THE UNLOST RIVERS OF LONDON Wembley Brook Sudbury → Wembley → Tokyngton (2½ miles)
[Wembley Brook → Brent → Thames]
This one's minor enough that I'd never heard of it before squinting more closely at a map of Wembley. This may be because the brook only spends a mile on the surface and spends the rest of its miserable existence flowing through pipes. And yet in August it rose from its culvert causing "an area of around one square mile to be flooded up to a depth of approximately one metre", because you should never underestimate the power of an unlost river after heavy rain. Join me on a meandering walk from Sudbury to Stonebridge Park through the backstreets of Brent, and prepare for a rather more disappointing showing.
The Wembley Brook once started as a trickle across Vale Farm, the largest dairy farm in Sudbury. Its meadows spread northeastwards from the Harrow Road and its milk was sold from a shop on Wembley High Road. But with three railways passing close by its land was inevitably sold off for housing, and in 1932 the environs of the farmhouse were repurposed as a sports ground and an open air lido. The river's source is now surrounded by an indoor pool, a sports centre, a health centre and some playing fields, being one of the few places Brent council can build civic things without significant opposition.
Here too is the home ground of Wembley FC, underachievers of Combined Counties Premier Division North, where access to the scant stands is via the Ron Clarke Memorial Gate. The ground's called Vale Farm in honour of what it replaced, and its claim to fame is that the England team trained here during their World Cup campaign in 1966 (partly because the pitch was in excellent condition but mainly because it was dead close to Wembley Stadium). Tucked alongside is East Lane Theatre, an amateur 75-seater that hopefully looks a lot more plush inside than out. It's a hodgepodge of repurposed workshop and former tennis pavilion and was conjured up by the local amdram society in 1990. They still put on four productions a year, the next of which will of course be a Victorian thriller called Gaslight but I've told you that already.
The stream was banished underground when the fields to the south were turned into housing, and so comprehensively it won't be visible for several more paragraphs. That said there is a gentle but very obvious dip in the road along Eton Avenue, providing semi-convincing evidence of the passage of a former watercourse. All the estate's roads were named after top public schools... Eton, Repton, Rugby, Charterhouse and very sensibly not Harrow because that's just up the road. The housing is motley interwar stock, some gabled, some pebbledashed and rather a lot of it bungalows. Here black cats sit on windowsills, caravans hibernate for winter and estate agents are rarely overenthusiastic.
Following the river means cutting across the grain of the subsequent street pattern, suggesting connectivity wasn't at the top of the agenda when these avenues were built. You can tell you're getting closer to Wembley Stadium when the event day parking restrictions suddenly start at 8am instead of 10. You can tell you're getting closer to Wembley proper when the semis, flats and townhouses are abruptly replaced by narrow Victorian terraces. And you can tell you're getting closer to the West Coast Main Line because the noise of swooshing trains can't possibly be being caused by the tiny Chiltern units rattling over the bridge above.
The High Road really is high, climbing above natural ground level on a humped viaduct to cross multiple tracks at Wembley Central station. The street is often logjammed with traffic and buzzes with independent shops, most of which serve the local south Asian community. It's a mystery why KFC are advertising on the bus shelter when most of the food outlets on this stretch promote themselves as 'pure vegetarian'. Dosa Express, for example, attracts two queues of pancake-seekers spreading back onto the street, and offers punters a long row of help-yourself sauce bottles containing nothing as dull as ketchup and mayo. Wembley's flinty parish church is close by, so it makes sense that a stream once forded the road here even if we still haven't caught sight of it yet.
The Wembley Brook ran behind Ranelagh Road along what's now a feverish service road catering to jewellers, restaurants and sweet shops. It passed close by St Andrew's Presbyterian Church, which 25 years ago morphed into Wembley Central Mosque and has since been repeatedly extended. It then crossed the main road to emerge from hiding round the back of Ealing Road Library, which is one of the half dozen Brent council hasn't closed yet. It's since been screened by houses on Park Road and Lyon Park Avenue, but an alleyway between the two eventually intervenes and here the brook emerges from a moss-topped pipe into a concrete culvert beside an electricity substation. If you look behind the pile of discarded cider cans and energy drink bottles, there it finally is.
Now steel yourself for a crossing of one of London's edgiest railway footbridges. This launches forth beside the gate to the allotments, a graffitied climb up a zigzag of uncaged wooden steps. After the first flight it crosses the Bakerloo line but that's just the hors d'oeuvres, the main span is much higher and is needed to cross the West Coast Main Line which at this point is a staggering 15 tracks wide. Only a few of these are for speeding Pendolinos, the majority are for freight and for empty stock shuttling into Wembley Depot or its multiple sidings. Bakerloo line trains are stabled in the marginally smaller Stonebridge Depot alongside, and essentially what you're looking down on is a massive railway prairie, its northern boundary defined by a runt of a river.
At the foot of the precipitious staircase on the northern side a brief flat footbridge intrudes, and here the Wembley Brook can be seen for only the second time. Peculiarly it appears to dive under the footbridge as a trickle but emerges on the other side as a rush. This headscratching optical illusion is explained by the main flow arriving in a perpendicular pipe halfway underneath - what you saw initially was merely an insignificant tributary. What follows is as close as today's walk gets to a riverside promenade, except the path is rigorously fenced between playing fields and a tube depot and the brook is shielded in a deep concrete culvert, so the overall ambience is somewhat oppressive.
We've just one street to go, but that street is Tokyngton Avenue and the first house is number 328 so a fair distance remains. The brook runs behind the gardens of the houses on the 'evens' side, so you still won't be seeing it, but residents occasionally do because that's where the flooding happened back in the summer. This road is more recognisably Metroland, although at present disfigured by Cadent gas works which have necessitated digging over 50 coned-off holes in the pavement. Adjacent avenues are named after West Hertfordshire villages, and also an unlikely couple called Sylvia and Derek.
At the far end of Tokyngton Avenue is Stonebridge Park station, and also the point where the Wembley Brook flows into the River Brent. The last thing it does is pass underneath a demolition site which is about to erupt as a 24 storeybuilding, and whose construction works arethought to have contributed to August's inundation. The confluence alas is underground, and has been ever since the North Circular carved through because roads take precedence over rivers. But if you walk back to the bus turning circle and look through the wire fence the last gasp of the Wembley Brook is plainly seen, a splash of water tumbling over a weir into a deeper concrete groove.
For river-spotters it turns out the previous 2½ miles were a complete waste of time because the best bit was just outside the final tube station all along.
