The London Daily Newsletter Friday 23 June

River Westbourne
The easternmost branch of the River Westbourne rises just south of the centre of Hampstead,

There is another branch which rises at Whitestone Pond, Hampstead Heath which flows approximately southward. It meets this eastern branch in Kilburn – to skirt east of Hyde Park’s Serpentine lake after about 3.3 miles, to Sloane Square, Chelsea after about 1 mile, passes centrally under the south side of Royal Hospital Chelsea’s Ranelagh Gardens after about half a mile, then issues into the Inner London Tideway. In common with several urbanised streams, its basin contributes to a network of storm drainage channels, with a sewer beneath its route. The river was originally called the Kilburn (Cye Bourne – royal stream, ’Bourne’ being an Anglo-Saxon word for ’river’) but has been known, at different times and in different places, as Kelebourne, Kilburn, Bayswater, Bayswater River, Bayswater Rivulet, Serpentine River, The Bourne, Westburn Brook, the Ranelagh River, and the Ranelagh Sewer. It is of similar size to the Fleet. The waters of the Westbourne were originally pure and in 1437 and 1439 conduits were laid to carry water from the Westbourne into the City of London, for drinking. In the nineteenth century, however, the water became filthy and impure by its use as a sewer, and the rise of the water closet as the prevailing form of sanitation. When Belgravia, Chelsea and Paddington were developed, it became necessary to drive the river Westbourne underground to build over it. The river was therefore directed into pipes in the early part of the nineteenth century, work which was completed in the 1850s. Since then, the Westbourne has been one of the lost rivers of London, running underground in a pipe. The pipe can still be seen running above the platform of Sloane Square tube station. It is located just below the ceiling towards the end of the platforms closest to the exits. The pipe is the original one constructed in the nineteenth century. Although the station was badly bombed during the Battle of Britain in November 1940, the old iron pipe was not damaged. A vestige of the river, a wide quay opens into the river Thames about 300 yards west of Chelsea Bridge. An overflow outfall, from a pipe named the Ranelagh Sewer, can still be seen at low tide, as most of the Westbourne’s course has been used as a convenient depression in the land to place the local sewerage system, some of which takes surface water to form a combined sewer which links to two intercept sewers, the Middle Level Sewer and the Northern Low Level Sewer in the London sewerage system.

TUM Book Club: Old Covent Garden
The magic of the old Covent Garden Market is evoked through Clive Boursnell’s photographs, taken over the course of numerous visits to Covent Garden in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Clive Boursnell, then a young photographer, shot thousands of photographs of the old Covent Garden, documenting the end of an era before the markets moved out of central London. Boursnell captured these last days of the market over a period of six years, from 1968 until the market’s closure, in a series of beautiful portraits of the feisty life of a city institution.

Wapping, 1860-1864

James McNeill Whistler

Video: Flying into LCY
A simulated flight into LCY courtesy of Google Earth Studio.