Turkey Brook has been transformed following a restoration that did one vital thing similar projects often overlook – it reconnected the waterway with its hyporheic zone
As two great white egrets land at the meandering Turkey Brook in north London, it’s hard to believe this thriving river was once mistaken for a ditch.
Few visitors know that London has 640km of waterways and there's a serious movement taking place to restore these "blue corridors" to their former glory.
Though most visitors to London think only of the River Thames, the city is a myriad of waterways. Old maps show a skein of rivers and brooks that provided "blue corridors" traversing the city for centuries, providing both sources of food and recreation. But as London boomed, these waterways faded from consciousness – encased by walls, turned into polluted backwaters or simply covered over to run unseen beneath busy streets.
Thames21 has begun restoring part of the river Cray, a chalk stream, at Foots Cray Meadows near Sidcup, south London. We aim to restore 800m of the river between now and March 2021 by adding large wood into the channel.
Chalk streams are a rare habitat globally; only approximately 200 exist worldwide. Eighty-five per cent of these are in southern England. The river Cray is a healthy urban chalk stream along part of its stretches, but it suffers the same pressures as any other urban river: plastic and other pollution, artificial modification and water abstraction for human use.
London is the most vulnerable city in western Europe to climate-related impacts including floods and drought, according to a recent report from the Green Party on the London Assembly. Hundreds of schools, hospitals and tube stations in London are at risk of flooding, according to the report.
