A Tribute to the Tributaries:The Secret Rivers of London.

"What kind of city buries its rivers? And what kind of city digs them up?" - Platform, 2012.

"For they were young, and the Thames was old. And this is the tale that the river told" - Rudyard Kipling, 1911.

When a Londoner speaks of the river, they speak of the river Thames. But the Thames is merely the father, or mother, of all London's rivers. All, or nearly all (some canals and the New River, for example, can be exempted), of London's waterways eventually flow into the Thames and finally, via the estuary, into the North Sea.

Some are visible, some are hidden. Some are visible at times, hidden at others. There are 27 tributaries of the Thames in London alone and many of them have several tributaries of their own which, in turn, have their own tributaries and so on and so on until you find out that that ditch which flows through your back garden flows into a brook which flows into a stream which flows into a river with flows into a creek which flows into the Thames and, finally, the sea.

The Museum of London Docklands on West India Quay hosted, towards the end of last year, an exhibition named Secret Rivers and if the name was misleading, many of these rivers are very well known, that did not reflect negatively on how interesting an experience I had when I spent a morning taking it in.

The rivers the Museum of London Docklands had chosen for consideration were the Walbrook, the Fleet, the Neckinger, the Westbourne, the Tyburn, the Effra, the Wandle, the Lea, and the Thames itself and the story the exhibition's curators were trying to tell is one of how those rivers have not just shaped London itself but how Londoners have shaped, and responded to, those rivers. How the rivers have been revered, used, and abused. How they've been utilised for transport, industry, sustenance, and pleasure and how they have inspired authors, musicians, and artists over the years.

"Where a spring or river flows, there should we build altars and offer sacrifices" is a quote attributed to the Roman philosopher and statesman Seneca who lived from 4BC to AD65 and though it seems likely that Seneca had the Tiber in mind it's a quote that could apply equally to the Ganges, the Jordan, or, of course, the Thames (and its tributaries).

Our need for water influenced where we built our earliest settlements (even now it's unusual to find a large city not based near a river or sea) and the Romans founded Londinium on the north bank of the Thames with the Walbrook flowing through the middle of the city. They also constructed the first bridge over the Thames which connected the then Londinium to the marshy islands of Southwark to the south.

It was only a matter of time before people started seeing the river as holy and furnishing it with votive offerings and sacrifices. The word Thames comes from the Latin Tamesis and is believed to derive its name from the Sanskrit word for 'dark'. It flows from the Cotswold Hills in Gloucestershire to, as we've established, the North Sea and it was once, before Britain was separated from continental Europe in something far more dramatic than Brexit, a tributary of the Rhine.

I've even read that the force of the Thames as it emptied into the Rhine was the impetus that pushed Britain away from Europe. While the Thames runs for 215 miles, the Walbrook's length is less than two miles. Rising from springs in Angel Islington and Shoreditch it meets the Thames near where Cannon Street station now stands. It was buried during the 15th century but during building work at the Bank of England (in both 1732 and 1803) construction workers spotted it flowing.

Middle Bronze Age skull (1260-900BC)

You can travel back another three thousand years if you're fishing skulls out of the Thames. The majority (but certainly not all) are prehistoric and the majority (but, again, not all) are the result of simple water burials. It's the river movement that's probably caused any polishing, scraping, and frontal tooth loss, and resulted in stones wedging themselves into the ear canals.

It wasn't just dead bodies that were affected by the elemental power of the river. Those living by its banks would try to prevent unpredictable and threatening floods and tidal shifts while still harnessing the river for food and power by physically controlling them. It wasn't always a success so, perhaps inevitably, divine help was sought.

The Romans believed rivers acted as boundaries between physical and spiritual worlds and offered a direct means of communicating with the gods. Bridges and other crossing points became the focus of ritual activity and these patterns of behaviour continue to this day. Though, mostly, out of a sense of tradition than any great belief system.

The annual Blessing of the Thames takes places each Sunday after Epiphany (that's the Sunday coming up, 12th January) when the parishes of Southwark Cathedral (south bank) and St Magnus the Martyr (north bank) meet in the centre of London Bridge, bless the river and those who work on it, and cast a wooden cross into its water. I might go along and watch it. Might even write about it. You never know.

Near where the Walbrook now flows underground there is a temple dedicated to the Roman mystery god, Mithras. A Greek god many consider to be inspired by the Iranian religion of Zoroastrianism. It's free to visit and I can fully recommend you do so. It's another thing that, time permitting, one day I will write about.

Metal statuette of Vishnu (20th century)

In the Hindu faith there are seven sacred rivers (Ganges, Yamuna, Indus, Saraswati, Godavari, Narmada, and Kaveri). Or at least there were until 1970 when the Thames was blessed and became the eighth. This meant that it could, from thereon, be used for various religious rites and since then many small objects, like the above statuette of Vishnu (the preserver and protector of the universe), have been found on the foreshore. In a bizarrely circular story it is said that the Ganges flows from the toe of Vishnu.

Elsewhere, poppy-headed jars, flagons, and bronze feet found in the river are believed to have religious significance although experts are still undecided on what religion or what significance to that religion they actually had. As the river still flows its mysteries continue to both unfold and deepen simultaneously. The most plausible theory regarding the bronze foot is that it belonged to a statue of the Egyptian goddess Isis who was known for protecting ships at sea. Hence the location by the river.

Poppy-headed jar (c.AD130)

Bronze foot (2nd century AD)

Cow's skull

The skull of the cow shows that it has received a lethal blow to the forehead and is believed to have been sacrificed and thrown to the water and the jolly looking 'facepot' below was found in the Walbrook and is thought to be a votive offering. Another theory suggests that it, and the miniature jars and Roman styli found nearby, had simply fallen out of fashion or use and were ditched as rubbish.

Facepot (1st-2nd century AD)

Roman styli

"The Fleet is a secret ditch, the kingdom of typhoid, a conduit of bad air" - Aidan Andrew Dun, 1995.

Heading upstream, and along the north bank, the next river to flow into the Thames is the Fleet. Also known as the 'River of Wells' and the 'Fleet Ditch' it is, we're informed, a river of surprises as well as the most famous of London's 'lost' rivers, possibly due to the massive archaeological excavations that took place on it during the 1980s.

In Roman times, the Fleet, situated outside the city walls, was a useful dock and during the medieval period a prison and monasteries altered the landscape. As the city grew and houses and industry filled the Fleet valley, the river's banks narrowed and pollution decreased its flow. Attempts to cleanse it, and even a brief spell at turning it into a canal, both failed and, eventually, it was buried underground and used as a Victorian sewer.

The state in which, more or less, it has to this day. It's only four miles long and runs from springs on Hampstead Heath to just beneath Blackfriars Bridge and if you were to take a swim in the Hampstead ponds, as many Londoners still do often, you will be swimming in the Fleet water as the ponds are fed by the same springs as the water that reaches the Thames.

Entrance to the Fleet Canal - Follower of Samuel Scott (c.1750)

Away from the heath, it soon stopped looking as grand as it did in the above mid-eighteenth century oil painting. After 1666's Great Fire, the Fleet (on its way down from Holborn) looked more worthy of Venice than London yet the wharves proved unprofitable and Londoners, as they do to this day, chose to throw rubbish in their own beauty spots. To shit on their own doorsteps. The swine.

Dog collars have been found in the Fleet (it was a popular spot for disposing of expired hounds) and there was one on show in the exhibition as well as the butchered bones of cattle, sheep, and pigs from Smithfield market (where the Museum of London's main building will soon be moving). These all contributed to clogging up the river and making it unnavigable. They even led to a rumour that a herd of subterranean feral swine roamed, and continue to roam, the sewers that used to be, and in fact still are, the Fleet.

Medieval oak three-seater toilet seat (mid-12th century)

The humans who lived on the river's banks, judging by their propensity for fly tipping, were barely less primitive, it appears. Although at least they sat down to have a shit. Together. In groups of three, ideally. A toilet seat found lying over a cesspit in a yard near Ludgate Hill is evidence of how the family that sits together, shits together.

Three hundred years later, around 1612, the poet and playwright Ben Jonson wrote:-

'...How dare 

Your dainty nostrils (in so hot a season,

When every clerk eats artichokes, and peason,

Laxative lettuce, and such windy meat)

'Tempt such a passage? When each privy's seat

Is filled with buttock? And the walls do sweat

Urine, and plasters? When the noise doth beat

Upon your ears, of discords so unsweet?

And outcries of the damned in the Fleet?'

Not much had changed (though defecating directly into the river was banned in 1463) and the Secret Rivers exhibition didn't want us to miss out on the fun so they'd handily provided a mock up copy for us to try for size. If only I'd attended with two (very close) friends or family members. We learn that the person tasked with removing the excrement from the cesspit was given the job title 'gong farmer'! It's a dirty job but someone had to do it.

Far less renowned than the Fleet, the Neckinger flowed for three miles from the site of the current Imperial War Museum to St Saviour's Dock just east of Tower Bridge (near the old Design Museum) and was buried in the late nineteenth century. There's even some debate as to whether or not it's a tributary or simple part of a minor channel of the Thames.

The Neckinger was first exploited by the monks of Bermondsey Abbey for industrial use and, later, power mills and factories sprang up. By the time the river/channel had been covered up the area had become a notorious slum filled with both industrial and human waste.

It was quite a different story in the more affluent, and leafier, west London. The Westbourne (an eight mile river that runs, or ran, from Hampstead to Chelsea Bridge) was damned  in Hyde Park, on the orders of Queen Caroline in the 1730s, to create the Serpentine and was used to fill the ornamental canal of the Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens.

Much nicer. Though also evidence of how there have always been at least two different Londons. The London of the rich and the London of the poor. Only the wealthy could afford to attend Ranelagh and drink out of the opulent porcelain provided there. Opened to the public in 1742 not far from where the Saatchi Gallery now stands, Ranelagh was designed as a more upmarket rival to Vauxhall Gardens and had, as its centrepiece, the below rotunda. The rotunda was surrounded by the canal fed by the Westbourne. A river that now passes through one of the platforms of Sloane Square underground station in a pipe. How the mighty have fallen.

A Design for the Rotunda and Canal at Ranelagh Gardens - William Jones and Francois Morellon (1742)

Cup and saucer, Chelsea-Derby porcelain (1746-1780)

The Chinese House, the Rotunda, & the Company in Masquerade in Ranelagh Gardens - Thomas Bowles II (1751)

Skating on the Serpentine - Thomas Rowlandson (1786)

There are pots available for visitors, visiting children primarily one assumes, to sniff and to decide if they prefer the genteel aromas of the Westbourne to the fetid stench of the Neckinger. It's hardly the Pepsi challenge but it's a bit of fun in an exhibition which is intended as a family show but sometimes leans so heavily into history it risks losing a younger audience.

There's a toothbrush (a communal one - often one toothbrush was shared by a whole family), found near the Neckinger, and a story which suggests that people used to brush their teeth in water that had rubbish thrown in it and with bristles made from the hair of pigs, horses, or badgers and there's an a-z consisting of rubbish that artist Jane Porter fished out of the Wandle (the f is from a fish'n'chip shop, the J from a bicycle lock, and the u is made of false teeth) in which it's suggested that we might like to spell out our names. These are fun but, truth be told, it's not the most interactive of exhibitions and would be of interest to older, more curious, children but not distracting enough for the very young.

Wandle Alphabet - Jane Porter (2011)

For the most part, it's of interest to Londoners like myself who never seem to tire of digging into their city's history. There's stuff about Jacob's Island (the artificial island that became known as both 'the Venice of drains' and 'the very capital of cholera' and whose houses gave Charles Dickens the inspiration for Bill Sikes' home in Oliver Twist), and, on the same theme, there's Richard Dugard Grainger's Cholera Map of the Metropolis from 1849 where the darker the markings the more prevalent the disease.

There are ceramic mugs (but only 'FOR A GOOD GIRL' - not creepy at all), there are plastic dinosaur toys fished from the Wandle (along with knives, motor scooters, and number plates), and there are river sounds recorded by both Ian Rawes and Dale Garland as you walk round the museum. Rawes has plotted his on to a 'sound map' based on Harry Beck's iconic map of the London Underground whereas Garland has gone as far out as Windsor to get the essence of the Thames down on tape.

Oliver Reed as Bill Sikes in Oliver! (1968)

Folly's Ditch, Jacob's Island - James Lawson Stewart (1887)

Cholera Map of the Metropolis - Richard Dugard Grainger (1849)

Plastic toy (21st century)

As we listen to these ambient, at times barely audible, sounds we can read about the recent popularity of daylighting, or bringing back to the surface, these hidden rivers. Sections of the Moselle, the Quaggy, and the Wandle have all reappeared above ground in recent years where they have provided sustainable flood protection, havens for wildlife, and more urban green spaces.

It's not cheap to do but it seems an eminently worthwhile exercise if London is to continue to thrive. The latest proposals are to uncover sections of the Effra and the Tyburn and if neither of those projects seem, yet, entirely plausible they've both succeeded in drawing attention to important ecological questions about urbanisation and about how our shared water resources are managed.

The Effra runs 6.8 miles from Norwood to Vauxhall Bridge (and the last part was buried right back in 1880) and the Oval cricket ground is both shaped around a curve of the Effra and contains banks of seating made from soil excavated during the covering of that river. The Tyburn, a shorter river at 5.7 miles, flows from Hampstead to Westminster and Pimlico and did not, as you might think, give its name to the Tyburn Gallows. That comes from the Tyburn Brook. A separate water course, a tributary of the Westbourne in fact, altogether.

Newspaper poster (1992)

Tyburn Salmon - Simon Gudgeon (c.2000)

All these rivers do get a bit confusing! But don't lose heart. There are only two left to go in both this exhibition and this article. The Wandle and the Lea have been lumped together not due to geographical proximity but because they are both formerly industrialised and polluted rivers that have been cleaned up and invested in significantly in recent years.

Take a walk along either (my London by Foot walking group did the Lea last year and we're doing the Wandle in June) and you'll see just how true that is. By 1805 the Wandle (shallow, fast flowing, and ideal for powering water mills) had earned itself the title of "the hardest working river for its size in the world" but by the 1960s all that hard work had turned it, like so many before it, into an open sewer. The Lea provided the water for munitions, vehicle, electronic, and chemical manufacturing but as most of those industries declined the river came to be neglected.

The regeneration of the area around Stratford for the London Olympics in 2012 did wonders for the Lea while the Wandle's return to favour has been more gradual and less spectacular but equally welcome. While the Lea flows for forty-two miles, the Wandle manages just nine but, along the way, it passes some beautiful parkland and some of Croydon's more pleasant areas. You can even take a 'sound cup' and listen to Wandle enthusiast Andy talk about sticklebacks and canoeing down the river. When it comes to the Lea the curators have used the same Adele quote that I started off March 2019's walk with. Great minds and all that, eh?

Croydon Church, Surrey - James Bourne (1800-1848)

Croydon Minster - John Chase (2018)

View of Wandsworth, Surrey - John Burges Watson (1819)

Junction of the Lea and Pudding Mill river - Mike Seaborne (2006)

View of the New Bridge at Bow - Unknown artist (c.1834)

The Iron Bridge over the River Lea, near East India Docks, Poplar (1815-1825)

There's lots of nice paintings and photographs of the Lea and the Wandle proving how good they once looked and how good they now look again and from there we enter into a final section, a coda if you will, to the exhibition called Tracing The Rivers featuring contemporary art, photography, maps, and a section of books written about the rivers, lost or otherwise, of London. 

They look at history, they look at place, and they look at environment. Simon Dovar's has erased a pencil drawing of the course of the Fleet from a hand drawn street map as if to question our sense of loss and our sense of understanding of what the river once gave us while Loraine Ruff's Peckham Light Postcards has cast a confusing history, in porcelain, of the burial of the river Peck. Just one small rivulet in Peckham Rye remains today.

Lost River Fleet - Simon Dovar (2010)

Peckham Lights Postcards - Loraine Rutt (2015)

There are books by Ben Aaronovitch, Charles Dickens, Iain Sinclair, Neil Gaiman and others and there is Stephen Walter's photogravure etching that shows London stripped of its buildings and roads and given over to the water of its rivers, canals, brooks, and sewers. Finally there is Andy Sewell's recent pigment print of his five year project to document Hampstead Heath (the source of so many of London's rivers as you will have read) as well as the human urge, biophilia, to associate with nature.

The example here shows a man swimming in the Hampstead Brook and while it's far from the most impressive exhibit on show at the Museum of London Docklands it is, in some ways, one of the most instructive. Because no matter how interesting an exhibition on London's lost or secret rivers can be (and this one was very interesting, for sure) it can never compete with getting out there, in the city, exploring these rivers yourself by foot or by bike. I enjoyed the exhibition and I enjoyed writing about it but, truth be told, I can hardly wait to get out and walk along one of these bad boys again soon. When we start the Capital Ring (75 mile long) circular walk around London in less than three weeks we'll no doubt be reacquainted, or even acquainted for the first time, with these rivers. It'll be like catching up with old friends.

Rivers of London - Stephen Walter (2014)

The Heath - Andy Sewell (2006-2011)