London Under (5 page)

On its journey to the Thames the Westbourne passes through a great iron pipe to be seen above the platforms of
Sloane Square tube station. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it ran through desolate fields and muddy swamps, but the territory was drained and covered before being transformed into
Belgravia. Eleven streets in Paddington are named after the river—among them
Westbourne Grove and
Westbourne Gardens—and Bourne Street in Chelsea follows its course. It is often possible to track the path of the river by contemplating the street names on the outer surface. The Westbourne is now known as the
Ranelagh sewer.

The Effra descends from
Norwood, South London, making its way through
Dulwich and
Herne Hill before entering
Brixton; it was 6 feet in depth here, and from bank to bank measured 12 feet.

It was wide enough to support large barges, and
King Canute is recorded to have sailed up
the Effra to
Brixton. The name itself derives from
yfrid
or torrent. At the beginning of its descent, in
Norwood, there still stands an old cottage named “The Boathouse.” On the Brixton Road small bridges connected the houses with the road itself; the grass verges on either side of the road still mark the banks of the river. The old riverscape survives. There is a Water Lane and a Coldharbour Lane and a Rush Common in Brixton. The Effra then ran
past what is now the south side of the Oval before leaving
Kennington and reaching
Vauxhall. A stage or platform was erected, during the mid-
Bronze Age, at the point where the river flows into the Thames; the place where rivers meet was deemed to be holy.

The Westbourne tumbling from the Serpentine in 1800
(illustration credit Ill.8)

The history of the Effra is representative. Its upper parts were relatively clear and clean; in the latter part of the eighteenth century it was a swiftly running and amiable stream guarded by laburnums, hawthorns and chestnut trees. As it approached the suburbs of the city, however, it gradually became fouled until it was little more than a sewer. It was eventually covered by brick and building. There is still a small open stretch in Dulwich, and the Effra overflows into areas of
Dulwich Park and
Dulwich Common. Although it is largely concealed it can still flood its neighbourhood at times of heavy rain; the adjacent area was last inundated in the summer of 2007. Further downstream it can only be entered through the sewers of the Effra Road in
Brixton, but there have been suggestions that parts may be opened up once more as a fitting addition to the London environment.

T
he Walbrook lies to the north, in the
City of London, where a narrow street is still devoted to its memory.
John Stow was already mourning its disappearance at the end of the sixteenth century. “This water-course,” he
wrote, “having divers bridges, was afterwards vaulted over with brick, and paved level with the streets and lanes where through it passed; and since that, also houses have been built thereon, so that the course of Walbrooke is now hidden underground, and thereby hardly known.”

We can revive that course in the imagination. It rose in the vicinity of Holywell Street in
Shoreditch, and indeed that sacred spring may be its source. There are signs of a Roman shrine at this spot. It then ran southwards towards the city on a course now marked out by Curtain Road and Blomfield Street; it passed across the wall just to the west of the church of All Hallows; an aqueduct was found here, buried
at a depth of 20 feet. An arch was found at its southern end lined with moss; at some time, therefore, the channel had been above the ground.

From this point the river flowed south-west until it reached Tokenhouse Yard, a little to the north-east of the Bank of England; it may have been enlarged by one or two small tributaries and, when it was still visible, at least four bridges were built across it. The church of St. Margaret Lothbury was also erected on vaults above the flowing water. The Walbrook then turned slightly to the south-west and coursed beneath the Bank, from where it ran beneath St. Mildred, Poultry. The church, now demolished, was rebuilt on an arch over the river in 1456. In 1739 the Walbrook was described as “a great and rapid stream … running under St. Mildred’s church steeple at a depth of sixteen feet.” The Bank and the
Mansion House are built upon the alluvial deposits from the river.

From St. Mildred, Poultry, the river ran south beside the Roman temple of Mithras that had been erected on the bank beside it. It then descended towards the Thames on a path 50 yards to the west of the present street named Walbrook, where it ran beside
St. Stephen upon Walbrook. It then flowed down to
Cloak Lane, named after
cloaca
or sewer. The attachment of churches to the river—or of the river to churches—is confirmed by the fact that at Cloak Lane there stood another church,
St. John the Baptist upon Walbrook.

It then ran down
Dowgate Hill towards the Thames with such force that in 1574 a young man of eighteen tried to leap across it but was carried away by “such violent swiftness as no man could rescue or stay him till he came against a cart wheel that stood in the watergate before which he was drowned and stark dead.” These are the violent waters that now lie 35 feet under the ground. Yet they do mark the world above the ground. A sharp turn in the river’s course became Elbow Lane, later changed to College Street. A dip along
Cannon Street, between
Budge Row and Walbrook, still signals the valley through which it passed.

So the Walbrook began at a sacred well and touched at least six holy places in the course of its journey. Another testimony to its character may be found in the discovery of skulls deposited in its waters at some
point in the first century. Forty-eight human skulls were found in the bed of the river, during excavations in the middle of the nineteenth century, and more recent investigation has shown that they were deliberately immersed without their lower jaws; the colour of the bones suggests that they had been exposed after death. It is very likely, therefore, that the Walbrook was the site for ritual activity. At the time of the immersion of the skulls it was some 12 feet in width but relatively shallow. It then fell into a decline, but was rescued for use in the eleventh and twelfth centuries when it was described as “a fair brook of sweet water”; the growth and intensification of London meant that, by the thirteenth century, it had become an open sewer full of dung and other refuse. By the sixteenth century it was largely covered. It had begun another phase of its long life.

Yet it still had its uses. It was an administrative boundary whereby according to Stow “the procedure, according to ancient usage of the City of London, is wont to be that eighteen men must be chosen from the east side of the Walebroke, and eighteen men from the west side” for various civic duties. Stow also reports that twelve wards lay on the west side of the river, and thirteen wards on the east. In its lower reaches, for example, it divided the wards of Dowgate and Vintry. Its etymology may be
wealas
, or stream of the Britons, encouraging speculation that the Walbrook separated the native Britons from the Roman administrators. But that must
remain in the realm of theory only. Other London rivers acted as the boundaries of wards or parishes, and their invisible presence still marks a difference in atmosphere between adjacent City neighbourhoods.

T
he Tyburn springs up in
Hampstead and journeys south through
Swiss Cottage and
Regent’s Park before it joins with a tributary and follows a meandering path into central London. The twists and turns of
Marylebone Lane accurately plot its course. The primeval force of water has created these shapes, cutting its way through clay that has now become brick. Old sketches delineate
the Tyburn in this part of its progress, flowing through fields with flowers and bushes beside its banks. If you look carefully enough you can still glimpse the hills and valleys of the original landscape, even though they are now covered by bricks and stone rather than trees and grass; they make up the contours of the modern city.

From Marylebone Lane the Tyburn follows a southward course across
Oxford Street, where it then turns south-east into
South Molton Lane;
Brook Street is named after it. It then pursues a circuitous course through the purlieus of
Mayfair before finally emerging into
Down Street where naturally enough it descends into
Piccadilly. Oxford Street was once known as the Tyburn Road, and
Park Lane as Tyburn Lane; the river of course also gave its name to the gallows set up by
Marble Arch. The name
Marylebone is derived from the church of St. Mary by the bourne or brook.

The Tyburn then crosses
Green Park, flows past Buckingham Palace, and runs through
Victoria and
Pimlico into the Thames by
Vauxhall Bridge. This was until recent times an area of marsh and swamp, so that the waters of the Tyburn in the vicinity were not much used. In
A Traveller’s Life
(1982) Eric Newby recounts how he came upon the stream in 1963 and recalls that “the bottom of the Tyburn was littered with some bizarre sorts of jetsam which included that morning a fine pair of unmounted antlers, a folio Bible in the Welsh language, half a pram and an old bicycle.” Rivers seem to attract unwanted and dilapidated things; consigned to the water, they can be made to disappear. The upper reaches of the Tyburn were far more wholesome, and in the thirteenth century a conduit was built to carry the water through wooden pipes from Marylebone Lane into the City. It was eventually discharged at the great conduit in
Cheapside.

Other lost rivers flow north of the Thames, among them
Stamford Brook that rises at
Wormwood Scrubs in East
Acton and falls into the Thames at Hammersmith. In its closing stages it becomes three streams, with myriad tributaries crossing and recrossing beneath the pavements unseen and unknown. Another river,
Counter’s Creek, finds its source somewhere beside
Kensal Green cemetery before passing through
White City,
Olympia and
Earls Court; it reaches its end at
Chelsea, close to
Lots Road Power Station, where in the 1950s it was noticed as “a stagnant ditch with a few disheartened marguerite daisies and thistles growing beside the green slime.” On its route from Kensal Green Cemetery it passes close to
Hammersmith Cemetery and
Brompton Cemetery and
Fulham Cemetery, perhaps out of atavistic attraction to the buried dead.
Hackney Brook, in the east of London, also forms the northern boundary of Abney Park Cemetery. The buried river known only as
the Black Ditch rose in
Whitechapel.

Many people are fascinated by the course of the subterranean rivers; they track them, sometimes with maps and sometimes with dowsing rods, seeking for the life under ground. They pursue them as far as they can through unpromising surroundings of council blocks or shopping malls or derelict plots of marshy land. On stretches of their route the outer world is in mourning for its lost companion. A verse from Job may act as a summary: “Even the waters forgotten of the foot: they are dried up, they are gone away from men.”

The river walkers pace their journey slowly, re-creating a sense of time that has been lost in the contemporary city—or perhaps time is altered by the presence of the buried river. It may follow the speed of the water beneath the ground. Time itself does not matter in the presence of the lost river.
The Tyburn, for example,
flowed in prehistory just as it flows now; it joins past and present in a perpetual embrace. We might be in Coleridge’s “Xanadu”

The Neckinger flows south of the Thames; it has its origin beneath the
Imperial War Museum, formerly
Bethlem Hospital for the insane, and then runs under
Elephant and Castle before following the
New Kent Road; it turns north-east into Prioress Street and Abbey Street, the site of
Bermondsey Abbey. The monks built a bridge across it here. It then runs northward to the Thames.
St. Saviour’s Dock marks the point where it issued into the greater river, where
Neckinger Wharf once stood. It is said that pirates were hanged here; the rope that killed them was known as “the devil’s neck cloth” or “neckinger.”

Its channels, in the lower reaches, formed one of the most notorious London districts. Jacob’s Island was immortalised by Dickens as the home of Bill Sikes in
Oliver Twist
, and was dubbed in the
Morning Chronicle
as the “Venice of Drains” and the “Capital of Cholera.” It was a place of filth, rot and garbage.
Jacob Street is the only memorial of that tainted past.
The Neckinger has
in any case always been a symptom of urban squalor. It was used by tanners and hatters in the course of their work so that it was said to resemble the colour of strong green tea.
Charles Kingsley visited the neighbourhood of the river in 1849 and exclaimed to his wife, “Oh God! What I saw! People having no water to drink—hundreds of them—but the water of the common sewer which stagnates …”