London’s Fleet River, runs, not surprisingly, under Fleet
Street, and actually goes quite a way.
What is interesting of course, is that it is completely underground,
with quite a history and checkered past.
I recall being gobsmacked when I found out about the Fleet and had a
look on-line – pretty damned fabulous.
The stuff below here is from a site called
London's Lost Rivers. There's a good slide show of photos and it the Fleet River, and also heaps of other info on other rivers (obviously) with plenty of good shots right through the site.
London's Lost Rivers - The River Fleet
Outfall under Blackfriars Bridge
The
source of the Fleet were two springs at Hampstead Heath separated by
Parliament Hill– one on the western side near Hampstead and one on the
eastern side in the grounds of Kenwood House. Each spring feeds a line
of ponds on either side (the Hampstead Ponds to the west and Highgate
Ponds to the east). They were built as resevoirs in the 1700’s. These
sources joined together in Camden Town and flow under Kings Cross. From
here the Fleet flows down the valley of Farringdon Street, finally
falling into the Thames beneath Blackfriars Bridge.
The River
Fleet is the most well known of London’s subterranean rivers and is
known to be used in Roman times as a major river with a tide mill in its
estuary. The word "Fleet" is derived from an old Anglo-Saxon word flēot
meaning "estuary, bay or inlet". The Fleet once was a broad tidal basin
several hundred feet wide. The higher reaches of the rivers flow were
known as the Holbourne (or Oldbourne), from the word Holburna (from
where the name Holborn was derived from) meaning hollow stream,
referring to its deep valley. A large iron bridge called The Holborn
Viaduct ,opened by Queen Victoria in 1840, spans what is known as the
Fleet Valley.
King's Cross was originally named Battle Bridge,
referring to an ancient bridge over The Fleet where Queen Boudicca’s
army is said to have fought an important battle against the Romans in 60
AD and 80,000 Britons are said to have been slaughtered here. Rumours
are that Boudicca is buried undeneath a platform of Kings Cross railway
station which is perhaps, no more than an urban myth….
The
Fleet ran beside St Pancras Old Church nearby to the present day railway
station of the same name. It was one of Europe’s most ancient sites of
Christian worship possibly dating back to the early 4th century. The
present church building has been here since the 11th or 12th Century. A
board on the entrance railings the Church show a drawing of bathers in
the Fleet in 1827. During 1865 an architect called Thomas Hardy, who
later became famous as a novelist and poet, was overseeing the careful
removal of bodies and tombs from part of the churchyard on which the
Midland Railway line was being built. The headstones around this Ash
Tree in the remainder of St Pancras Churchyard were placed by Hardy as
part of that project and still exists in the churchyard to this day.
In
Roman & Anglo Saxon times the Fleet was a major river but the flow
of the river was greatly reduced as London grew in population as local
industry waste (such as remains of carcasses from the adjacent
Smithfield Market) and human waste polluted the river by the 13th
century. The lower section of the river was now known as the Fleet Ditch
by this time and was little more than a large open sewer. In 1710
Jonathan Swift (author of "Gullivers Travels") mentioned the filth in
the Fleet during a storm in a poem:
"Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts and Blood,
Drown'd Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench'd in Mud,
Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood"
The
surrounding area became undesirable and became notorious for its
closely packed slum dwellings bad characters & diseases. Charles
Dickens based Fagin’s Den in “Oliver Twist” in this area. The cheap
land became a popular location to build prisons. Most of the prisons of
old London including Newgate, Clerkenwell, Ludgate, Fleet &
Bridewell prisons were in the Fleet Valley. The introduction of the
cholera into Clerkenwell Prison, in 1832, was attributed to the effluvia
of the Fleet,
Aside from the tales of pollution a more positive
aspect of the Fleet is that a large number of wells were built along the
banks of the Fleet and reputed to have healing qualities. These
included Chalybeate Wells, St Chads, Clerks Well & Bagnigge Wells.
As a result, the Fleet was often nicknamed the “River of Wells” with
some of these wells surviving until the 19th century.
Following
the Great Fire of London in 1666, extensive building work took place
including St Paul's Cathedral by Christopher Wren. He went on to convert
the lower reach of the Fleet into what was then known as the New Canal
based on the elaborate Grand Canal in Venice. The mouth of the Fleet was
broadened to a width of forty feet and flanked with great wharfs for
unloading coal and traversed by four new decorative bridges, at
Bridewell, Fleet Street, Fleet Lane, and Holborn. The torrent of
pollution from upriver, which was still basically an open sewer, caused
the canal to be a failure. It became choked with mud and was no longer
navigable. Several people had fallen in and been suffocated in the mud
resulting in sections being covered over from 1732. The development of
the Regents Canal covered the river in King's Cross and Camden from
1812. The construction of the Metropolitan line in 1862 railway buried
the Fleet along Farringdon Road although the river created problems
later that year when the sewer burst causing a large section of the
arches lining the tunnel to collapse. Over a hundred years later It
almost gave its name to a tube line, but since its opening coincided
with the Queen’s silver jubilee in 1977, the Fleet Line was named the
Jubilee Line.
The final upper section of the river was covered
when Hampstead was expanded in the 1870s. The Fleet now exists as a
large underground sewer.
More pictures taken along the course of the River Fleet can be found on the Author's Guided Walks section on this website.
River Fleet - Headstreams on Hampstead Heath
The article below comes from a website of
British History Online and is from an old book published in 1878. There are some page reference in the piece that are from the original book, so I haven't added the actual pages referenced in this article.
THE FLEET RIVER AND FLEET DITCH
The name of this ill-used stream, once fresh and
fleet, now a mere sluggish and plague-breeding
sewer, is traced by some to the Anglo-Saxon
fleotan, "to float;" and by others, to the Saxon
fleot, or flod, "a flood." The sources of the river
Fleet are on the high lands of Hampstead and
Highgate, and the chief of them rise near Caen
Wood. The Fleet was fed by the Oldborne, which
rose, says Stow, "where now the Bars do stand,"
and ran down to Old Borne Bridge, and into the
River of Wells or Turnmill Brook. The Fleet
was also fed by all the springs of Clerkenwell,
such as Clerkenwell itself, Skinner's Well, Fogg's
Well, Tod's Well, Loder's Well, Rad Well (near
the Charterhouse), and the Horse Pool, at Smithfield.