Installation by Christina Iglesias at the site of the former Walbrook River.
City of London, 2024. Photo Lesley Lawson.

An 1180 account of London describes the settlement as having flowing streams and surrounded by “excellent springs; the water of which is sweet, clear and salubrious”. Indeed, until the mid-nineteenth century, London was traversed by more than a dozen rivers, which have since disappeared underground. Hackney Brook, was one such river that ran west to east across the city, feeding the lakes in Clissold Park along the way. Having discovered this during the COVID lockdown, I resolved to trace its route through my north London neighbourhood.

After much research and fruitless trekking, the exact whereabouts of its origins remains a mystery. Some say there were two springs in Tufnell Park—and have produced Victorian maps attesting to that fact. They point to the existence of a water pump in the basement of the Odeon Cinema on Holloway Road as evidence of the river’s course. Others swear the source of the river was much further east.

Hackney Brook fed the lakes of Clissold Park. Becksmere, 2024.
Photo:Lesley Lawson

What is certain is that the river flowed past the old Arsenal stadium and into Clissold Park. It exited the northeast corner of the park, a substantial river 10 meters wide, along what is now Grazebrook Road. (Cattle no doubt grazing on its banks.)  While walking here I met a man packing the boot of his car who knew all about Hackney Brook. When they first renovated their house in the 1970s, he said, the builders were puzzled when the foundations kept welling up, even when there had been no rain.

From here the river ran around the norther perimeter of Abney Park cemetery and followed a complex course across lower ground in Hackney before entering the river Lea just south of Olympic Park.

The majority of London’s lost rivers were tributaries of the Thames. The Fleet, the Tyburn, Westbourne, Walbrook; their ancient names live on in road signs and place names today. Their presence is still felt in damp basements and can be heard rushing under drain covers after heavy rains. Early London is truly alive and flowing under our feet.

These rivers provided drinking water for humans and animals. They were also used for fishing, cleaning hides and carcases, laundries, lavatories and swimming pools etc.

As the city’s population doubled in the 1800s, they became so heavily polluted they were little more than open sewers.

1828 cartoon showing a Londoner’s response to the quality of drinking water.
Wellcome Collection.

Despite frequent cholera outbreaks, Victorians were slow to make the connection between drinking water and disease, believing instead that illness was linked to noxious air.  But the stink itself was so stupendous that it convinced the city fathers that something had to be done. In the 1860s, in a great feat of engineering, the rivers were diverted into a massive network of underground pipes to form the world’s first urban sewage system, which is still in use today.  In north London where I live, Thames Water estimates there are 68 kilometres of pipes and tunnels that may once have been natural watercourses.

Hackney Brook was incorporated into London’s Northern Outfall Sewer and there it would have stayed, buried and forgotten, if not for the efforts of the river hunters who have made the unearthing of lost waterways their life’s work.

Walbrook installation, city of London, 2024.
Photo: Lesley Lawson.

Going with the flow, I have unearthed legions of books and websites, YouTube videos and blogs on the topic of London’s lost rivers. Historians and geographers, poets and adventurers offer text, online talks and real-life walks. Hundreds of amateur river hunters tramp the city searching for the path of the rivers. Vlogger John Rogers advises his 83,000 followers of certain indicators that point to the presence of an underground river— gaps between houses, substations, wide grassy lanes in the middle of roads, ponds and parks.

River hunting is fun. But the rivers don’t really want to be found, and when it comes down to it, there is not that much to see. A pointless exercise?

Hackney Brook flows underground through my neighbourhood.
Nothing to see here. Photo: Lesley Lawson

Despite their absence, fascination with these underground rivers lies in the way they have shaped the city. As writer and film maker Iain Sinclair says, “It is not possible to understand the growth and development of Hackney, for example, without registering the presence of that subterranean river, the Hackney Brook.” The route of older roads, the siting of parks and grander homes, were all determined by the river’s course.

The lost rivers have an even deeper pull.
London chronicler Peter Ackroyd writes that there is a recurring theme of “sensing London’s buried rivers, or otherwise reacting to them, perhaps without knowing they are there… the outer world is in mourning for its lost companion.” The poet Aidan Dun finds magical properties in these forgotten waters. “The black stream is a ley-line whose energies have become stagnant through neglect, or negative through misuse.”  

Sinclair believes that “The rivers continue, hidden and culverted as they might be, to flow through our dreams, fixing the compass of our moods and movements…Visible or invisible, they haunt us.” For Sinclair, Hackney Brook is both a geographical and a philosophical entity. He went to the lengths of engaging a dowser to ensure the accuracy of his cognitive map. The dowser claimed to have traced a pattern of disease like “ripples of a stone dropped in a pond. Houses built above lost rivers, if the inhabitants have no knowledge of that history, carry a dark aura. Ill fortunate [sic] is always associated with this.”

For me, the lost rivers feel like a sad metaphor for progress. How centuries of urbanisation have transmuted the pure, sweet streams of history into so much dirt.

References

• Early descriptions of London in Nichola Barton, The Lost Rivers of London, 1962, Phoenix House.
• Iain Sinclair, Swimming to heaven 2013, Swedenborg Archive
• Iain Sinclair, podcast, with dowser: http://lndn.blogspot.com/2010/05/
• Romany Reagan, London’s Buried Rivers: The Hackney Brook in Stoke Newington & Other Ghosts from London Below, 2020.
• Aidan Dun, Vale Royal, 2022, Goldmark quoted in Reagan
• Peter Ackroyd, London Under, 2011Chatto & Windus, quoted in Reagan
• Tom Bolton, London’s Lost Rivers, A Walkers Guide, Volume Two, 2019, Strange Attractor Press
• Paul Talling, London’s Lost Rivers, 2011, Random House