In the Preface to The Crown of Wild Olive (1881), Ruskin writes of the despoliation of the River Wandle, which runs north from its source near Carshalton to the Thames. This is one of his set-piece environmentalist pieces, where he writes out of a combination of pain and nostalgia for the beauty and freshness lost now that it has become a site where "the human wretches of the place cast their street and house foulness; heaps of dust and slime, and broken shreds of old metal, and rags of putrid clothes; they having neither energy to cart it away, nor decency enough to dig it into the ground, thus shed into the stream, to diffuse what venom of it will float and melt, far away, in all places where God meant those waters to bring joy and health."
But look! It's been cleaned up, wonderfully! To be sure, it's much touted as an example of urban conservation/reclamation. I took the 93 bus down to Morden Hall Park - which is a National Trust park, and very lovely and fairly unkempt, with Wandle-fed wetlands; and then walked up the path alongside it ...
... until I got to Deen City Farm, where I made some new four-legged friends, and petted sheep, and admired some ferrets;
and then walked on to Merton Abbey. Would Ruskin have approved of the pub? Almost certainly not - but I'm sure William Morris would have done: it is situated in the old Liberty & Co. Block Shop, built around 1910 to house fabric printing blocks. The whole Merton Abbey Mills complex has been restored: there have been textile mills here since around 1600; over 1,000 workers were employed here in 1792; Morris used a mill here from 1881-88; and Liberty bought the site in 1904, and their fabrics were printed here until the 1970s. Then dereliction ... and now regeneration, with lots of little shops and restaurants.
The mill wheel still works - it now powers a pottery wheel -
But - oh, shades of Ruskin remain ...
And then back on the 200 bus - which stops just a little way down the road. Who knew? It was all a great discovery, so close by.
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