The Built Environment: Between a Rock and a Hard Place
| Published: 27th August 2008 10:06 |
This is the first of a quarterly series about the built environment written by St Ippolyts resident Stuart Haden. Comments can be made at the bottom of the page.
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Northwest from Stevenage and northeast from Luton lies a town called Hitchin. A drizzle of a river called the Hiz runs through it. To the southsouthwest of Hitchin it rises out of the ground at Wellhead (1) and runs its picturesque way northnortheast (2), parallel to and east of Charlton Road through the hamlet of Charlton and past the pretty public house called The Windmill (3, 4). It swells under a huge brick arched bridge below Park Way (5) and into the grounds of the Priory where it glides as an elegant, wide river flowing through manicured lawns (6, 7).
Then the Hiz narrows before it leaves the Priory grounds (8) to little more than a culvert under Bridge Street. It trickles past the site where once stood the Tax Office, now to become Imperial Place, a gentrified bourgeois des res. though not to my desire. And a stream runs through it. Well, a rather dismal drain actually. Let's hope that the developers make the Hiz an attractive resource by providing appropriate aquatic planting and riverside seating and paving adjacent to it.
As a stream it appears between a car park at the back of the Sun Hotel and the row of houses known as Jill Grey Place and flows into the fountain pool - an oversized bird bath with a spurting plume, more like three holes in a mains than a beautiful fountain - to the east of St Mary's Church (9, 10). This is the spiritual, historical and geographical centre of Hitchin and deserves a beautiful fountain to celebrate the fact. And let's stop people from throwing white loaves into it. This only pollutes the water. The ducks do not need feeding. They get a far healthier diet by feeding from the river than white bread could ever offer.
The Hiz then converts to a culvert again under Portmill Lane (11) and runs between Sainsbury's car park and Lavender Fields. I haven't seen any lavender there yet, let alone fields, just boxes. Let's not throw supermarket trolleys in the Hiz, please.
Then the stream continues north and can be seen again on both sides of Starlings Bridge as a murky, messy meandering of effluent (12).
Flowing to the east of Grove Road and the west of Walsworth Common (13, 14) the Hiz then trickles northwards, gathering more flotsam and jetsam as it approaches the railway bridge (15). Shortly after dribbling under the bridge (16) the sad and sorrowful Hiz joins the River Purwell (17). It then flows northwest to eventually join the River Oughton in the village of Ickleford, where it becomes an attractive meandering river in the countryside again with willows, rushes and natural banks of grassland, free at last from the sordid entrails of urban ignominy.
Let's bring back some attractive riverside planting and create a clean and attractive river bed for this ignored water course. We really should acknowledge the role of the river in our lives as a clean and attractive body of water channelling the overflow away after storms and preventing flooding in the low-lying areas. After all, water is the bringer of life and life could not exist on this planet without it. You would think it was an unfortunate evil the way the planning authorities and the town have turned their backs on it and relegated it to the hidden parts of our settlement. From the glimpses you get of it creeping and slithering in the town, it is more like a poisonous snake slithering and hissing between boundary walls and fences, between crevices and under concrete, than a treasured amenity.
Why do we turn our backs on a potentially beautiful natural feature like this? We need water for life but we have relegated it to a sewer in parts and more or less a rubbish receptacle rather than a source of pleasure to walk along and admire. You wouldn't think we were twinned with Nuits Saint George, would you? Let's all write to North Hertfordshire District Council and Hitchin Town Centre Initiative asking for it to be reinstated as an attractive feature of the town. Why can't we have a riverside walk along the length of the River Hiz so that it becomes an attractive feature to the town rather than an apology for a ditch? After all, we are in the Age of Aquarius. Perhaps if this river was called Hers instead of Hiz more attention would be paid to this slippery siren, a carrier of life. Long live the Hiz!
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© Stuart Haden
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