Wandle Trail: walking and stitching

 To mark the one year anniversary of the start of my Wandle Wardrobe project, I spent a weekend trying out a mini-project; I walked the Wandle Trail from the Thames at Wandsworth back to the source in Carshalton on Saturday, and then from Wilderness Island (where the river divides) to the source in Croydon on Sunday, stitching a map of the river.

I pre-stitched the river itself to give me a guideline, packed up a box of embroidery threads, needles and scissors, and arrived at The Spit, where the Wandle flows into the Thames, at 10am on a beautiful sunny morning. I didn’t have a definite plan for what the finished work should look like, but I was aware that whatever I was stitching in each location needed to be quick and basic. I wouldn’t have time to make a detailed study of the beautiful old tree I was sitting under, but I could acknowledge its existence with a French knot in a deep forest green. The fancy new-build apartments with their Thames view were condensed down to a few straight stitches in several different threads, echoing the architect’s colour scheme.

Wandsworth is very much a manmade landscape - industrial sites (grey), the Ram Quarter (sandstone brick), the Southside Shopping Centre (concrete) and King George’s Park (sports fields, neatly manicured). Sitting down on a bench in the park to stitch, I felt like I was getting into a rhythm of how I wanted to represent certain structures, almost like creating a key for a map. 

Through Earlsfield, the walking route detours from the Wandle itself, down several streets of neat Victorian terraced houses and past a High Street of cafes and shops before returning to the river along an exuberantly overgrown bank, with tantalising glimpses of the allotments on the other side. I picked a terracotta and a putty-coloured thread to suggest the red-brick houses with their ornate plaster detailing. I used the pattern of stitches to illustrate the different types of plant growth I could see - neat squares for the allotments, an uneven, overlapping straight stitch for the creepers creating a blanket of green over the bank. 

Heading towards the more wild stretches of the Wandle, I started to concentrate more on the colours of the foliage I was passing, taking time at my next sewing stop to select a bluish-grey for Willow, a deep green for a tangle of ivy, yellow ochre for the dry grasses and seed heads that covered Wandle Meadow Nature Park. After walking the Wandle so many times focussing on spotting small things; either lost clothes or textile waste along the path, or specific birds or insects, it was a very different experience to focus on what the area looked like as a whole, getting a general impression of colour and texture, and then trying to express this impression through a few stitches. 

Stopping for lunch at Merton Abbey Mills, and in the Rose Garden at Morden Hall Park gave me the opportunity to stitch at two of my favourite locations along the trail (Merton Abbey Mills is the last physical reminder of the Wandle’s importance as a site of textile production, and who doesn’t love a pub lunch overlooking the river?) before I was on to the part of the trail I know best, through Ravensbury Park, Watermeads Nature Reserve and past Poulter Park. Recording my surroundings here was all about noticing the combinations of the natural and the man-made along the river - the houses secluded behind centuries-old plane trees, the industrial units shrouded from view by weeping willows. 

My penultimate stop was in the Hackbridge community garden, lovingly curated by Claudio Funari who collects fly-tipped furniture and bric-a-brac and transforms it into whimsical sculptures and seating for his colourfully-planted garden. It felt like an appropriate place to stitch my local area, a patchwork of new-build houses, older estates, deliberate green spaces and scraps of no-man’s land that have turned into wonderful wildlife habitats.

I couldn’t linger long as I was conscious of dusk fast approaching, so I walked the final familiar stretch of this branch of the Wandle to Carshalton, and sat near Carshalton Ponds, looking across to Honeywood Museum, where the river flows from a spring in the garden under the building itself - a very fitting location for my first Wandle Wardrobe exhibition and the perfect place to finish a long day of walking and stitching.

I resumed the walk on Sunday morning from Wilderness Island, and my first stitching stop was Beddington Park, where I was easily distracted by a number of good dogs playing in the river, and lovely people coming to chat to me about sewing. Walking on through a series of small parks and residential streets, I became quite particular about the thread colours I was using to denote each type of housing - victorian and edwardian terraces, a 1930s cul-de-sac, several different estates of modern housing with distinct building materials and textures. 

Stopping to stitch in Waddon Ponds I was almost overwhelmed with nature after my walk along suburban streets - Canada geese patrolled the footpath while seagulls stole food from one another and rats scurried in and out of the reeds. The blue-grey of the willows matched the rapidly greying sky, and I started to feel moisture in the air, so I hurried on to Wandle Park in Croydon.

The start of the Wandle in Croydon - a grated concrete drain covered in graffiti - seems like an inauspicious start to a river that has become such a haven for wildlife, but the water flows out into a flourishing reed bed, and the horse-chestnut trees were just starting to turn autumnal shades, sending squirrels scurrying to look for conkers. As I finished my final stitch, I felt the first drop of rain, and I packed up and scurried to the nearest tram stop before the weather really took a turn for the worse.

I made the stitched map into a top (with the back made from a different piece of Wandle fabric), and I’m pleased that I can look at it and identify individual areas - it might not work as a conventional map but it makes sense to me! I’m keen to try more walking and stitching, perhaps changing my focus to a different aspect of the Wandle Trail, or going on a different walk entirely. I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface of this way of stitching something immediate and unplanned, and I’d like to take it further, make it more expressive and emotional.