Mapping the Past

When we lived there Mottingham was a forgotten finger of Kent poking into the boundaries of London, now several local government reorganisations later, it and much more of Kent has been absorbed into Greater London.  A dairy farm abutted the length of our garden with fields sloping down to the little river Quaggy and the Sidcup Road (A20) just beyond.
Most of the water courses in that part of Kent had been confined to tunnels and concrete culverts during the first half of the 20th century, especially just after WWII when the big housing estates were built for those displaced during the Blitz.
The Quaggy emerged from a tunnel at the bottom of our lane, King John Walk, and then ran free between banks burrowed by water voles and covered with bushes where I once saw a kingfisher flashing past.  We waded the stream catching sticklebacks in our jam jars and bravely searching out the rivers destination.  After a mile or so the river crossed under the A20 and was constrained by concrete again.  We fearlessly pushed on through Lee towards Lewisham where the culvert was roofed over with concrete again and iron gratings fitted to exclude inquisitive little boys.

I have since discovered that our part of the stream is in fact know as the "Little Quaggy" (No.7 on the sketch above) and had we been able (and brave enough) to explore further we would have emerged into the Thames opposite the Isle of Dogs.

An Internet posting of 2015 describes my little bit of the Quaggy at that time as:
"... close to how the stream would probably have looked like prior to suburbanisation – a pasture covered with buttercups. It is not some semi-rural idyll though, just a narrow strip of green used by a riding school, with heavy goods vehicles from the Channel Ports thundering past, 20 metres away, towards inner London and the Blackwall Tunnel – very close by there are high average nitrogen dioxide pollution and occasional high levels of particulates – it is not a place to linger."
However it's not all bad news.  Through the heroic efforts of local conservationists a flood relief scheme for Lewisham that would have encased even more of the Quaggy in concrete was successfully replaced in 2003 by an enlightened proposal that actually opened up the river again.  The river was restored to a more natural condition in Sutcliffe Park and wet lands created to absorb any flood waters.  The scheme has been a major success creating new leisure amenities and wildlife habitat, as well as preventing flooding, all at a lower cost that the original plan.
For a more complete history of the Quaggy see In Search of the Little Quaggy and The Quaggy and its Tributaries.  I'm especially grateful to Ken White for his sketch map of the watercourses which has recreated so vividly in my mind the landscape of my childhood 65 years ago, the little hills and valleys that we traversed on foot or bicycle, the fields where we played, the streams where we fished and the ponds where we searched for frog spawn.