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
