There are clues to their existence in street names, in the winding of lanes and in the rushing sound of water deep in the capital’s drains.
The hidden rivers are really good radial walks,” said Des Garrahan, of Inner London Ramblers, who leads guided walks on London’s buried rivers.
So we’re talking scores and scores of lost waterways in London,” said Talling, who also leads guided lost river walks.
By the 1860s, following the Great Stink of 1858, most were incorporated into Joseph Bazalgette’s sewer system.
There was a mill at Clerkenwell, where the well was used by clerks of the nunnery, and myriad little underground springs that fed the well.
The Tyburn branched to form islands, on one of which, Thorney Island, Westminster Abbey now stands.
The average person walking around London doesn’t know about them,” said Talling.
An exhibition at the Museum of London in 2019 traced the history of many of the secret rivers.
Among the routes proposed by the Ramblers is one following the course of the Fleet down to the Thames past St Pancras Old Church and alongside Regent’s canal.
The Fleet Polluted by industry and carcasses from Smithfield’s butchers, this foul-smelling waterway was a blight on London and bordered by slums. Fagin’s Den in Dickens’ Oliver Twist was set here.
The Tyburn Angling Society’s proposals to restore it have not come to fruition, possibly because it could mean the demolition of Buckingham Palace.
The Westbourne George’s II’s wife, Queen Caroline, ordered it be dammed to form the Serpentine and prettify Hyde Park in 1730.
In 1992 there were spoof proposals to bring the buried Effra back to the surface, with posters reading “Wet, Dark and Buried”.