Colebrooke Row Gardens

These gardens trace the exact path of the New River, an ambitious engineering project from the seventeenth century that once carried fresh drinking water from Hertfordshire to London. For hundreds of years, this water flowed in an open channel right where you are standing. It was only enclosed in pipes and covered over in the middle of the nineteenth century, leaving behind this long, narrow strip of land that now serves as a quiet green ribbon through the neighborhood.