Who Is Beverley Brook?

May 2, 2019 Comments Off

Tina Baxter is walking Section 6 of the Capital Ring on May 12th, here she looks at one of the feature of the walk – the Beverley Brook

Long in length and flow, also a character in fantasy fiction, not a person but a river of 14.3km metres rising at the top of a hill in a shady area at Cuddington Recreation Ground in Worcester Park, flows through Motspur Park, New Malden, Wimbledon Common, Richmond Park, Barnes, joining the Thames near Putney Bridge. Beverley Brook runs along the western edge of Wimbledon Common, the watercourse once formed the historic south west London boundary.

Over half the catchment area is found in urban/suburban areas, therefore the river has a tendency to fail in terms of biodiversity – 1800 metres flow through Wimbledon Common and this is where we will meet up with Beverley Brook before we cross the A3 into Richmond Park.

The name is derived from the former presence in the river of the European beaver (Castor fiber), a species extinct in Britain since the sixteenth century. The Middle English word for beaver was bever, the word for meadow was ley (or lei or various other spellings, still rarely used today as lea) and brook meant stream, as it does today. Beverley Brook was thus the Beaver-Meadow Stream.

For much of the twentieth century Beverley Brook was joined by poorly treated sewage from a sewage works in Green Lane, Worcester Park. Since sewage pipe redirection enabled the removal of the works and the introduction of improved treatment methods in 1998, the range of wildlife species in the river has improved.

In January this year an extensive programme of works has resumed to help restore the natural processes which will enable the river to ‘self-heal’ and become a fully functioning riverine ecosystem.

This will no doubt please the ‘Rivers of London’ as Beverley Brook features in the Ben Aaronovitch series of urban fantasy police procedural novel(s). She describes her kind thus: “Orisa’, said Beverley. ‘We’re Orisa. Not spirits, not local geniuses – Orisa*.“

So, we trust and hope Beverley Brook goes from strength to strength, join us and see this awakened river as one of the many interesting features of the Capital Ring Walk Section 6.

(* Any of various spirits in West African and especially Yoruban religious belief that can interact directly with human beings, often ritually invoked to influence human affairs or communicate messages from the spirit world.)