London’s lost rivers

I found my first of London’s many lost rivers when I walked across Holborn Viaduct, looked down at the sweep of Farringdon Road below and realised that it had to be the path of a river, not just a road. Indeed, I was soon to learn that the river Fleet runs directly beneath, coursing down to meet the Thames by Blackfriars Bridge.

The Fleet is perhaps the most famous of London’s lost rivers; it was once large enough for boats to navigate it, and an anchor has been discovered as far up as Kentish Town. As for the lower stretch of the Fleet, its earliest recorded cargo were the stones that built the old St Paul’s Cathedral in the early 12th century, but by the 18th century it had degenerated into the Fleet Ditch, so filthy that Alexander Pope, in his poem The Dunciad, wrote that children swam ‘where Fleet-ditch, with disemboguing streams/ Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames.’