There are several shepherdy streets in London, but I've plumped for the hilly one in Highgate. It's also the most upmarket, a broad sweep of affluence following a natural rise amid the capital's northern heights. I thought it must be an ancient road, given its strategic connection, but until the 1880s it was merely the footpath connecting Highgate to Crouch Hill. Property developers then perceived its potential - people pay a premium for a panorama - and threw up a few choice villas along its length. They've been infilling ever since. [1895 map][1951 map][2019 map]
Shepherds Hill starts on the Archway Road, near the top of the long slog up from Holloway, immediately alongside Highgate tube station. Its corner shop sells antiques, which says a lot. The initial climb crosses disused railway tunnels, after which the first building is Highgate Library, an Edwardian stronghold guaranteed more turrety than your local. A bench on the pavement offers cosy views of some allotments, and might once have offered sight of central London had not silver birch and conifers sprung up since. All credit to the allotmenteers for not giving up their plots for development, seemingly the last folk on Shepherds Hill who haven't.
The homes along the remaining half mile are intensely varied, but invariably upscale. Most of the original three-storey Victorian villas remain, with names like Highcroft, Belvedere and Holmwood, but subdivided into half a dozen flats. The northern side was initially left empty to allow those on the southern side a better view, so its homes are generally younger (and lower, as land the drops away faster over here). Postwar additions tend to be chunky blocks of flats with names like Highgate Heights or Altior Court, many appealingly modernist, the bonus of high ground being that balconies on opposite flanks boast a decent view. The most recent extras are sleek one-off townhouses, often built on the site of less profitable garages or gardens, squeezed in with house numbers like 16A. The entire street is quite the architectural showcase, if that's your thing.
But all infilling means top floor residents get to see the skyline, not you. The only enforced break comes at Shepherds Hill Gardens, a brief stretch of hillside left clear for recreational purposes. At pavement level another row of over-optimistic benches faces nothing but a wall of trees, and sightseers must wind down the slope through a stripe of woodland before finally reaching open grass. Queens Wood and Alexandra Palace are clearly seen across the valley, these being the upper reaches of the River Moselle, which is how Shepherds Hill came to be a hill in the first place. A few sheep grazing here wouldn't look entirely out of place, but any shepherds have long ago seen the light and fled.
Angel Road N18
Here's an exercise in how to utterly destroy a country lane. The next road I'm visiting once followed a quiet stream east from Edmonton past a couple of farms. It terminated beside the River Lea where a ferry, then a small bridge, carried very little traffic onwards to Chingford. What hasn't changed since the 19th century is how few bridging points there are across the Lea Valley. What has changed is how thronged they are, and Angel Road is now full-on overwhelming. [1896 map][1966 map][2019 map]
The Angel was an inn on the turnpike between London and Ware, built at the point where the road crossed the Pymmes Brook. The pub gave its name to the lane running alongside the river, originally Watery Lane, and the subsequent crossroads became Angel Corner. In 1924 the genesis of the North Circular Road transformed Angel Road into a busy orbital thoroughfare, and fifty years later further upgrades widened everything into full-on arterial... and erased the pub entirely. Also lost underground was the Pymmes Brook. If you stand on the footbridge above six lanes of dual carriageway and look east, that thin strip of trees on the left between the A406 and Aberdeen Road is the line of the buried river.
As the stream of traffic ploughs on, the new Angel Road rises up onto concrete pillars to leap the railway. Local traffic queues and twiddles underneath, alongside the final overshadowed terrace before the flood plain begins. A mountain of waste and scrap metal bulges out towards the roadside, barely held back by a wall of discoloured planks and boards. Looking down onto the platforms of what was once Angel Road station, every scrap of equipment and infrastructure has long been stripped away. Only when the space age suburb of Meridian Water arises alongside might this Ballardian landscape look anything less then grim.
Here come the superstores, retail sheds, warehouses units and inexplicable banqueting venues. It's also time to welcome Advent Way, the service road clinging to the northern side of the dual carriageway. Its super-seasonal name isn't deliberate - the southern service road is called Argon Way - but it is good to see Angel Road referenced on the streetsign. Watch out for traffic turning into the cash and carry, and especially for dustcarts heading for the optimistically named Edmonton EcoPark, a whopping great waste-to-energy incinerator. Somehow the elevated scar of Angel Road is still following the same country lane, and buried stream, as it was all those years ago.
The Lea Navigation comes as blessed visual relief, its waters high, its pylons higher, its swans seemingly content. This is as far as Watery Lane/Angel Road used to go, at a time when water and swans were the only constant. Nothing remains of Cooks Ferry where the river was crossed, nor indeed of this particular braid of the Lea which has been swept into other channels to either side. Instead its name lives on only as the split-level Cooks Ferry Roundabout, which gets my vote as the bleakest spot on an already bleak half hour trek. And that was Angel Road, a heavenly vision ruined.
