London’s Water
Under London’s busy streets forgotten rivers run:
Westbourne. Holbourne and the Fleet, all shielded from the sun,
Springing from the ancient fonts, which once the city took
To succour thirsty thousands, who built beside the brook.
Our bold forefathers drank their fill from sparkling, rippling rills
That flowed from Hampstead’s teeming ponds upon North London’s hills.
From Tyburn grim to Hackney Brook they savoured, crystal clear,
The purest water in the South, no need for mead or beer.
But, as the population grew, the bubbling brooks grew rank.
With sewage, muck and garbage filled, the streamlets stalled and stank
And, as the mediaeval folk were felled by plague from fleas,
Our rancid rat-filled rivers ran with danger and disease.
As good King Henry Third obtained new water from the marsh
That stood by Tyburn’s grassy fields, now under Marble Arch,
The poorer peasants supped, unstopped, from foetid Father Thames
All risking death from cholera, those sickly citizens.
Though Peter Morice tried to raise more water by a wheel
Which, in one arch of London Bridge, he built with craft and skill,
The daring Dutchman didn’t know the peril people faced
From drinking dirty ditchwater which down the river raced.
When the New River cut its course from distant river Lea
And made its way to Sadler’s Wells, where now lithe dancers reel,
The city’s health improved, no doubt, but rubbish still was thrown
Into the ever-filthier Thames, where barges ferried stone.
As many fortune seekers came to streets not paved with gold,
Then overcrowded hovels covered up the waters cold
And culverts carried underground the filthy River Fleet;
Its name now just remembered in that famous press-men’s street.
But Doctor Snow soon saw that dirty water played its part
In decimating denizens who dwelled in Soho’s heart
And, when he closed the Broad Street pump, he saved unnumbered men
And stopped an epidemic breaking, in Victoria’s reign.
When the Great Stink enforced MPs to vote at Parliament
To solve the sanitation problems, swiftly, to prevent
The closing of the capital to all but lower ranks,
Brave Bazalgette stepped up to reinforce the riverbanks.
Under the new Embankment, he made a massive pipe
To take away the sludge and slime that smelt so rank and ripe
To Barking in the poor man’s East where they would never know
That there, into the river, ran the sewage overflow.
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poem by C. Richard Miles
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