THE UNLOST RIVERS OF LONDON Burnt Oak Brook Mill Hill → Burnt Oak (2 miles)
[Burnt Oak Brook → Silk Stream → Brent → Thames]
London's bountiful supply of unlost rivers continues to provide opportunities for waterside walking if you know where to look. This one flows not far from Edgware and is yet another tributary of the Silk Stream, which is yet another tributary of the Brent. What's unusual about this one is that it spends most of its upper course in pipes and most of its lower course out in the open, which does at least mean proper running water later on. Along the way I can promise you suburban furrows, fancy pastries, municipal daylighting and a direct hit on two stations, one of which is celebrating its centenary later this month.
The Burnt Oak Brook starts on the southern flank of Holcombe Hill, one of the lumpier bits of Mill Hill. Precisely where it starts is a good question, there being at least two feeder streams on the upper slopes, but the first sighting on the ground is a pond in a park called The Mill Field. As recreational spaces go it's quite precipitous so nowhere you'd play football, but the benches along the top path have a decent view across the M1 corridor. The pond is concealed by brambly woodland lower down and isn't currently full enough to spill out along the initial channel, but a thick coil of blue plastic pipe suggests drainage is sometimes a significant issue.
Below the lower field the channel becomes an artificial drain which diverts around the edge of the Chalet Estate, then skirts the grounds of St Joseph's College, a former Roman Catholic seminary. The trainee priests moved out in 2008 and their Gothic pile was used for filming early series of Call The Midwife - the original Nonnatus House! - but it's all luxury retirement flats now. The Middlesex topographer Nick Papadimitriou has christened this particular rill the Mill Stream and has a couple of fine photos of a narrow trickle awash with spring celandine on his website, but it's not so nice in October. Alas I checked on a 150 year-old map and this fork's not on it, only a much straighter stream starting near The Old Forge and running through the fields parallel to Lawrence Street, and this has all the classic hidden river tropes.
At the bottom of The Reddings is a widening stripe of grass called Lawrence Green with an utterly distinct furrow running down the middle. Sit on Joseph Swallow's bench and you can see it really clearly. It's dry these days but a drain cover at the far end, by the dogbins, strongly hints at the continuing passage of underground water.
The next street down is Sunnyfield, a hairpin crescent with an extremely pronounced dip where the Burnt Oak Brook once barrelled through. According to Nick a 14-inch culvert runs between the houses in the bottom's deepest point, so a resident told him, but I only met a Waitrose delivery driver and the postie so was unable to confirm this. By the next street the dented contours remain evident but are less defined, which seems somewhat ironic given this is Uphill Drive but it was actually named after Uphill Farm which once cultivated these brooky slopes.
The first proper view of the Burnt Oak Brook comes at Simmonds Mead Open Space as it spills gently out of a small pipe into an ornamental garden. It then meanders artificially through a wiggly narrow channel and is generally step-across-able, but four teensy footbridges have been provided at strategic locations to make recreational strolling more pleasant. Only one of these currently needs urgent repair. We have the Mill Hill Preservation Society to thank for elevating all this to Village Green status in 2007, and I suspect the special trees commemorating Dennis, Brian, Eileen and Leonard are their doing as well. Then it's all too swiftly back into a pipe because the A1 needs to power through.
We've reached Mill Hill Broadway, the main shopping street, where the Burnt Oak Brook once hugged the southern side. Here today we find a trio of churches, only one of which has been rebuilt to look more like a community centre, and a lot of shops catering for refreshment and grooming needs. Quite the worst name of any business is Joice, where "where joy is a choice", the kind of cafe where if you want hash browns with your cooked breakfast it'll knock the price over £16. From various maps it seems likely that the brook's culvert passes beneath Pizza Express, a frozen yoghurt joint ("where indulgence meets wellness") and the inevitable Gail's bakery before bearing off towards the railway.
Mill Hill Broadway ranks highly in the list of London's fugliest stations, its entrance having been demoted underneath the M1 motorway in the 1960s, and the bus station beneath the carriageways is a proper gloomy turnaround. I stood at the top of the steps and tried to picture the Burnt Oak Brook trickling through, long before the concrete thudded down, but the guy from synagogue security was eyeing me suspiciously so I thought it best to move on. Langley Park, on the other side of the railway, is the last suburban street where the absent stream's indentation can still be seen. But if you make your way across Lyndhurst Park to the dip in the far corner it finally emerges properly from a large pipe, now one metre across, and stays above ground as it wends its way across Burnt Oak.
This is The Meads, a fine example of how interwar planners cleverly incorporated an urban river into a council estate. Two lines of concatenated houses face off across a broad meadow, regularly mown, with the stream in a seemingly natural channel to one side. The banks are deep with greenery, and alas a sprinkling of himalayan balsam, while crabapples bob downstream until trapped by a stray branch or pebbled ripple. Occasionally a road intervenes, then it's back to brambly overhang, reddening shrubbery and even a zigzag meander at one point which I think is a leftover from an old farm pond. Shame about the discarded microwave.
For a couple of hundred metres the Burnt Oak Brook becomes the sole preserve of the Abbotts Road Allotments, a lovingly tended enclave watched over by various flags and two fake flamingos. And then it bursts out into Watling Park, the chief recreational space hereabouts, where it tracks the western edge in an attractive if not overly visible manner. There are thus £1½m-worth of plans to re-align the river, strip back surrounding vegetation, add meanders and bring it further into the park, thereby reducing the flood risk to neighbouring properties.
The largest intervention is the creation of a central wetland area along the alignment of an existing pipe, this currently at the "freshly-dug pools overseen by pristine lifebelts" stage. The fairly grim pergola above the southern outfall is also going, along with umpteen other changes you can read about in detail here, and all should all be finished by the spring.
After that last hurrah the Burnt Oak Brook plunges into one last pipe to duck beneath the lowest point of the shopping parade on Watling Avenue. If you stand at the southeastern tip of the platforms at Burnt Oak tube station (opened 27th October 1924), the Burnt Oak Brook is sluicing under your feet. To see it emerge head behind the shops to Market Lane, where the car repair gangs work, and follow the alleyway at the end to a little-trodden footbridge - voila! The stream's final ten metres pass quietly between trees and a graffitied fence before entering its fluvial parent, the Silk Stream, for a livelier journey down to the Welsh Harp Reservoir.
