Sweet Hampstead and Its Associations

by Caroline A. White

Hughson has fallen into the error of regarding Turnmill Brook, or the River of Wells, as one and the same with the Fleet, simply because, as already stated, it was ultimately included in its outlet; but a little examination and research would have shown him that at the time of the making of Domesday Book, the Fleete, the Tybourne, and the Brent, were the principal streams which carried the waters from the northern heights through the Great Forest to the Thames; and that Turnmill Brook, or the River of Wells, was, as he himself observes in another place, formed ‘by the influx of many springs in the neighbourhood,’ and not a substantive and self-supplied stream as the Fleet was. This year, he observes (1503), the ancient River of Wells (afterwards called Fleet Ditch) was cleared, and made navigable for craft as far as Holborn Bridge. Maitland also calls it ‘Fleet Dyke, now Fleet Ditch, the remains of the ancient River of Wells.’ It is all plain enough if we admit the Fleet to have lost its identity in that of the River of Wells, or Turnmill Brook, at an early stage of its set-out from Hampstead Hill.

But unless we take the word ‘Fleete’ in its general Saxon sense as a flood, or mere watercourse, how can we separate the idea of an important stream from one that presumably gave a name to so many objects and places?

It was always a troublesome stream, going wrong immediately after it got to Holborn, as early as 1307.

‘The first mention I find of this watercourse by the name of Fleet,’ says Maitland, quoting Stowe, ‘is in a complaint made to a Parliament held at Carlisle by Henry, Earl of Lincoln (in the above year), setting forth that the watercourse under Fleet Bridge, formerly frequented by many ships, was then, by encroachments and other obstructions, rendered unnavigable.’ And very curiously (recollecting what he has written above of the Fleet Ditch) he goes on to observe that this complaint, through great inattention, is quoted by Stowe to prove that the Fleet was then denominated the River of Wells, whereas from a charter granted by the Conqueror to the Collegiate Church of St. Martin le Grand, and also quoted by Stowe, he had shown the direct contrary in these words:

‘I do give and grant to the same Church all the land and the moor without the postern which is called Cripplegate, on either part of the postern, that is to say, from the North corner of the wall as the River of Wells there near runneth, departeth the same moor from the wall, unto the running water (Wall-brook) which entereth the City.’

Moreover, the most westerly of the springs which fed the River of Wells appears to have been St. Clement’s Well, Clerkenwell, and Skinner’s Well; the others were much more to the east. But in describing the Liberty of St. Sepulchre, Maitland tells us that the street vulgarly called Turnbull Street was anciently called Turnmill Street, from the mills thereon erected by the Knights of St. John, which were wrought by a stream of water from Hampstead and Highgate, which, being apparently dried up, had given occasion to some to represent the same as lost, whereas, had they taken trouble to inquire, they would have found that the said stream was brought to the suburbs of London in two large wooden pipes of 7 inches bore each, the original contrivance of Sir John Hart, probably.

The modern local opinion is that the Fleet had its rise about the middle of the Flask Walk, whence it ran downhill, at the back of the cottages and houses in Willow Walk,[228] to South End Green, where there used to be a pond; thence by what is now Fleet Road, through Kentish Town, to Bagnigge Wells Road,[229] the present King’s Cross Road; and so on by Farringdon Street to the Thames, debouching somewhere about Blackfriars Bridge.

Undoubtedly it rose in the clay on the slope of Hampstead Hill, and, long before the Norman took seizin of our shore, is mentioned in Edgar’s forged charters to the monks at Westminster of land at Paddington, of which it made the eastern boundary, that on the south being the Thames, on the north the Roman Road, and on the west the Tybourne. In maps of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, one stream—the Fleet—is seen descending from the south side of Hampstead Hill.

It is said to have been navigable as far as King’s Cross in Edward I.’s time. When the brothers Storer published their ‘History of Clerkenwell,’ in 1828, they tell us that from a point in their parochial boundary the banks of the Fleet River were seen to jut out in little wild crags, and break into miniature precipices, as it meandered originally between green slopes at the foot of the uplands, clothed with umbrageous trees.