But any attempt to walk the length of Myddelton’s New River is a forlorn exercise. Water: known but not seen. Dishonoured water. The muddy trickle of streams that no longer pay their way, edging in embarrassment through the dog-exercising pastures of Enfield Chase. Relics of Pymmes Brook, Salmons Brook, Turkey Brook.
The New River Head on the Penton Mound in Islington has been developed by Stirling Ackroyd. A spindly fountain playing in a shallow pool. A wink at those who have chased the brook from Hertfordshire. St James Homes promote: ‘a dynamic living environment’. There are still parties of intent walkers, greyheads in anoraks and trainers, straining to catch the guide’s patter above the noise of the traffic. Elderly street signs, white on blue, with their brighter replacements: Myddelton Square, Amwell Street, Chadwell Street, Sadler’s Wells, Merlin’s Cave. Just as the reprieved statues and arches of the old city migrate to the green belt, so the names of the source places, the springs, are planted in a townscape: pastoral aspirations. Lloyds Dairy in Amwell Street: a black and white chequerboard display for bottles of contour-banded yellow milk, heavy with cream. Simulations. Heritage nudges with a true heritage: Welsh cows, draymen and dairymen from the west. Thick-necked bottles are clotted to give the lie to Cockney rumours of Welshers (from Cardiganshire) watering their milk.
The Metropolitan Water Board (privatised, defunct) have left a sepulchral, marbled wreath behind them, a text nobody bothers to read: ERECTED BY THE METROPOLITAN WATER BOARD ON THE SITE OF THE NEW RIVER HEAD. On the corner of River Street is a peeling signboard: The Village Buttery. Cream, milk, butter, pseudo-apothecaries: the village within the city, the small green oasis of Wilmington Square Gardens.
Following the New River, north, up Colebrooke Row, brings you to the cottage Charles Lamb shared with his sister Mary. Restored, white-painted, plants on window sill. The cottage dates from 1760. The Lambs lived here from 1823 to 1826. The New River, already tired, drudges past the front of the house. My children, when they were told the story of Mary Lamb murdering her mother, preferred to walk on the other side of the road. What is curious is how the Lambs, taking up a rustic retreat in Enfield, followed the river out. Water remains, in my fancy, a messenger substance, linking reservoir with source; a dream hinge between city heat and Arcadian potentiality.
Lamb has been heritaged as one of the treasures of Enfield. Contemporary reports were ambiguous. ‘Charles Lamb quite delighted with his retirement. He does not fear the solitude of the situation, though he seems to be almost without an acquaintance, and dreads rather than seeks visitors.’
With Mary Lamb’s health deteriorating, brother and sister shifted from house to house, lodging to lodging: The Poplars in Chase Side to Bay Cottage, Church Street, Edmonton. Lamb was buried in All Saints Church.
Enfield lacked culture. Enfield was not Islington. Food was dull. The chief bookseller, Lamb informed Mary Shelley, ‘deals in prose versions of the melodrama, with plates of ghosts and murders and other subterranean passages’. The fraudulent antiquarianism in which the Chase specialised: the plaster devils of Capel Manor.
Back on my New River trail, I tried to photograph the heritage plaque on Colebrooke Cottages. Two women brushed past. ‘He’s sharp as a pin. Got all his marbles, only he can’t talk.’
Myddelton is memorialised by a statue, facing south, at the sharp end of the little park that divides Upper Street and Essex Road, Islington. The water speculator on his high plinth is a carry-on conquistador, back turned to the lowlife scramblings of park bench, bushes. Palm trees surround the base. Myddelton has hacked his way through a Douanier Rousseau jungle, climbed a small hill to stare over unconquered lands; his eyeline will carry him to Cleopatra’s Needle and the Thames. Stone putti with pockmarked skins kneel in the shrubs, flanking a dish of rusty water. Myddelton’s right hand keeps his cloak clear of the muck; while his left hand clutches a map or charter.
Sir Hugh Myddelton, fortune secure, built himself a house and laid out gardens in the neighbourhood of Forty Hall, near Enfield. The New River flowed through the grounds. Forty Hall was later acquired by H.C. Bowles, described by James Thorne in his Handbook to the Environs of London as ‘the fortunate possessor of shares in the New River company’. Into these suburban reservations was gathered the cultural ballast of London: a portion of ballustrading from Christopher Wren’s church of St Benet (demolished in 1867), a Portland stone Grecian temple from the Duke of Chandos’s house in Edgware, twelve stone balls from the front of Burlington House, Piccadilly. Scattered throughout the Chase were jigsaw mementoes of a lost London.
Bowles, on a site adjoining Forty Hall, once known as Bowling Green, built Myddelton House. Here all the elements that defined Enfield Chase came together: accumulated wealth, green politics, architectural salvage from the City, royal courtiers working their connections, paradise gardens. Myddelton House, glorying in the name of the original water promoter, is presently the headquarters of the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority. On those days, and at those hours, when the grounds are open to the public, you can creep up to the high windows of this comfortable property and see computers, coffee machines, filing cabinets, the steel-grey trappings of bureaucracy. But, unless you have business with LVRPA, you can’t go in. You must shuffle across the gravel to wonder at the heritage of the notable botanist E. A. Bowles.
Philippa Gregory and her sorority got it right. The Bowles story and the story of the garden do play like an historical romance. It is a romance. At the Capel Manor garden centre, massed copies of Joan Hessayon’s Capel Bells are offered for sale. An Edwardian lady with parasol drifting across lawns. Beneath the heavy relief lettering of the author’s name, a tapestry of fuchsias, the eponymous ‘Capel Bells’. Prosperity on a stalk: ‘They look like petals, I grant you, but those of us in the know refer to them as sepals… Blooms increase on a mathematical progression. Damned clever little things.’
Capel Bells is a grand read, pre-optioned television: Cookson heroine battling to establish herself in society, knockabout subplot of Cockney chancers, horticulture, discovery of unknown father, sail off into sunset with the inheritor of this magical country house. It’s like finger-licking your way through a seed catalogue with racy bits, headset history on a guided tour of the grounds.
The gravity of Hessayon’s novel pulls towards the notion of Arcadia as an achievable condition, the contrary of urban struggle. ‘Charlotte had boarded the train at Liverpool Street station in the sooty air of the City, deafened by the cries of unhappy children, the whine of beggars, the scolding of irritated mothers and the bellows of station staff. Fifteen miles north of this cacophony, the outer reaches of Enfield were a paradise of leafy trees and empty roads. She had not seen a single motor car.’