to brands such as Berghaus, Speedo and JD Sports, whereas the ex-stream has veered right across some allotments.
Hurrah, it's the classic signifier of a lost river - an obvious dip in a road. That road is Long Lane, another once-rural thoroughfare, its adjacent fields long smothered by hundreds of semis. An additional stream merges somewhere in the vicinity of Tudor Primary School. Then the A406 hits, and the valley is never the same again. Engineers building the North Circular in the 1920s followed rivers for much of the way to simplify construction, here using the line of the Strawberry Vale Brook to jump across the watershed from the Brent to the Pymmes Brook. The allotments on the far side of the footbridge are still called Vale Farm, but these days are watered by taps and hosepipes.
If you're still with me, this is where Octavia Hill fits in. At the age of 8 her family moved from Wisbech to a row of cottages on the Great North Road in a hamlet called Brownswell, opposite a pub called the Green Man. The Strawberry Vale Brook flowed through the fields a few yards away. Octavia and her three sisters enjoyed the freedom of their surroundings, playing beside the stream, 'leaping ditches and climbing trees'. The five years she spent here embedded a love of the countryside, and help explain why she ended up campaigning for recreational open spaces and became a co-founder of the National Trust.
Those cottages have since been smothered by a Big Yellow Self Storage warehouse, so no plaque, while the Green Man was demolished in the 1990s to make way for a surprisingly substantial community centre. Monday night bingo should restart after Easter, if you're interested in coming along. A small community garden dedicated to Octavia Hill has been opened alongside, with a somewhat sanitised feel, incorporating a pergola, a few sparse trees and a ring of benches. But the gate's locked every night (and all weekend), and dogs are banned, and a sign prohibits ball games too, and you sense this is not the tribute Octavia would have wanted.
The road descending past the community centre, called Strawberry Vale, leads to an elongated enclave with a chequered history. The Regents Canal Company bought the land with the intention of flooding it to create a reservoir, but practicalities intervened and they swiftly sold it on to a builder. He built a pair of yellowbrick cottages beside the stream, incorporating cast iron and concrete, which in 1826 was truly groundbreaking. Hawthorne Dene nearly got demolished when the North Circular was widened in the 1960s, but local resident Spike Milligan stepped in to help get it Grade II listed, and today the westbound carriageway narrowly misses.
Just beyond lay Strawberry Vale House, which 50 years ago was one of the last surviving farms in Finchley, run by a horse breeder of international renown. Then in the late 70s it was purchased for housing, and the resulting Strawberry Vale Estate is an unusually defensive bastion of high-density living. A long curving five-storey'barrier block' faces the dual carriageway, its larger windows on the opposite side, surrounding a warren of smaller asymmetric townhouses. Turret-like stairwells lead up to the battlements, now keypadded to prevent unwelcome access. A tiny corner shop on Brook Walk survives by catering to residents under siege. If social housing architecture floats your boat, this is quite something.
It's also a dead end, so to cross the fence and progress further along the line of the Strawberry Vale Brook requires a mile long detour. Welcome to St PancrasandIslington Cemetery, opened in 1854 as funereal overspill from central London, and which (despite being in Barnet) is still jointly run by Camden and Islington councils. It covers 190 acres and holds the record for the most interments at any UK cemetery - in excess of 800,000 burials and 50,000 cremations - a total which continues to increase. It's quite affecting to wander continuously past a century and a half of gravestones, the most recent still lovingly tended. On one waterlogged verge, where the SVB would once have flowed, I was jolted by a freshly filled grave topped with unblemished bouquets dedicated to a man who was born a week before me in March 1965, and died a few days into 2020.
At the far eastern end of the cemetery the Strawberry Vale Brook finally comes out of hiding, emerging from a culvert between two lines of trees, and cowers in a steeply-banked ditch for almost 300 metres. This daylighted stretch is long enough for ducks to call it home, but fails to become the glorious landscaping treat it could be. A few daffodils brighten the verge, along with artificial flowers and a Christmas bauble blown in by the wind from adjacent graves. Judging by the number of Liams, Bridies and Seans remembered hereabouts, this might be the cemetery's Irish corner. And by the eastern gates the brook ducks back underground to be carried beneath the roaring North Circular, emerging on the far side with a different name. So that'll be tomorrow's post.
