London Under (7 page)

Eventually the canal was built over, and the wharves became streets; a public market was erected just above the junction with
Fleet Street, now called
Ludgate Circus, and in the 1820s
Farringdon Street was built. The task of hiding the Fleet was more or less complete. Yet it was not wholly or safely buried. In 1846 it blew up and its fetid gases, as well as its waters, escaped into the outer world. The roads became impassable, and the houses inundated. Three poorhouses were deluged and partly destroyed by a great wave of sewage. A steamboat was smashed against the
Blackfriars Bridge. At times of storm the river still proves hazardous for those who live along its course. The tunnels of London Underground in the vicinity are kept dry by means of pumps.

The archaeology of the area is matter for wonder and contemplation. The skeleton of an infant was found on the southern edge of one of the two islands; the child came from a time before the foundation of Roman London, but the anaerobic conditions allowed some of its flesh and skin to survive. Whether it drowned, or was killed, is of course not known. Glass kilns were built
by the eastern bank of the river in the third century. Evidence also exists from the
Roman period of
coins and pottery, of rings and glasses, of leather shoes and wooden writing tablets, of spatulas and hooks used for surgical purposes. Three keys from the medieval period had dropped down to the Roman level. The foods of various periods—the fruits, the nuts, the cereals—have been found. All the panoply of early London life is here.

The
Fleet Ditch, behind Field Lane, 1841
(illustration credit Ill.11)

Yet time may also be suspended above the river. Traces of the Roman road leading out of Newgate have been discovered; the modern
Holborn Viaduct follows
precisely the same path. The same building stood on
Ludgate Hill, overlooking the
Fleet, from the twelfth century until a night in 1940 when it was destroyed by fire bombs; it had no doubt served a variety of purposes over its long life, including those of a shop, an inn and a lodging house.

An octagonal stone building, most likely to be a Romano-Celtic temple, was built close to the banks of the river. Its interior was red with a border of green and white lines. A pit beside it contained flecks of charcoal and a human skull. The Fleet was once a sacred place, associated with the Celtic worship of the head. The skulls of
the Walbrook offer a parallel. The temple was destroyed at the beginning of the fourth century, at the time when Christianity had become the dominant religion of London. A large building of many rooms was then built on the same site. It has been suggested, therefore, that the temple was torn down and a bishop’s palace erected in its place. Two Roman images, of Bacchus and of Ceres, had been flung into the waters; the
Mirror
of 22 March 1834 also reported the discovery of “a considerable number of medals, with crosses, crucifixes and Ave Marias engraved thereon.”

At the place where the Fleet and Thames become one, eleven bodies from the early part of the eleventh century were uncovered in the early 1990s by a team of archaeologists working for the Museum of London
Archaeology Service; the bodies had been dismembered
and decapitated before being buried. A toilet facility of three seats, dating from the twelfth century, was found deposited in the mud as a reminder of one of the river’s original functions. A black rat, the harbinger of plague, was also found.

Gazing on the maps of the Fleet and the Fleet Valley, and studying the archaeology of the area, can turn the development of London into a dream or hallucination. Buildings rise and fall, road surfaces are relined before falling into disuse, yards and alleys disappear and reappear, doorways and staircases come and go, lanes run through previously unoccupied areas, alleys become streets, wells and new drains and cellars are dug in profusion before being covered over. A dish appears bearing the picture of a Tudor woman, and an anthropomorphic head of the thirteenth century emerges from the mud. Buried in the debris of the Fleet were toys, vessels, tobacco pipes, wooden panels, brooches, pots, bowls, jugs, buckles, pins and pieces of fabric. On one tile was imprinted the fingermark of a small child. It is liquid history.

The Fleet river was always synonymous with crime and disease, not least because of the
Fleet Prison that stood beside its eastern bank. This place of dread reputation is mentioned for the first time in documents of the twelfth century, and was no doubt built a few decades earlier. It was erected upon one of the two islands of the Fleet, with a bridge connecting it to the mainland of the
city ditch; the “Gaol of London,” as it was called, was surrounded by a moat 10 feet in width. It consisted of a stone tower with an unknown number of floors; it may have therefore resembled the
White Tower of the Tower of London. Many cups and mugs have been found in the precincts of the prison; one of them was inscribed “J. Hirst,
Fleet Cellar.” The prison stood for almost 800 years before being demolished in 1845.

Other criminal fraternities congregated along the course of the Fleet. A house, looking over the river close to
Smithfield, became in the eighteenth century a haven for thieves and footpads of every description. A trap-door in the building led directly down to the water, and the victims of crime were sometimes unceremoniously bundled out. One sailor had been decoyed before being robbed and stripped; he was “taken up at Blackfriars bridge a corpse.” When “the Old House in West Street,” as it was known, was demolished its cellars were full of human bones.
Turnmill Street was notable for its brothels, and
Saffron Hill for its robbers. In the nineteenth century William Pinks, in his
History of
Clerkenwell
(1881), remarked that “vice of every kind was rampant in this locality, no measures being effectual for its suppression; the appointed officers of the law were both defied and terrified.”

The association with disease was just as strong as that with criminality. In the twelfth century the monks of Whitefriars complained that the smell of the river
penetrated the odours of their incense, and that several of their brethren had already died from its “putrid exhalations.” The inmates of
the
Fleet Prison were also killed by the waters encircling them. In 1560 a city doctor wrote that in the “stinking lanes” in the vicinity of the Fleet, at the time of epidemic fever or plague, “there died most of London, and were soonest inflicted and longest continued.” An outbreak of cholera in
Clerkenwell Prison, in 1832, was also attributed to the presence of the effluent waters. It was one of the most defiled areas of the city.

A stairway to the buried Fleet
(illustration credit Ill.12)

Schemes have been proposed to allow the Fleet to flow again through the streets of London. A plan has been made to build an observation platform beneath
Ludgate Circus, where the buried waters might be seen. The river has not entirely lost its hold upon the imagination of the city. On the corner of
Warner Street and
Ray Street, in the road before the Coach and Horses pub, a piece of grating can be found. If you put your ear close to it, you can still hear the sound of the river pulsing underneath. It is not dead.

There is no better preamble to the world of London’s
sewers. It is truly a journey into the night. The sewers are places of universal defilement, filled with matter that we have ejected from our bodies and flushed out of sight. They collect the waste of the world, left in streets or thrown down drains. They are the repository of primitive and repulsive, or simply outmoded, things. They represent putrefaction and dissolution.

Sewers were certainly the token of death. In a nineteenth-century report, it was concluded that if “you were to take a map and mark out the districts which are the constant seats of fever in London … you would be able to mark out invariably and with absolute certainty where the sewers are.” The track of fever followed the contours of the underground. The several outbreaks of cholera in the city were closely identified with the course of these pestilential tunnels.

In London mythology the sewers contain fearsome underground creatures, among them
rats as big as large cats. “I’ve often seed as many as a hundred rats at once,” a nineteenth-century sewer-man confided. “They think nothing of taking a man, if they found that they couldn’t get away no how.” The tunnels sweat as if in a fever. Yet they may also be the womb of strange birth. In previous centuries excrement was used as a great fertiliser; schemes were proposed to take the contents of the London sewers and spread them over the adjacent countryside.

“The Rat-catchers,”from Mayhew’s
London Labour
, 1851
(illustration credit Ill.13)

If there were sewers in
Roman London, they have not survived. In the general model of Roman building they would indeed have existed. The original sewers of Rome itself lasted until 1913. There are Roman sewers in York. Yet in London they seem to have crumbled into decay and dust, leaving not one relic behind. It is not impossible, however, that they still lie buried beneath the modern city.

The sewers of early medieval London were the streams and rivers and ditches that ran down to the Thames. Cess-pits, lined with brick or stone, were also in common use and were cleansed weekly or fortnightly by urban workers known as “gong-fermers.” In 1326 one
of them,
“Richard the Raker,” fell into his own cess-pit and suffocated “monstrously in his own excrement.” The first pipes to carry waste, in an underground drainage system, were introduced to London in the thirteenth century during the reign of
Henry III.

But they were not sufficient to contain the city’s effusions. Mr.
William Sprot complained in 1328 that his neighbours,
William and Adam Mere, had allowed their “cloaca” or sewer to discharge its contents over his wall. Two Londoners were in 1347 accused of allowing their “odours” to escape into an adjacent cellar. In 1388 an Act was passed to punish those “who corrupt or pollute ditches, rivers, waters and the air of London.” It would have been easier to stop the tides of the Thames. As the city grew, so did its stench.