The Fields Beneath Read Online Free PDF Page B

watercourse since, above a certain population density, human beings seem inevitably to pollute and foul their streams. The Fleet was still open just north of St Pancras church in the early nineteenth century, perhaps because this was then a very sparsely populated area, but a large segment disappeared underground when the Regent’s Canal was constructed. (It crosses under the canal, but for a little way through Camden Town the canal takes the exact route of the old river, as if replacing it.) It was still capable, in the 1820s, of causing floods in the Kentish Town area, principally at the point where it crossed under the lower part of what is now Kentish Town High Road and what was known for centuries before as ‘Water Lane’. Indeed the watery habits of the Fleet made themselves known again at that point some twenty-five years later, when the North London Junction Railway was being constructed by unwary engineers and several arches of the viaduct collapsed with a rush of water at the foundations. Further up, its fluctuating levels did less harm. In 1825 the pond where the stream crossed under Highgate Road (near the entrance to College Lane) was said to be thirteen feet wide at flood, and so it was there that the water-carts regularly came. A house where the carters refreshed themselves, Bridge House, stood there and in fact still stands (but see page 16), disguised behind the pebbledashed modern facade of a metal dealer’s offices.
    But the population explosion experienced by Kentish Town as the nineteenth century went on – the transformation scene which will be a dominant theme in this book – had a terrible effect on the Fleet, which suffered the fate of rivers up and down the country in that newlyindustrialised era. Typical of many general laments for the lost stream, that archetypal playground of lost childhood, lost innocence, is that of James Hole, a housing reformer of the same generation as the great sanitary propagandist, Edwin Chadwick. He wrote in 1866: ‘The inhabitant whose memory can carry him back thirty years recalls pictures of rural beauty, suburban mansions and farmsteads, green fields, waving trees and clear streams where fish could live – where now can be seen only streets, factories and workshops, and a river or brook black as the ink which now runs from our pen describing it.’
    Kentish Town was by then rapidly filling up with inhabitants, increasingly working-class, and between them their cess-pits, street drains and workshops did for the Fleet. As each new area of land disappeared under paving and foundations, another section of the brook was arched over. In 1872 the Metropolitan Board of Works finally encased its whole course, from Highgate Ponds, in a new sewer, some of it as much as fifteen feet below the level of the modern street. Two years earlier, Samuel Palmer, the principal and almost the only historian of St Pancras, had written:
    There still remains a few yards in our parish where the brook runs in its native state. At the back of the Grove, in the Kentish Town Road, is a rill of water, one of the little arms of the Fleet, which is yet clear and untainted. Another arm is at the bottom of the field at the back of the Bull and Last inn, over which is a little wooden bridge leading to the cemetery. [Highgate Cemetery]. It is pleasant of a summer evening to walk the meadow, or lean over the little bridge, and allow fancy to range back when that running rill flowed on to join the River of Wells, pure and clear, which emptied itself into what was then the clear and stainless Thames …
    Palmer’s vision of the primitive world was that of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, every leaf and petal standing out in childlike colour, of Ruskin or of William Morris’s escapist Earthly Paradise , which never existed historically, or at any rate not in the pristine form envisaged:
    Forget the spreading of the hideous town
    Think rather of the packhorse on the down,
    And dream of London, small and