VIRTUAL London Heritages Conference

Abstract

Rising in Bromley, the River Quaggy passes through south-east London to join the meandering River Ravensbourne flowing into the Thames at Greenwich. Concrete channels and culverts fashion the Quaggy as one of Britain’s most heavily engineered rivers. Nevertheless, people work to restore the urban stream as a habitat for wildlife and a place for people. Two hemispheres away, at Greenwich’s almost exact antipodes, urban streams have been engineered out of legal existence. Numerous streams flowed into Te Whanganui-a-Tara (The Great Harbour of Tara) at Wellington; however, colonization left the culverted urban watercourses forgotten. Departing the East India Docks and Gravesend, the first wave of 1840s settlers initially valued the streams’ freshwater, but wanton pollution and the revenue to be generated by town acres, saw the streams disappear within a generation. This has been to an extent far exceeding the degradation of the Quaggy and the upper reaches of the Ravensbourne. Today, Māori and Pākehā researchers uncover and daylight knowledge of the now-lost streams. Forgotten names—Waimapihi, Waitangi, Kumutoto and Pipitea—re-enter the citizens’ consciousness. The catchments and their still-culverted watercourses are increasingly valued as heritage sites in a contested urban environment. New understanding afforded these streams provides insight into the early Māori world and ensuing colonial processes. Strategies to decolonise the engineered landscape and to increase ecological awareness weave together. New understanding of the environment reveals and dismantles the forces that maintained colonial power relations, and connects the citizenry to a global project to better connect with the natural world.