Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

There’s a lake, of course. But it’s notable, in this area of springs and rivulets, riverine speculations, that Capel Manor has chosen to market non-liquid water, fake water. This season’s idea is the virtual water garden (a drought fancy which only succeeded in predicting the continual rain that would raise London’s water table and float off anything that wasn’t firmly anchored). The concept of designers Angela Grant and Nigel Jackson was to stimulate those parts of the brain that ‘think water’ — without actually involving that precious resource in the exchange. Diuretic gardening: as sponsored by a ‘cooperative venture’ (Anglian Water, West Water, Yorkshire, Thames Water, Severn Trent). Nifty arrangements of broken slate and silver paper (gallery quality) make up the ‘water conscious’ garden (i.e. the garden that makes us conscious of the absence of water). A notion that is about as much use as handing a dehydrated marathon runner a photograph of a high-energy drink. Or playing a video loop of Ullswater-at-dawn on a Tunisian sand dune.

Princess Elizabeth, the future Virgin Queen, was brought from Hatfield House to Enfield Chase by her ‘keeper’, Sir Thomas Pope. She travelled, according to Nicholas Norden’s Progresses of Queen Elizabeth , with ‘a retinue of twelve ladies in white satin, on ambling palfreys, and twenty yeomen in green on horseback, that her grace might hunt the hart’.

The forest was a site of enchantment for a green belt monarchy; a theatre for role reversals, sexual travesty, debating schools. ‘The Queen came from Theobalds to Enfield House to dinner, and she had toils set up in the park to shoot at the buck.’ The court stood for wild nature, ecology, the preservation of animals so that they could be killed for sport. The forest, when it is enclosed and exploited, is royalist. Republican sentiment cuts down trees. The major deforestation took place under Cromwell and the Commonwealth. The diarist John Evelyn described the Chase as ‘a solitary desert with 3,000 deer’.

Royal physicians were rewarded with Enfield estates. Trent Park was given by George III to his favourite quack. Elizabeth I presented White Webbs House to her physician, Dr Hucks (or Huicks). Huicks — and the house he occupied — came under grave suspicion in the time of Elizabeth’s successor, James. Guido Vaux (aka Guy Fawkes) was a frequent visitor. Heretics (Catholics) were always shunted out to the fringes, rural and riverside suburbs, while nonconforming fundamentalists clung to the city, plain chapels and places of assembly. Recent aristocrats, royal servants, cash-rich bureaucrats bought into the green girdle, leaving the inner suburbs, Hackney and Hoxton, to argumentative mechanics and tradesmen.

Vaux took White Webbs House and furnished it at his own expense. Garnet the Jesuit stayed with him. The house was reported, by government agents, to be filled with ‘Popish books and relics’; a fiendish warren of ‘trapdoors and passages’. What is now White Webbs Lane was once known as Rome Lane. Terror and counter-terror lived in close proximity: the spymaster on one side of the fence and the heretical assassin on the other.

Walking through Enfield Chase, estate to estate, you notice small streams, channels cut for Sir Hugh Myddelton’s New River. Myddelton was a speculator, water was a resource. By the late Elizabethan period, medieval wells and conduits could not adequately supply the needs of the City. Edmund Colthurst looked to the Hertfordshire springs at Amwell and Chadwell, near Ware. The goldsmith Myddelton exploited Colthurst’s initiative. Born in Wales in 1560, he was MP for Denbigh and jeweller to James I. The dull silver of the River Lea was converted, by labour and promotion, to gold, a personal fortune. Adventurer shares were issued and Colthurst was appointed as overseer of the work, the digging and cutting; the New River would travel forty miles in making the twenty-mile journey to London. It hugged the 100-foot contour line, falling eighteen feet in the course of its travels. It opened at Christmas in 1613. Myddelton was knighted, made a baronet. He prospered. He died in 1631, leaving versions of his name scattered through the suburbs, tracings that can still be followed into town.

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.