Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
A day in the life of the New River
Yesterday evening the police were at and in the New River at the Bridge where it crosses into the New River Village, adjacent to Tottenham Lane. I got into a conversation with walker along the new river today. He said his friend was fishing and had spotted an Uzi machine gun in the water. He wasn't sure if it was a toy or real so he lowered a magnet in... ...it was metal so he called the police. On the stretch to the back of Wightman Road today there was a fairly strong stench of sewage at the footbridge and a significant brown sludge building up at the weed trap. This sludge buildup was repeated along the river up to the exit on Hampden Road.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Liz on
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Magnet fishing is very popular I’ve discovered recently. It’s the water version of The Detectorists.
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Permalink Reply by Justin Guest on
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His crotch from the looks of it... Nice.
I ran by the NR up to Wightman this morning and it stank of sewage. Nice to think that is in our future drinking water...
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Permalink Reply by EMC2 on
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I contacted Thames (reference number 90718/637575)- they sent engineers yesterday. It seems that whatever the brown stinking sludge is, it isn't pollution.
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Permalink Reply by John D on
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I would think it's just mud from the bottom stirred up by the search for the Uzi. Was one found, by the way ?
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Definitely not mud, a stinking sludge floating on the top in 5 separate places... ...I didn't hang around to see but the police were taking it seriously and they've removed various cycles and other metal detritus dumped there.
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Permalink Reply by John Miles on
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The Moselle Brook is not an open sewer. It has had a specific problem for several years - namely, the mis-plumbing of the waste water systems at Alexandra Primary School (which included seventy-five toilets) into the surface water drains. This was finally fixed by the Council in February - Thames Water, the body responsible for the original problem, will meet the costs - as have most of the other misconnected domestic properties upstream from Wood Green. Attention must now shift to managing the silt in Lordship Rec where the Brook as reconstituted in 2012 has been forced to serve as a holding and filtration system for the accumulated sewage. Neither the smell nor the fungus is going to disappear overnight but the continuing problem is the result of the historical accumulation and not of an ongoing discharge. There is still a lot to be learned as the Brook in the Rec is remediated - the river there has been significantly damaged and will need time to heal. Meanwhile, the potential for cleaning Haringey's hidden rivers as an important element to daylighting them has recently been illustrated in spectacular fashion. St William's planning consent for the Clarendon site (the old Wood Green gasworks) requires them to test water quality in the Moselle annually at a casement at the bottom of the embankment on the east side of the railway. The 2018 test indicated serious problems with ammonia and ecoli but the three tests carried out this year in February and March found the Brook to meet a good standard under the European Bathing Water Directive (an inappropriate standard which the Council has foolishly allowed St William to adopt and impose). A fourth test then indicated a surge of polluting material while the results of further tests have not yet been released. We don't know yet what is going on upstream to cause these fluctuations. But this episode indicates the growing importance of a forensic approach and the letting-go of an urban myth which may have an emotional appeal but will not help progress real environmental transformation.
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Tris, it's entirely possible that there is a continuing discharge. But the mouth of the tunnel is designed as a silt trap which has never been systematically cleaned as the management plan intended. So the cloudy grey water may be what's coming out of the tunnel or it may the result of the flow disturbing what is already settled there. From my observations I'm not sure you can tell.
And there will no doubt be new foul water misconnections - the vast majority of them sinks and washing machines. But there will be a real difference of scale. The Council's drainage technician estimated that the school was discharging more than 90,000 litres a day during term-time - the equivalent of at least 150 domestic misconnections. Another way of getting a handle on this is to check downstream - in the Cemetery, for example, at the point where the culvert eventually joins Pymmes Brook on Tottenham Marshes - both could surely be cleaner but neither is ever significantly smelly. While you could sometimes smell ammonia near Mary Neuner Way (where the Brook was open beneath a grille near the gasholders) it was never enough to suggest that the main source of the problem in the Rec was not the school just down the road.
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Permalink Reply by tim p on
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As an aside, I thought I would apply for a permit to catch Signal Crayfish in this bit of the New River and had the application declined for a couple of reasons, which relate to other invasive creatures in the river. I was told that eating anything caught in the river would be ill advised in view of the many unpleasant substances which leach into the waterway and the pollution was getting worse..
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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That's interesting, Tim. I got a licence a few years back and there was no issue. As Jamie says below, the New River is still part of our water supply. So I imagine that its quality is constantly monitored. There have been pollution incidents, but I'm not aware of any constant source of pollution.
Paul at the Harringay Local Store has been catching and eating the crayfish for a few years.
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Hi, I was surprised as well. Many years ago we had a flat right next to the New River and the waterway seemed to be well stocked with fish. I mentioned this to the fellow who called me about the licence and he said that things had deteriorated over time. One of the reasons for refusal was the worry about some sort of invasive mussel which lives in the river along with about 3 other types of unwelcome crayfish. I was advised to avoid waterways within the M25 if I wanted untainted crayfish. A bit of a disappointment , I was looking forward to depleting the numbers of the invaders !!
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