London Under by Peter Ackroyd Read Free Book Online

border ofWestminster and the City.

    The confluence of the Fleet and the Thames, 1749 (illustration credit Ill.10)
    It was a notable river, therefore, flowing through what would become the heart of London. A petition of 1307 states that the Fleet “used to be wide enough to carry ten or twelve ships up toFleet bridge, laden with various articles and merchandise.” In the twelfth century it was used for transporting stones to help in the building ofOld St. Paul’s. It was also employed for conveying hay, and corn, and wine, and wood.Old Seacoal Lane andNewcastle Close bear witness to another London necessity that was discharged at one of the wharves.
    But the curse of the city was already upon it. The slaughter-houses ofSmithfield, and thetanneries along its banks, discharged all of their waste products into the waters. It was constantly fouled almost to choking by refuse and silt, and only periodic attempts were made at cleansing. It was scoured clean at the beginning of the sixteenth century, for example, so that boats could once again sail up to Fleet Bridge andOldbourne Bridge. It was thoroughly cleaned a hundred years later, and again in 1652 when it was clogged “by the throwing in of offal and other garbage by butchers, saucemen, and others, and by reason of the many houses of office standing over upon it.” A “house of office” was a public lavatory. It was now in its lower reaches a brown soup.
    Ben Jonson’s poem “On the Famous Voyage” (1612), celebrates—if that is the word—a journey up the Fleet at the beginning of the seventeenth century:
                   In the first iawes appear’d that ugly monster
                   Yclepèd Mud, which, when their oares did once stirre,
                   Belched forth an aire, as hot as the muster
                   Of all your night-tubs, when the carts doe cluster,
                   Who shall discharge first his merd-urinous load …
                   The sinks ran grease, and hair of measled hogs,
                   The heads, boughs, entrails, and the hides of dogs.
    He goes on to enquire:
                      How dare
                   Your daintie nostrils (in so hot a season,
                   When every clerke eates artichokes and peason,
                   Laxative lettus, and such windie meat)
                   Tempt such a passage? When each privies seate
                   Is fill’d with buttock? And the walls doe sweate
                   Urine and plaisters?
    A hundred years later Jonathan Swift, observing the waters flowing under Holborn Bridge, remarked in“A Description of a City Shower” (1710) that:
                   Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts and Blood,
                   Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud,
                   Dead Cats and Turnips-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.
    After the Great Fire of 1666Sir Christopher Wren determined to replace the river of shit with a river of majesty. He widened the Fleet and gave it some of the characteristics of a Venetian canal, with wharves of stone on either side and with a grand newHolborn bridge. This bridge was found beneath the ground in 1826, having in the end been surmounted by the rubbish of the city. Forty years after Wren’s renovation Ned Ward, in
The London Spy
(1703), remarked that “the greatest good that I ever heard it did was to the undertaker, who is bound to acknowledge he has found better fishing in that muddy stream than ever he did in clear water.” George