6 LOST LONDON RIVERS (INCLUDING I THAT MAY NEVER HAVE EXISTED)
1.The Fleet Flowing from Hampstead and Highgate towards Blackfriars, the Fleet was much the most important of the Thames tributaries. It was driven underground in the eighteenth century. In the 1730s, it was arched over from Holborn Bridge to Fleet Bridge along what eventually became Farringdon Road and the stretches south to the river were covered some thirty years later. Nearly all the literary references to the Fleet emphasise its appalling pollution, much of it caused by the blood and entrails of the animals slaughtered in nearby Smithfield Market. In The Dunciad, Alexander Pope writes of 'where Fleet Ditch with disemboguing streams/Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames'. Bridewell, first a royal palace and then a prison, stood at the mouth of the Fleet where it emptied into the Thames, on a site now occupied by the Unilever Building.
2.The Effra Beneath the streets of South London flows the River Effra which rises near Crystal Palace, journeys through Norwood and Brixton, runs close by the Oval and then enters the Thames near the MI6 building at Vauxhall Bridge. The Effra is now entirely underground and mostly incorporated into the city's sewage network but it must once have flowed freely. Elizabeth I is supposed to have travelled along the Effra by royal barge to visit Sir Walter Raleigh, who had a house in Brixton. 3.The Tyburn Another tributary of the Thames, the Tyburn flowed from Hampstead to Westminster, giving its name to a village which eventually became the principal site of London executions during the eighteenth century. Thorney Island was an island at the mouth of the Tyburn which has long since disappeared under Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament.
4.The Walbrook The Walbrook divided Roman London in two, flowing from the area north of Moorgate and Liverpool Street Station to join the River Thames at Dowgate.
5.The Westbourne Rising in Hampstead, the Westbourne flowed southwards through Kilburn towards Bayswater and Hyde Park, on through Knightsbridge (which takes its name from a crossing over the river), continued through Kensington and Chelsea and entered the Thames near what is now Chelsea Bridge. The river was dammed in the eighteenth century to form the Long Water and the Serpentine and disappeared underground as London developed in the second half of that century and the early part of the next. At one point, it passes through a nineteenth-century conduit pipe which can be seen crossing the tracks from the platforms at Sloane Square tube station.
6.The Langbourne One of the wards of the City of London is called Langbourn and the sixteenth-century historian of the city John Stow wrote that it took its name from a lost river that flowed nearby. Not only was Stow wrong about the derivation of the name-almost certainly it comes from a medieval version of the world 'Lombard' – but he was probably mistaken in believing that there was any river,lost or otherwise, in the vicinity.