The Royal Parks is to fence off around 200 metres of Beverley Brook in Richmond Park, shutting walkers and dogs out of the water while the banks are rebuilt.
Richmond Council signed the scheme off on 29 July. Some 405 metres of chestnut post and rail fencing, backed with wire mesh, will be set 10 metres back from the top of the bank. A gate hung on chains will close the brook at the downstream end, and the fence ties into an existing enclosure at a footbridge upstream. The mesh is specified to keep dogs out. The gate is for dogs and deer, which churn the banks bare where they climb in and out.
Inside that enclosure, the river is being made smaller. The designers describe the channel as significantly overwide and deep, so 185 metres of the left bank will be cut back and the spoil pushed into the water to form 195 metres of low banks faced with brushwood. That squeezes the flow into a channel three metres across, a width chosen to match restoration already done further downstream.
Around 30 whole trees, root plates attached, will be wedged into the bank pointing downstream so the current hits them, digs out pools and drops gravel.
Three shallow ditches, 235 metres of them, will be cut across the parkland to catch water that currently disappears into Victorian clay drains. The drains will be deliberately broken open and plugged so the water reaches the floodplain instead of vanishing.
Then the plan is to stop and let the river take over. The design promotes what the documents call a “self-sustaining and dynamic river system”, and the maintenance instructions tell the park not to tidy up after it: where wood shifts, it should generally be left where it lands.
That is not the same as putting the brook back the way it was. The Beverley Brook was straightened and widened over the past century and a half, and an earlier phase of this restoration dug 20 tonnes of concrete out of the bed. The straight cut stays. What changes is the water inside it, which is nudged into swinging from side to side as though it had bends, an effect the designers call pseudo-sinuosity. A river that wanders holds more water, and more life, than one that cannot.
What visitors will see
A 60-metre raised walkway is being built along the fence line so people can look into the enclosure.
First, six trees come down to supply the timber, two mature and four oaks in poor condition, with more woodland thinning across the park. A compound 30 metres square goes into the Robin Hood Gate car park. Machinery will be walked through the park with traffic marshals alongside. A footpath gets a ditch across it, piped underneath and relaid level.
What is left afterwards is bare bank sprayed with acid grassland seed, matting pinned over the spoil, brushwood packed between chestnut posts and roughly 30 dead trees lying in the water. A further 280 metres of temporary fencing goes up on top of the rest, purely so the seed can establish without deer and dogs on it.
None of it required planning permission. The council issued a certificate confirming the works are permitted development, on the grounds that The Royal Parks counts as a drainage body. No public consultation was carried out, and the officer’s report records why: a lawfulness certificate is a determination of law, so consulting anyone was not considered necessary.
Flood risk?
One thing the plan has not had is a flood model. FLOW’s design assumptions say so plainly: the scheme has not undergone hydraulic modelling. Instead the channel is designed to achieve no net loss of capacity through the reprofiling of the bank.
Richmond Council’s own record of the site lists nine designations naming flood or groundwater risk, among them functional floodplain, which is land the water is meant to spread onto when the brook rises. The works put material into it: 195 metres of spoil banks, around 30 trees and a gravel mound.
The council did not weigh any of that, and was not entitled to. A lawfulness certificate answers a question of law rather than one of merit, which is the same reason nobody was consulted. Flood risk belongs to the Environment Agency, through a separate permit, and the project’s own documents describe that permit as still to be submitted.
The documents give no start date, no duration, and no date for taking the fence down, only that its retention should be reviewed once the site is established. It follows a similar wetland scheme at Vine Road on the Barnes side of the brook, and a summer that sent volunteers out on a hunt for Richmond Park’s lost rivers.
The stretch is about a tenth of the two kilometres the brook runs through the park, at the top of the last few miles before it reaches Barnes Common, Putney Lower Common and the Thames at Barn Elms.
