London is famous for one river and one river alone - the Thames. But there were once several other rivers crossing the clay basin of the lower Thames valley, all long since covered over by the capital's suburban sprawl, and the greatest of these was the Fleet. I've been busy tracking down the visible remains of this long-lost river and I'll be telling you all about my travels over the next month. It's a fascinating journey from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day and, even better, it's all downhill.
Blogs didn't tend to go on long psychogeographical journeys in those days, let alone in fine-grained detail. Published accounts of the River Fleet were also very thin on the ground in 2005, essentially Nicholas Barton's book The Lost Rivers of London and a few onlinemaps, so it felt like I was breaking fresh ground. Since then it seemsmostLondonwebsitesandvideochannels have covered the Fleet at some point, inevitably with better camerawork, as lost rivers have shifted from niche content to quirky stalwarts.
In 2008 my month down the Fleet led to me being offered a proper book deal, which was nice, but it soon proved too onerous and ultimately Paul Talling delivered the new classic Lost Rivers volume instead. I researched them all anyway and blogged another dozen rivers the following year. But I've always had a soft spot for the Fleet, the only Thames tributary to carve a valley across very-central London, and long thought it would be good to go back and walk it again. So let's do just that, precisely 20 years later.
This blog's evolved a lot since 2005, the average post now topping 1000 words rather than a couple of paragraphs, so if I were to do the entire river in detail it would soon become a ridiculously cumbersome task. Also last time I posted 170 photos to Flickr and you don't need to see all that again, even if the backdrops have changed. So I've decided to leave my 2005 posts as the definitive end-to-end record and instead to sample the river at certain points on the way down. In particular I looked at the map of the Fleet I knocked up twenty years ago and thought "that'll do nicely".
My map included five locations - Hampstead Heath, Camden, King's Cross, Clerkenwell and Blackfriars - so I'm going to focus on those and skip plodding inbetween. That means five posts, hopefully delivered weekly, allowing time for plenty of other content inbetween. I'm going to call my abridged version FLEETING, and I'll start tomorrow with a wander round the upper course of the river on Hampstead Heath.
In the meantime all the spoilers are in what I wrote twenty years ago, as condensed into these twoblog pages from August 2005, plus five Flickr albums that between them have had over 40,000 views. My apologies that most of the links don't work any more, but it turns out the internet is pretty fleeting too.
Reviewing the Fleet
Reviewing the Fleet
