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What better way to celebrate my birthday than to walk across a plague-stricken London to Stepney, there to walk one of the city's more obscure lost rivers? - a river so lost in fact that it is commemorated not as a river at all, but as a sewer: the #BlackDitch
Stepney is first mentioned c. 1000. Stybbanhyð - 'Stybba's landing place' - conjures up romantic images of a Saxon adventurer arriving off whatever Limehouse was called back then, and navigating the river that would one day come to be called the #BlackDitch
In 1913, an antiquarian claimed that the #BlackDitch had originally been called the Barge River, & cites "old records of place names in the parishes and hamlets along the Thames side" as evidence - but if these ever existed, they cannot be found today.
A map of 1746 shows Limekiln Dock, where the #BlackDitch joins the Thames, and a riverlike line inland from Limehouse, next to what is now Mile End Stadium, but back then was still open fields.
"In 1835 there was an old resident of Narrow-street, Limehouse, who recalled through his father, some strange yarns of smugglers and Revenue Officers on the Barge River when it was navigable for ships and boats for a considerable distance at some seasons and tides."
Even if the antiquarian quoted above is correct in calling the river the Barge, a map printed in 1799 suggests that it had already begun to be known as a "Common Sewer" by the end of the 18th century, and was vanishing beneath the eastwards spread of London. #BlackDitch
The #BlackDitch seems to have had three sources: the one at Stepney, and two east of what is now Brick Lane. The rivers which flowed from them are now - as @teabolton puts it in Volume 2 of his wonderful walking guides to London's lost rivers - 'spectral rivers'.
Perhaps, when these alms houses were built nearby the source of the #BlackDitch, it was still a stream & not a sewer...
Behind Stepney Green tube station, this picturesque spot is the likely source of the main tributary of the #BlackDitch. “The Horwood Map of 1799 includes a dead-end street called Spring Garden Court that has now become Stayner’s Road. Its name is highly suggestive” - @teabolton
What is now the Anchor Retail Park in the Mile End Road was, until 1975, Charrington’s Blue Anchor Brewery. The springs which fed the #BlackDitch would have provided the original brewery with clean water.
Beaumont Square - flattened in the Blitz - preserves just a hint of the open green spaces that once surrounded the #BlackDitch. The stream itself had been covered here by the 1790s.
Stepney Green leads down to Stepney Way, site of the splendidly named Great Place, a Tudor mansion supposedly much frequented by Thomas Cromwell. In the 18th C it was the site of the Spring Gardens Coffee House:
At Stepney now, with Cakes & Ale,
Our Tara their Mistresses regale.”
At Stepney now, with Cakes & Ale,
Our Tara their Mistresses regale.”
Some of the houses on Stepney Green are really beautiful. A sweet-flowing sewer would have added wonderfully to the ambience... #BlackDitch
