Nick Murray, The Bottleneck (2025)

The waterways of Brent may be managed by the council, but they are truly governed by a host of flora and fauna that watch over the water’s progression from its source to its meeting with the Thames. This game-poem sequence comes from a wider interactive text called The Bottleneck. Made up of 55 cards, it served as a prompt and a guide in the form of a game. Readers divine a shifting landscape and map forms from the structures discovered along the way. Hidden landmarks are glimpsed just out of view.

This is a walk, a reading, a game. It follows a waterway downstream from its source. The waterway in question may be the Wembley Brook, a tributary of the River Brent, where this piece was devised. Or it may be a river close to you, one you know from growing up, one that exists only in memory. Each section serves as an observation of the flora, fauna, and landmarks that dot its banks. 

The Bottleneck (2025) exists as part of a larger work called Return To Dreamphone (2019-ongoing). Over the span of about a year Nick Murray was Artist in Residence at Barham Park in Wembley where they continued an ongoing research project looking at the tributaries of the River Brent, the communities that live alongside them, and the rapidly shifting landscape that serves as the site of friction between rapid redevelopment and slower community-based care. Return To Dreamphone became a way to investigate community archiving and communal action, while centring gathering as a medium and non-hierarchical methods of history-making. 

Until only very recently I believed herons to be entirely solitary creatures. I think a childhood informed by Farthing Wood caused this, and nothing challenged it until I walked the circumference of the Brent Reservoir this year. 

Herons in fact congregate in large groups for breeding and migration. This year their breeding season started almost prophetically early, at the beginning of February. 

We’ve always been here. Though existing in myth more than history. The area that surrounds the Clitterhouse Brook, a tributary that feeds the Brent, feeds the reservoir, is mentioned in the Domesday Book as being inhabited all the way back in 1086, but not the Clay House. 

The name Clitterhouse, was Clutterhouse, was Clitherow – all meaning Clay House.

Stories say it had a moat back then too, and these do show up in the maps. Deep channels that still run round the modern farmhouse. 

It’s said the homestead was raided by Vikings, burned down.  We restored it as ‘a house of clay’. I say we, but I didn’t get here all that long ago. Through my mother, we only became part of the Clay House back in 1970, bringing new stories from the Caribbean to add to the local anthology. 

The Church of St John the Evangelist sits downhill from the Wembley Brook, a tributary that feeds the Brent, that feeds this reservoir. When the parish was redefined, parishioners from the Vale Farm, the source of the brook, would follow the waterway, a direct route to service and salvation. A hundred and twelve years later on the advent of the queen’s silver jubilee a glass and steel cathedral celebrating the horticultural excellence of the area was erected on top of the Brook, now covered for much of its span. The river serves as path and provider. The greenhouse is in ruins, but nearby you can still hear the brook flow underneath.