London is famous for one river and one river alone - the Thames. But there were once several other rivers crossing the clay basin of the lower Thames valley, all long since covered over by the capital's suburban sprawl, and the greatest of these was the Fleet. I've been busy tracking down the visible remains of this long-lost river and I'll be telling you all about my travels over the next month. It's a fascinating journey from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day and, even better, it's all downhill.
Blogs didn't tend to go on long psychogeographical journeys in those days, let alone in fine-grained detail. Published accounts of the River Fleet were also very thin on the ground in 2005, essentially Nicholas Barton's book The Lost Rivers of London and a few onlinemaps, so it felt like I was breaking fresh ground. Since then it seems mostLondonwebsitesandvideochannels have covered the Fleet at some point, inevitably with better camerawork, as lost rivers have shifted from niche content to quirky stalwarts.
In 2008 my month down the Fleet led to me being offered a proper book deal, which was nice, but it soon proved too onerous and ultimately Paul Talling delivered the new classic Lost Rivers volume instead. I researched them all anyway and blogged another dozen rivers the following year. But I've always had a soft spot for the Fleet, the only Thames tributary to carve a valley across very-central London, and long thought it would be good to go back and walk it again. So let's do just that, precisely 20 years later.
This blog's evolved a lot since 2005, the average post now topping 1000 words rather than a couple of paragraphs, so if I were to do the entire river in detail it would soon become a ridiculously cumbersome task. Also last time I posted 170 photos to Flickr and you don't need to see all that again, even if the backdrops have changed. So I've decided to leave my 2005 posts as the definitive end-to-end record and instead to sample the river at certain points on the way down. In particular I looked at the map of the Fleet I knocked up twenty years ago and thought "that'll do nicely".
My map included five locations - Hampstead Heath, Camden, King's Cross, Clerkenwell and Blackfriars - so I'm going to focus on those and skip plodding inbetween. I'm calling my abridged version FLEETING, and it all kicks off with a wander round the upper course of the river on Hampstead Heath.
Fleeting HAMPSTEAD HEATH
The Fleet starts at the highest point in inner London which is the top of Hampstead Heath. It starts here because the clay hills are capped with sandy soil - specifically the Bagshot Formation and the Claygate Member - thus groundwater emerges from springs at the boundary between permeable and less permeable strata. There are several sources, all of which join up to form a western branch and an eastern branch which remain separate for the best part of two miles before joining together in Kentish Town. The highest point is just below Whitestone Pond, where a raindrop landing to the south will end up in the Westbourne, to the north in the Brent and to the east in the Fleet. And here we find the first of a dozen ponds, each originally a reservoir dammed to provide drinking water for folk further down the valley.
This is the Vale of Health, which sounds delightful but was originally a patch of boggy marshland called Hatchett's Bottom, rebranded when the reservoir was built in 1777. A throwback cluster of well-to-do villas nestles on the upper flank, the first of several places on this river walk that IYNBYRS (if you've never been you really should). Normally you'd see anglers dipping rods around the perimeter, but all fishing on Hampstead Heath was temporarily suspended last month due to a suspected outbreak of koi herpesvirus, a notifiable carp killer. The animal you're more likely see in the water is a happily-splashing canine, perhaps chasing a stick, this being the only Hampstead pond designated an official dog swimming area. And in the corner is a low brick-cased grille, currently dry above the water level but when overtopping occurs its sends the fledgling River Fleet on its tumbling way.
Everyone assumes the Fleet is a lost river but if you find the right bit, which is this woodland at the top of Hampstead Heath, you can gambol alongside the stream in an almost-natural state. Just below the Vale of Health Pond the slopes are steep and impenetrable with vegetation, also somewhat boggy, but veer off the main path a little further down and rivulets plainly trace a dip in the earthy banks. Despite all the rain we've had there's no flow at present, merely occasional damp mud, but the Fleet was more plainlyvisible in August 2005 in a shade of dirty chalybeate brown. A few minutes into the woods a separate tributary from the Viaduct Pond joins the fray (that's the pond you can cross on a high viaduct, once used for transporting wagonloads of bricks, which was dammed in 1846) and the muddy channel becomes a tad wider.
Since I was last here a 5m-high earth dam has been added amid the woodland, creating a 'catchpit' to fend off worst-case flooding scenarios, although you'd barely realise because the low hump's already been disguised by vegetation. Beyond this a wetland scrape briefly intrudes and then the Fleet makes its final appearance as a lazy linear stream because from here on it's all ponds and culverts. First up is the Mixed Bathing Pond, a deep facility for competent swimmers only, with a jaunty non-secretive vibe. It's currently 19°C in the water and £4.80 a dip. The next pair are Hampstead No.2 Pond and Hampstead No.1 Pond, thankfully neither named after unwelcome floating content, by which point we've reached the tip of the Heath near the shops at South End Green and it's time for the Fleet to vanish permanently underground. So let's switch tributaries.
My favourite Fleet source can be found just below the Henry Moore sculpture on the upper lawn at Kenwood House. A notch of woodland dips down from the main terrace, within which a dry path eventually merges into a boggy brown squelch. This is one of the springs to be found at the sand/clay borderline on the Heath, and perhaps the easiest to access. From here a shallow furrow meanders across the picnic lawn - a brilliant feature once you've worked out what it is - before trickling into a mighty pond at the foot of the bank. It's this large because a separate tributary feeds in from a peaty sphagnum bog in the West Meadow. The adjacent Thousand Pound Pond was also constructed in the late 18th century and features a sham bridge, a low bright arc designed to look decorative and convincing from the front but from round the back you can see it's just a propped up slice of balustraded planking.
From the boardwalk at the next crossing point I finally caught sight of a shallow watery channel through a screen of oak and holly, but generally anything that might count as a stream on this branch of the Fleet is securely fenced off. Instead what's coming up is a chain of six more ponds linked by culverted flow, each originally a reservoir and now used for a variety of different purposes. First comes the Stock Pond, one of the smallest and most natural-looking, which was hard to see twenty years ago but they've since removed 24 trees to make way for a strengthened dam. A survey for the City of London in 2013 confirmed that the Stock Pond was only capable of withstanding a 1-in 5-year flood, a consequence of its low capacity and relatively large catchment, whereas by contrast Vale of Health Pond could withstand a 1-in-1000.
50 years ago this month Hampstead Heath was hit by a 1-in-20000 year rainfall event, the infamous thunderstorm of 14th August 1975. 170mm of rain were recorded over a 24 hour period - that's almost seven inches - most of it between 5.30pm and 9pm. It's still the largest daily rainfall total ever recorded in London, indeed anywhere in southeast England, and because it hit an urban area caused considerable damage to property. According to news reports the storm dropped hailstones "the size of marbles", flooded roads, crushed cars, closed several stations, delayed the Proms and also led to the death of a pensioner, although that was from overexertion while moving furniture in a basement flat in Brondesbury. The flooding was extremely localised with 'only' 4 inches at Highgate, 1 inch at Highbury and barely a splash in Hackney, and we only have accurate measurements because the Hampstead Scientific Society happened to have a weather station in precisely the right location. It seems highly unlikely that such extreme rainfall would ever hit the same spot again, but the City of London have spent millions raising andstrengthening several dams on the upper Fleet just in case.
Next down the Highgate branch is the Ladies Bathing Pond, the most secluded of all. The sign outside still says Women Only, as it did 20 years ago, but now adds that "those who identify as women are welcome" and that a public consultation on future admission policy is being prepared. With three bathing ponds hereabouts - a Women's, a Men's and the aforementioned Mixed - let's hope the interfering gender-obsessives don't get their blinkered way. The Men's Bathing Pond is more open to view, especially from its newly raised dam, with betrunked swimmers visible on the jetties and bobbing heads looping in the admittedly distant waters. Inbetween come the Bird Sanctuary Pond and the Model Boating Pond, the latter one of the largest on the Heath if sadly devoid of young boys whipping toy yachts these days. The causeway to its central island is being removed this month to boost its credentials as a nature reserve.
Concluding the sequence of reservoirs is Highgate No. 1 Pond. It's neither the prettiest nor the most accessible, but it does have the greatest capacity of any of the Ponds, which is good news for residents downstream facing potential inundation. A large overspill culvert lurks on its southern edge, considerably larger than the micro-drain at the Vale of Health, marking the last time the Highgate branch will be seen above ground. It heads off unseen towards Swain's Lane and Dartmouth Park, while half a mile to the west the Hampstead branch is disappearing underground too. What lies between the two is the Parliament Hill, the famous viewpoint, and those admiring central London from its summit generally fail to realise that the River Fleet is what cuts away the land on either side. Look towards St Paul's and you can see the cranes in Blackfriars where those waters finally reach the Thames, but it'll be several miles before my account finally reaches journey's end.
Hampstead Chain: Vale of Health (105m AOD) / Viaduct (90m) → Mixed Bathing (76m) → Hampstead No 2 (75m) → Hampstead No 1 (71m) Highgate Chain: Stock (82m) → Ladies Bathing (77m) → Bird Sanctuary (73m) → Model Boating (72m) → Men's Bathing (68m) → Highgate No 1 (64m)
Fleeting CAMDEN TOWN
The two branches of the river Fleet that rise on Hampstead Heath merge two miles lower down in the vicinity of Kentish Town. For my second visit to the river I'm skipping down to the confluence and attempting to follow its path onward through Camden Town. That means I won't be returning to Fleet Road in Hampstead to check if Fleet News still sells confectionery and bus passes (it does), nor going back to Tufnell Park where the river briefly pokes above ground to cross the Suffragette line in a rusty pipe (though I have fresh photographic evidence that it does). Instead let's revisit a backstreet off Kentish Town Road whose name nods back to a time before Victorian house builders covered the lot.
This is Anglers Lane, once a haunt of freshwater fisherfolk, indeed 20 years ago the back of this Nando's featured a painted quote from an old Edwardian man who remembered catching fish and bathing here in his youth. That's long painted over and the sylvan river is also long buried, tamed into an arched culvert because it had the occasional habit of flooding on a grand scale. This specific area was residentialised in the 1850s, hence the streets have Crimean names like Inkerman Road, Alma Street and Cathcart Street, the latter built directly on the line of the former stream. Around the same time Europe's largest false-teeth factory was built on Anglers Lane, the premises of Claudius Ash & Co, but they departed in 1965 and the long redbrick building is now flats. Contours make it clear that the Fleet passed by at the foot of the lane via a slight dip on Prince of Wales Road.
The name Kentish Town comes from an old name for the upper Fleet - the Ken Ditch, so called because it rose in Ken Wood at the top of Hampstead Heath. Minus ten points if you live locally and always assumed it was something to do with the county of Kent. Originally the heart of Kentish Town was lower down, nearer Camden, but better-off residents migrated up the valley as the Fleet there started to silt up and become more fetid. One regular visitor was Lord Nelson whose Uncle William lived in a house with a garden backing onto the river - cue hilarious anecdotes about the admiral coming to Kentish Town 'to keep an eye on the Fleet'. Nextdoor was a true local landmark, The Castle Inn, which is thought to have existed beside the stream since medieval times. The tavern gets 20 mentions in Gillian Tindall's seminal local history book The Fields Beneath, but longevity didn't save it and the Victorian incarnation was demolished in 2013.
Quinns is another corner pub, this time located in the sweet spot where the two main tributaries of the Fleet once merged. Its shell is a garish yellow, seemingly not repainted since I last blogged about the river in 2005, also the upper windows are in peeling disarray and half the gold lettering has fallen off. Everything about the physical building says 'closed' but everything online still says 'open', so I guess dishevelment is the disguise you need when you're the roughest pub in NW1. It's easier to research historic maps now than it was 20 years ago so I believe the actual confluence was marginally west, outside the pencil-fronted Hawley Primary School, but I'm surprised nobody's yet produced a truly accurate map tracing the Fleet across the urban landscape.
We've reached Camden Gardens, a triangular greenspace at the northern tip of the local one-way system. The Fleet may once have followed the longest edge past a string of Georgian townhouses, although in my research I've only seen one historic document suggesting this. The gardens would have been more pleasant before a railway viaduct was constructed across the middle in 1849, and then again in 1850 because engineers had underestimated the effect of the river and the original span dramatically collapsed. Underneath at present is a dubious tented village occupied by lively roughsleepers in a state of undress, so I decided not to venture too far into the gardens. To the east is Camden Road station and to the west runs Water Lane, the origin of whose name is self-evident, indeed there are reports than in 1826 the Fleet in flood was 65ft across at this point.
The Regent's Canal reached Camden in 1816 and engineers faced a decision regarding how to cross the Fleet. They eventually decided that the two should share a course for a few hundred yards while weaving to the east, but with the Fleet relegated to a pipe underneath. A contemporary map shows the river meeting the canal by Kentish Town Road Lock, remaining hidden round the back of what's now the Sainsbury's superstore and re-emerging beyond the bridge at Camden Road. Follow the towpath today and you first pass Nicholas Grimshaw's arresting space-age wall of flats erected in 1989, then on the outside of the next bend the more recent and monumentally-unremarkable vernacular wedge of Regent Canalside. The end result, however you look at it, is that no local resident or tourist passing through would give the Fleet a second thought.
There is however one place where the river still makes itself known and that's at the far end of Lyme Street. Stucco townhouses and smart terraces replaced the meandering Fleet here in the mid 18th century, ten of them now Grade II listed. Keep going and you reach the Prince Albert, a glaze-fronted tavern opened in 1843 with a similarly period interior. The pub is now hidden behind an enormous tree the size of a mushroom cloud, which may be why it describes itself as Camden's Best-Kept Secret on social media, although the racket coming from the screened-off beer garden suggests several people are well aware. But perhaps fewer realise that if you stand out front you can hear the sound of the culverted Fleet plain as day through a grating in the street. Look for the circular drain cover, keeping watch for bikes because it's recently been absorbed into a cycle lane junction, and if the light's right you might even see the rushing water as well as hear it. I certainly did.
To follow the Fleet out of Camden cross Royal College Street and head for St Pancras Way. This is now a one-way ratrun that shadows the Regents Canal but in fact it follows the alignment of a very old packhorse track alongside the Fleet. To the right of the road the land still dips noticeably, most noticeably by the student accommodation at College Grove, while a Parcelforce depot fills much of what remains a marginal valley bottom. Elsewhere a massive regenerative blast has taken hold, from the hulking St Pancras Campus to a stripe of canalside apartments and a big hole where a life sciences cluster called Tribeca is taking shape. The developmental whirlwind only ceases at the gloomy walls of St Pancras Hospital, formerly St Pancras workhouse, and I'd best stop there before the Fleet trickles into St Pancras proper.
Fleeting KING'S CROSS
For my third return to the Fleet I'm heading to King's Cross, and also to St Pancras because the two stations are intrinsically linked to the river that once flowed through them. The river started to be buried hereabouts around 200 years ago as London edged outwards, transforming a healthy stream to a polluted irritant best hidden away. We thus won't be seeing it along this stretch, nor alas hearing it, but there are still signs of its passing in the lie of the land and the sweep of the buildings.
St Pancras Old Church is one of the oldest Christian sites in the UK - some say 4th century, some say 7th - located on a hump of land beside a temperamental river. The current building is however nowhere near original, so what we see today is an early Victorian reinvention of a church that was mostly Tudor, retaining a few Norman recesses and a medieval altar stone. Stepping inside it looks more Georgian than anything, all white walls and monuments, and also quite high church with racks of votive candles and the low whiff of incense. If you've never been before then be aware that Father Owen keeps the doors unlocked most days to encourage visitors, so there's no need to wait until Open House unless you're keen to see a more crowded interior with the addition of guided tours and a table of homemade chutneys.
Outside is an information board featuring a famous illustration of the churchyard circa 1827, a depiction of bathers in a sylvan stream in front of a church with a completely different tower. The adjacent cemetery proved troublesome in the 1860s when the Midland Railway came to open their station at St Pancras. Countless graves were disturbed and the future poet Thomas Hardy oversaw the reinterment works, including the creation of an evocative ring ofgravestones around an ash tree. Alas the 'Hardy Tree' fell in2022 (weakened by a parasitic fungus and a storm), and its chopped-up trunk now lies nearby for general sitting-on, perhaps while perusing the remaining ring of stones and intermingled roots.
In 1700 the land to the south of the church was occupied by medicinal springs called Saint Pancras Wells. Claims that the waters could cure everything from leprosy to piles brought invalids and daytrippers to the spa in their thousands, taking advantage of two pump rooms, a large dining hall and several tree-lined avenues for promenading. The site now lies roughly where Eurostar's international platforms terminate, the evolution of St Pancras station having repeatedly condemned the Fleet to a new course. A cast iron conduit diverted it in the 1860s, then in the 2000s a doglegged realignment was required so that the foundations of the new International station could be strengthened and Thameslink's tunnels could weave through. Even the crown of the sewer had to be lowered to make room for the subway linking St Pancras to King's Cross, so if you've ever walked that you've come pretty close to unseen waters.
King's Cross station arrived a decade earlier on the site of an old smallpox hospital. Lewis Cubitt's grand terminus was in part constrained by the Fleet Sewer, which is why it faces the Euston Road at an angle rather than straight on. A more obvious indicator is his Grand Northern Hotel, now a five storey stack of boutique rooms, the curve of which precisely follows the arc of the former river's passing. I did try to get a good photo of the hotel's lofty sweep but from the north direct sunlight intervened and from the south I ended up with a vibrant sponsored foreground courtesy of a pink lemonade giveaway. When I blogged the Fleet in 2005 all this was tall cranes and temporary walkways, the forecourt still a drab tacked-on concourse with its departures board and Boots the chemist, but today the constant stream of passengers flows more smoothly than the river.
The area around King's Cross was originally known as Battlebridge. The 'bridge' in question spanned the Fleet at the northern end of Gray's Inn Road and was originally known as Bradeford Bridge, mostly likely named after the broad ford that previously crossed the river here. The mainline station might also have been named Battlebridge had its construction not coincided with the brief tenure of a statue to George IV in the centre of the road junction alongside. The ugly cruciform monument was much disliked so was taken down after just 10 years, but it was during this brief window that the Great Northern Railway christened their new London terminus - King's Cross - and the name has stuck ever since. Battlebridge meanwhile is lost beneath the gyratory somewhere outside the Scala, its single brick arch incorporated into the sewer when the river was enclosed.
From here the Fleet follows the Metropolitan line, or rather the Metropolitan Railway followed the Fleet Sewer. The world's first underground railway was a grand plan to link several North London rail termini, and here between Kings Cross and Farringdon two parallel tunnels were dug, one carrying a railway and the other burying a river. In 1862 half a mile of track downstream was flooded to a depth of ten feet when the new sewer catastrophically burst its retaining wall, delaying the opening of the Metropolitan Railway by six months. Here in the King's Cross hinterland the line instead burrows in open cutting - relatively cheap to construct and better for letting the steam escape. Stand in St Chad's Place, Wicklow Street or any of several parallel roads and you can still trace the gaps in the terraces carved out by the railway below. A camera waved over the parapet may even catch a passing train.
The Metropolitan Railway also wiped away the last traces of the elegant spa at Bagnigge Wells. This developed as a lure for gentlefolk in 1758 after two mineral springs were discovered in the grounds of Bagnigge House, formerly Nell Gwynne’s summer residence. Visitors paid threepence to take the waters from the pump or retired to the Long Room to drink their fill at eightpence per gallon, passing time by attending concerts, playing skittles or strolling around the ornamental gardens on the banks of the river. But Bagnigge eventually gained a reputation for 'loose women and boys whose morals are depraved' so in 1813 the proprietors went bankrupt and the once genteel spa was replaced by a tavern. All that remains today is a white stone plaque topped by a carved head, formerly from Bagnigge House and now set into the wall of number 63 King's Cross Road... but come soon before it disappears behind a rampant buddleia.
Fleeting CLERKENWELL
Back to London's premier lost river, now on the descent from King's Cross to Clerkenwell along the approximate line of the Camden/Islington boundary. It's no coincidence that the Fleet once marked the divide, although previously the boroughs were St Pancras on one side and Finsbury on the other. There are very clear contours in the area, the roads dipping down from Bloomsbury and more steeply on the opposite flank, although the precise level of the valley has been disguised somewhat by subsequent development. In 1768 there are accounts of the river flooding four feet deep round here, carrying off three cattle and several pigs, whereas what's being swept away today is the old streetscape. Rows of fine Georgian terraces survive at the top of Pakenham Street, but look down Phoenix Place and pretty much nothing of what I saw 20 years ago remains.
The site to the left was once Coldbath Fields, source of yet another medicinal spring, and in 1794 a conveniently large open space on the edge of town on which to build a massive prison. The delightfully-named Middlesex House of Correction was originally used to house those waiting to be tried by magistrates, but later gained a fearsome reputation as a strict men-only institution with an enforced regime of silence. The governor was eventually dismissed following an inquiry and the prison closed in 1885. Enter the Post Office who purchased the site as somewhere to sort their parcels, a growing trade, creating what would soon be one of the largest sorting offices in the world. The upper section once used for parking hundreds of red vans was sold off a few years ago, inevitably for housing, as was the scrubby car park across the road. The resultant estate is called Postmark and has crammed in 681 luxury flats starting at £990,000, the sole enticing feature being the row of pillar-box-shaped vents along the central raised garden.
A more attractive local presence is the Postal Museum which opened at the top of Phoenix Place in 2017. Step inside for a first class display that clearly delivers, also a free-to-enter cafe (which may help explain why none of the commercial units at Postmark are yet occupied). A separate building houses the entrance to Mail Rail, once the GPO's subterranean delivery service and now a ride-on circuit where you take the place of the sacks. Its builders 100 years ago had to deal with all kinds of underground obstructions including the River Fleet, which is why heavy mid-tunnel floodgates are a feature on your way round. Royal Mail still sort parcels here in the remaining building at the lower end of the site which has been decorated with the names of postal towns between the windows. I smirked when I spotted a UPS van parked outside the delivery bay, and oh the irony as a brown-clad youth hopped out to deliver a package to a resident living on the site of the postmen's former car park.
The dip of the land is particularly pronounced along Mount Pleasant, a concave road that predates the Post Office's arrival. The street pattern was once very dense here alongside the fetid waters of the Fleet, a labyrinth of slums including Fleet Row, Red Lyon Yard and Wine Street. The Fleet Sewer replaced the earliest culverts in the 1860s following the line of Phoenix Place and Warner Street, then a decade later the Fleet Relief Sewer added extra capacity under parallel roads. A bigger intrusion was the construction of Rosebery Avenue in the late 1880s, necessitating a viaduct to be built across the valley to speed up through traffic and requiring considerable local demolition. However walking underneath along Warner Street still feels like stepping back in time, especially the echoing vaults of Clerkenwell Motors and the bleakly open staircase that connects the bustle up top to the cycle-friendly street down below.
As we continue south, the moment when this was the edge of built-up London gets ever earlier. For Ray Street this was around 1700, although at the time it went by the far less salubrious name of Hockley-in-the-Hole. Here the contours of the Fleet encouraged the creation of an infamous resort for the working classes, a natural amphitheatre at the foot of Herbal Hill where the City's low-life gathered to participate in violent sports. It was known as the Bear Garden, a place to watch and cheer on fighting creatures now the South Bank had been cleaned up. A flyer from 1710 reveals that at one event two market dogs were set upon a bull, a mad ass was baited, then another bull was turned loose with fireworks attached to is hide and two cats tied to his tail. The programme of events often included bearfights, cockfights, swordfights and bare knuckle bust-ups, although the worst of the behaviour shifted to Spitalfields in 1756 and the worst you'll find today is a pub. Which is closed.
The Coach was previously The Coach and Horses, a basic joint oft frequented by Guardian journalists when they were based just round the corner. Their HQ is now flats and the London base for LinkedIn, while The Coach reopened as a gastropub in 2018 (think grilled rabbit and onglet steak) and is currently on its second refit. Of far more interest on this safari is the drain cover out front, which 20 years ago was in the middle of the street but is now safely embraced by an extended pavement. This is another fabled location where the Fleet can be heard flowing through the pipework beneath the street, the sound particularly clear at present even though there's been barely any rain of late, so if you've never experienced the rush of a lost river this is the prime location to visit.
And so we hit Farringdon Road, which is reached up a brief slope because the land round here's been substantially reconstructed since a stream once ran downhill. Farringdon Road is one of the great engineering projects of the 19th century, simultaneously creating a major thoroughfare, shielding the first underground railway and burying a river. It's breadth here is striking, opening out into an arched chasm that splits the cityscape as trains emerge from tunnels on the approach to Farringdon station. One nominal remnant from the old days is the span of Vine Street Bridge, no longer open to through traffic but a great place to drop your Lime bike. Of greater relevance is the Clerk's Well, a source of water for the medieval Priory of St Mary and which ultimately gave Clerkenwell its name. It was rediscovered during building works in 1924 and can now be seen through the window of a lowly sales office whose tiny lobby is occasionally opened by Islington Museum, hence I was chuffed to get a closer look in June.
While the Fleet Sewer follows Farringdon Road the historic interest remains on the east side of the railway. Turnmill Street is ancient enough to be named after watermills on the medieval Fleet, and by Tudor times was filthy enough to have become one of London's most prominent red light districts. It's been scrubbed up a lot since, including the purest of officeblocks on the corner where Turnmills nightclub once stood. As for Cowcross Street this was once the route for cattle fording the Fleet - here the Turnmill Brook - on their way to market at Smithfield. It's now a pedestrianised road which divides the two entrances to Farringdon station, with the tube on one side, rail on the other and chuggers in the middle. Crossrail's engineers had to take account of a sewer following a tributary of the Fleet which crosses beneath the southeast corner of the ticket hall, meaning extra care had to be taken when digging out the shaft.
It's just beyond the station that the Fleet officially enters the City of London and Farringdon Road becomes Farringdon Street. Which'd be a good place to pause, I think, before concluding this Fleeting series below.
Fleeting BLACKFRIARS
Let's finish off my five-part walk down the River Fleet by following the long-buried section through the City of London. It's barely a ten minute walk from Smithfield to the Thames but packed with interest, so much so that 20 years ago I spent a week writing about it, but this'll be a more fleeting precis. Relevant landmarks along the way include Holborn Viaduct, Ludgate Circus and Fleet Street, obviously, plus several structures that weren't here back in August 2005. And OK there's no sight or sound of the river this time but the signs are everywhere.
The Fleet enters the City beside Smithfield Market. The area was originally known as Smooth Field, a grassy bank leading down to the river, hence the ideal place for a cattle market. Of the subsequent buildings the closest is the General Market Building, long vacated and currently being reimagined as a home for the London Museum which is due to open next year. The Victorian facade isn't quite ready so is screened at present by a long white hoarding featuring 33 pigeons each decorated by an artist from a different London borough. Here we read "These hoardings are a creative expression of our new brand identity", also that the museum will be "a shared place where all of London's stories cross and collide", and I fear that someone at the museum may have paid their strategic narrativeagency too much money.
The standout structure hereabouts is Holborn Viaduct, or the Holborn Valley Viaduct as it was known when the foundation stone was laid in 1867. The valley of the Fleet is particularly pronounced here, so for centuries cross-town traffic had been forced to dip down Holborn Hill and climb Snow Hill on the opposite side. The new cast iron span was over 400m long, supported on granite piers, and cost over £2m in conjunction with the associated road improvements. It still looks gorgeous with its red and gold gloss exterior and dragon-supported City arms, plus four statues on the upper parapets representing Commerce, Agriculture, Fine Arts and Science. Look underneath to find arched vaults, one currently occupied by a wine merchant, or head to one of the four corner pavilions to find staircases connecting top and bottom. The two southside stairwells are gloriously evocative whereas the northside pair are modern rebuilds with less character, lifts and in one case a huge tiled mural depicting the viaduct's construction.
Holborn Bridge, now Holborn Viaduct, once marked the Fleet's tidal limit. North of here the river was originally known as the Holebourne, literally the stream (bourne) in the hollow (hole), in case you'd never realised how the name Holborn was derived. South of here the river lived out its final days as a canal, Sir Christopher Wren having transformed the filthy channel into what he hoped would be a majestic 50-ft-wide waterway after the Great Fire. Things didn't quite turn out as hoped, the water soon silted up again and under private ownership the canal fell into disrepair. In 1733 the section between Holborn and Ludgate was arched over and topped off with a long line of market stalls - the Fleet Market - which was eventually cleared away in 1829 after becoming a dilapidated impediment to traffic.
Although Farringdon Street is a Victorian creation this valley section feels increasinglymodern as large-scale office developments inexorably replace the buildings to either side. Goldman Sachs massive HQ occupies a huge block as far down as Stonecutter Street while a new 13-storey curtain of student accommodation is rising opposite adjacent to Holborn Viaduct. Its hoardings are emblazoned with Fleet-related ephemera and artefacts, quite impressively so, including pewter tankards, Turnmills flyers and fascinating double page spreads from old books. One consequence of construction is that Turnaround Lane has been wiped from the map, a medieval alley so called because if you drove a cart down it to the river you'd have to come back up again. Of the handful of parallel alleys that survive, all have been relegated to become dead-end service roads for adjacent office blocks, each brimming with nipped-out smokers.
The notorious Fleet Prison was once slotted between Bear Lane and Seacoal Lane, originally located here just outside the City walls after the Norman Conquest. Its 19th century replacement was the Congregational Memorial Hall, birthplace of the modern Labour Party, whose memorial plaques can be seen embedded in the wall of the latest office block to grace the site. Back in 2005 this was a huge hole in the ground and now it's the Fleet Place Estate, a split-level generic mass of workspace offering KERB streetfood and "best-in-class end-of-commute facilities". Close by is Ludgate Circus, originally the site of Fleet Bridge, the key river crossing on the medieval road between Westminster and the City. To one side was Ludgate Hill and on the other side Fleet Bridge Street, its name subsequently shortened to Fleet Street. The bridge was essentially buried at the same time as the river in the 1760s, and the current concavecrossroads appeared 100 years later.
The final 300m to the Thames follows New Bridge Street, which was named after the original Blackfriars Bridge and not its Victorian replacement. This was the second section of the Fleet to be arched over, covering Wren's former wharfage, a hollow subsequently used to funnel both the Fleet Sewer and the Fleet Relief Sewer towards the Thames. It's a fairly lacklustre road today, its bland nature exemplified by the presence of Fleet Street Quarter's Green Skills And Innovation Hub halfway down. It would have looked considerably more magnificent 500 years ago when Henry VIII built a royal palace here, and far less appealing a century later after that had evolved into the Bridewell house of correction, lowest of the Fleet's three notorious lockups. The Bridewell Theatre round the back is a much more recent addition inside a converted Victorian swimming pool.
On the opposite bank was Blackfriars Priory, which despite being dissolved 500 years ago still manages to lend its name to much of the modern locality. As well as the bridge there's also the railway station, which now spans the Thames, and the tall thin Black Friar pub whose exterior mosaic features two friars dangling a fish by the mouth of the Fleet. The expansive road junction here was originally called Chatham Place and is now a major feeder of bicycles as well as passing cars. Until 2017 it was possible to descend to the walkway beneath Blackfriars Bridge, peer down and see the outfall where the brick-chambered Fleet Sewer overspilled into the Thames. The best view was from a staircase that no longer exists, this because the Tideway super sewer took control and has been refashioning the waterfront for several years longer than originally intended. 110m of fresh foreshore is scheduled for completion next month, and already looks nearly ready, while the former outfall has been encased behind a slabby protrusion that'll feed any brown sludge into the mega-tunnel 48m below.
And that's my fleeting return to the Fleet completed, a five-part skim down the river from fledgling peaty trickle at Kenwood to brand new post-Bazalgette megapipe at Blackfriars. Its path is rarely visible but can often be easily traced if you know where to look, and hides a fascinating fluvial history. What's more it's changed far more than I expected since I last blogged the Fleet 20 years ago, so who's to say I won't come back in 2045 and give it another go?
NDReviewing the Fleet
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Reviewing the Fleet
