June 07, 2008
The lost rivers of London:
Many of them played important role in the development of the city, as the location of mills, the source of drinking water and as open sewers. Most of them have been pushed totally underground, forced into culverts, out of sight and out of mind – even if some of them have left their mark on the city’s topology.
I spent a lazy half-hour looking over Google Earth seeing if I could find any hint of these rivers on the cityscape. The only one really evident seems to be the Lea/Lee.
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Excellent, and very interesting. Cheers
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Is there no end of cool, mysterious things under that city?
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Sad indeed that these rivers should be dry or in pipes. Apparently if you lean over on the Embankment and look under Blackfriars Bridge, you can see a hole like the end of a drain. That's the Fleet.
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Excellent link! Thanks. At low tide, you can sometimes see the channels where many of these rivers make their way into the Thames.
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The hollow where there Fleet ran is also visible near a public baths set up for printers in the 19th century. Toronto has at least one disapeered creek, Garrison Creek that used to run from Christie Pits down to Trinity Bellwoods Park and so onto the lake. It's all underground now. But land not being what it is in London, this is a rarity, not the norm - we've kept most of our creeks, and they are great public spaces (because most have ravines around them).
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This sounds like a job for an official RN expedition.
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That is so cool. I mean, in a sad way. The city continues to amaze.
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In Liverpool, there is one that runs from the Brooke House pub, through Greenbank Park and off to the Mersey, apparently.
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I grew up beside the Ravensbourne, and even went fishing in Keston Ponds, its source (I caught nothing). I didn't realise until much, much later that the two were related, nor that the river was a tributary of the Thames. Somehow, that knowledge would have enriched my formative years.
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Not all of these are "lost", I think. The Wandle is still paddlable, for example.
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You can see it quite well at Pointe a Calliere in Montreal. The street on the left was/is the main harbour road, built out further and deeper into the St. Lawrence, and the street to the right was the Little St-Pierre River. Montreal started, then, where the museum now stands, before they gave up the flats between the rivers for the higher ground on the right (where the old Customs House is). The Little St-Pierre was a river that became an open sewer, then a closed sewer, and then decommissioned. When you travel the archeological crypt between the museum and the Customs House, you walk a bit of the riverbed/sewer lining.
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That's right, the Wandle isn't lost. I live near one of its sources, and it's still a reasonable stream, supporting herons and even kingfishers, though you don't often see those. However, I believe it gets topped up artificially by the water people; some of its old tributaries are dry channels these days (except in the wettest weather).
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I used to catch frogs at a creek that is now somewhere under an expressway. It's one of the reasons I now raise my own kids out in the country, where they can still find real creeks.
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I see the man himself all the time -- he has one of the innumerable scooters in Hamilton, and he pops into Denninger's for lunch (comped, it looks like). He's driving up and down Main on the thing, and I always find it so depressing that he can't drive his own freeway...
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The River Poddle in Dublin. Some photos at Hidden Dublin. And a piece on YouTube excerpted from an RTE telly program.
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On Manhattan's lost creeks and streams, and the Viele Map: "a swell lithograph, long as a Buick."
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I wonder if Boris Johnson reads monkeyfilter Forgotten tributaries of the Thames, long buried under London’s concrete, may be raised to the surface under plans by advisers to Boris Johnson, the mayor, who want to revitalise the city with more water features and open spaces.