London’s largest lost river became an open sewer so notorious that Pope and Swift both wrote about the smell
The Sea Horse on Fleet Street holds a 4.3 from eight hundred and thirty-eight people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and is standing on top of a river.
The Fleet
It is London’s largest lost river. It rises on Hampstead Heath, runs south through Kentish Town and Camden and King’s Cross and Clerkenwell, and enters the Thames under Blackfriars Bridge.
It gave its name to the street, to the prison, and to the marriages – the Fleet marriages, conducted without banns or licence in the precincts of the prison, which is where you went if you needed to be married quickly and could not explain why.
And by the eighteenth century it was one of the most disgusting objects in Europe.
What was in it
Everything.
The tanneries were on it, and tanning is a process that requires urine, lime, dog faeces and the scraping of rotting hides. The butchers were on it, and threw in what they could not sell. The slaughterhouses of Smithfield drained into it.
And the population used it, because there was nowhere else, and by the 1700s the lower Fleet was not a river but a stationary trench of filth, and everybody called it the Fleet Ditch.
Jonathan Swift wrote a poem describing a city shower and the flood that follows it, and he lists what comes down the gutters into it – the sweepings, the dung, the drowned puppies, the guts of fish, and dead cats.
Alexander Pope put a diving contest in the Dunciad in which his enemies compete to plunge deepest into the Fleet, and the winner is the one who can best endure it.
Neither of them was exaggerating for effect. They were describing a place.
How it was buried
In sections, over about a century, and it was arched over rather than drained – because you cannot drain a river, you can only put a lid on it.
Which means it is still there. It is still running. It is a sewer now, in the formal sense – part of Bazalgette’s system – and it discharges into the Thames at Blackfriars, and you can see the outfall at low tide.
And in 1846 it exploded. A build-up of gas in the culvert blew the roof off a section, wrecked houses, and swept a boat off its moorings on the Thames.
A buried river, under a road, full of methane, took out a street.
The lesson we keep learning
We wrote at the Westbourne in Notting Hill that a buried river is still a river, and that you cannot build over one – you can only postpone the conversation.
The Fleet is the proof. It is under Farringdon Road. It floods. It always has.
The pub
Cheap for the City, a proper Fleet Street pub, and a 4.3 across a real sample – and the trade it was built to serve, the newspapers, left in the 1980s and never came back.
Verdict
Good pub. Go, drink, and be quietly grateful for Joseph Bazalgette, who is the reason you cannot smell what is underneath you.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
The precision of observation here is almost painful. Every detail correct makes everything infinitely worse.