The recent history of the River Wandle is typical of the slow recovery of London’s waterways from a series of open sewers to the kind of sparkling streams that you may even be able to picnic beside without having to grimace every time the wind changes. This particular nine-mile stretch from Croydon down to the Thames at Wandsworth has always been too fast-flowing for boating, but for the emerging fabrics industry in the 19th century there was no better place to site mills and water wheels and textile magnets William Morris and Arthur Liberty dominated the riverbanks during this era. However, along with the production of printed oriental silks came chemicals and effluent and by around 1950 virtually all life had been extinguished from the river itself, with riverbank habitats suffering almost as much.

The balance swung back in nature’s favour after the winding down of manufacturing industry and the eventual closure of the mills, which finally gave the Wandle the chance to regenerate. Teams of local people worked tirelessly at weekends to haul rusting kitchen appliances out of the river and into skips, kicking off a monumental clean-up effort. This coincided with a helpful revamp of the area’s sewerage network and some invaluable assistance from the Environment Agency in repopulating the river with fish.

Today the river is a contrast of the picturesque and the still rather grim. At the southern end of the Northern Line, Morden Hall Park demonstrates that there’s more to Morden than a post-pubbing, temple-throbbing, eye-rubbing 1am surprise as the last tube reaches its terminus. 125 acres of beautiful meadow and woodland are bisected neatly by the river, with handy signposts to guide you through the marshes and the buzzing of passing trams on the recently opened Croydon Tramlink. Nearby, the redeveloped Merton Abbey Mills – once the site owned by Liberty’s – is now the home of a small theatre and a thriving market selling organic produce, books and pottery, with a functioning waterwheel as a reminder of its industrial past.

Further north the river snakes through industrial estates and derelict land, with the Wandle Trail footpath presenting us with the best of the river (kingfishers, grey herons) and also the worst (abandoned shopping trolleys, unimaginative graffiti). Behind the Wimbledon Greyhound Stadium and the clutch of DIY and carpet superstores is an open space that was once Wandle Valley Sewage Works but, thanks to a regeneration programme, has undergone the unlikely transformation into the Wandle Meadow Nature Park, having seen off a bid to site Wimbledon’s football stadium here. A trail of buzzing electric pylons provide an unlikely canopy for a nature trail but the local wildlife seems unperturbed.

If you continue along to the basin where the Wandle finally flows into the Thames you’ll find Young’s brewery, where beer has been produced since 1581 and where traditional methods are still used to produce a range of ales and to spread that distinctive but fairly unpleasant smell of hops throughout the Wandsworth one-way-system. Cheers!