London: The Biography

It has always been said that enchantment is bought in the burying alive of great waters, yet the purchase may be a perilous one. The “lost rivers” can still create stench and dampness. The Fleet River, at times of storm, can still reach beyond its artificial containment and flood basements along its route; at its source in Hampstead it was the expediter of agues and fevers. The valleys of these rivers, many now converted into roads or train-lines, were subject to fog as well as damp. According to the author of The Lost Rivers of London, Nicholas Barton, rheumatism “was unusually common both sides of Counter’s Creek from Shepherd’s Bush to Chelsea,” while the London “ague” of the seventeenth century has been suggestively associated with streams and rivulets now sunk beneath the earth.

The lost rivers may provoke allergies also. One recent investigation of patients in London hospitals revealed that “38 out of the 49 allergic patients (i.e. 77.5 per cent) lived within 180 yards of a known watercourse” while among asthmatics “17 out of the 19 [were] living within 180 yards of a watercourse,” in most cases the “buried tributaries of the Thames.” The reasons for this strange correlation are still unknown, although those who understand the various powers of London places may have their own theories. But the enchantment, white or black, does not end there. A study published in 1960, The Geography of London Ghosts by G.W. Lambert, has found that approximately 75 per cent of these disturbances occurred “in houses significantly close to watercourses,” where perhaps the spirit as well as the sound of buried waters may be asserting themselves.

We may take the fate of the Fleet River as characteristic. As befits an ancient river, it has gone by many names. It was christened the Fleet in its lower reaches, from the Anglo-Saxon term for a tidal inlet; in its upper reaches it was known as the Holebourne, and in its middle section as Turnmill Brook. It has in a sense been the guardian of London, marking the boundary between Westminster and the City from ancient times. It has always been used as part of London’s defences; during the Civil War, for example, great earthworks were built on either bank. Of all the city’s lost rivers, therefore, it is the one which is best documented and most often depicted. It has shared in the defilement of London, as a repository of its discarded and forgotten objects. An anchor was discovered as far north as Kentish Town, which may provide some indication of its width and depth at this far point, but more generally it has been the last resting place for the more local and immediate items of urban existence-keys, daggers, coins, medals, pins, brooches and the detritus of such riverine industries as tanning. It needed continually to be cleansed of its mud and general filth, so the scouring of the river took place every twenty or thirty years. Those who wished to rail against London, and all its squalor, inevitably chose the Fleet River as their example; it epitomised the way in which the city fouled water once sweet and clear. It carried the savour of each street, readily identifiable; it was full of dung and dead things. It was London in essence. “The greatest good that I ever heard it did was to the undertaker,” Ned Ward wrote, “who is bound to acknowledge he has found better fishing in that muddy stream than ever he did in clear water.” The Fleet, like the Thames its father, was a river of death.

It has always been an unlucky river. Once it moved through the regions of Kentish Town and St. Pancras, melancholy still with the touch of the water; then at Battle Bridge it entered “the pleasure grounds of Giant Despair,” according to William Hone, where “trees stand as if not made to vegetate; clipped hedges seem willing to decline, and weeds struggle weakly upon unlimited borders.” It then moved around Clerkenwell Hill and touched the stones of the Coldbath Prison; passed Saffron Hill, whose fragrant name concealed some of the worst rookeries in London; and entered the path of Turnmill Street, the vicious reputation of which has already been chronicled. Then it flowed down into Chick Lane, later known as West Street, which was for many centuries the haven of felons and murderers; the river here became the dumping ground of bodies slain or robbed when dead drunk. Once more it became the river of death before flowing in front of the noxious Fleet Prison.