Looking for the River Fleet

8 February.  Following a path from Hampstead Heath to Blackfriars Bridge on the wettest Saturday in February was not for the faint hearted. So, a host of Morley Ramblers trudged through Hampstead onto the Heath to look for the hidden source of the River Fleet.

Passing the Blue Plaques for Tagore (the Indian writer and polymath) and the English author D. H. Lawrence, we entered the Vale of Heath and eventually found a bubbling spring and faint stream which we followed towards the main ponds. ‘This is definitely the Fleet’, said our guide assuredly though her sense of direction then failed her miserably.

Eventually the group headed South through Camden, pausing to look inside the extraordinary St. Dominic’s Priory and the Rosary Shrine, before going back to the search for drain covers.

Fleeting hesitation

This was really the Fleet, saw it, heard it, smelled it.

We found the stumps of the ‘Thomas Hardy Tree’ in the Old St Pancras Churchyard before eventually reaching our lunch stop in the Camley St Natural Park adjacent to the Regents Canal.

Understandably several soaked through walkers left us there but the dedicated stragglers continued through ginnels at the back of Kings Cross, through an uphill diversion via Percy Circus to Clerkenwell, then the Holborn Viaduct and finally the Thames at Blackfriars Bridge.  The punchline being that the exit of the Fleet into the Thames is now blocked by construction works for the new storm super sewer which was inaugurated the following week.

The walk leader would like to pay particular thanks to those who slithered their way through Hampstead mud, to Christine M and Sigrid for the photos and to Barbara for both joining us and holding the tables in the park café.

Further info about London’s lost rivers can be found on-line. Sue C