River Fleet

The River Fleet is the largest of London’s subterranean rivers, all of which today contain foul water for treatment. Its headwaters are two streams on Hampstead Heath, each of which was dammed into a series of ponds—the Hampstead Ponds and the Highgate Ponds—in the 18th century. At the southern edge of Hampstead Heath these descend underground as sewers and join in Camden Town. The waters flow 4 mi (6 km) from the ponds, having as combined sewers taken on foul water, in the Victorian economic but grandiose scheme designed by Joseph Bazelgette to be conveyed by very large sewers to be treated at Beckton Sewage Treatment Works.

The river gives its name to Fleet Street, the eastern end of which is at what was the crossing over the river known as Fleet Bridge, and is now the site of Ludgate Circus.

The river’s name is derived from the Anglo-Saxon flēot “tidal inlet”.[1] In Anglo-Saxon times, the Fleet served as a dock for shipping.

The lower reaches of the river were known as the Holbourne (or Oldbourne), whence Holborn derived its name.[2]

The river gives its name to Fleet Street which runs from Ludgate Circus to Temple Bar at the Strand. In the 1970s, a London Underground tube line was planned to lie under the line of Fleet Street, provisionally named the Fleet line. However, it was renamed the Jubilee line in 1977, and plans for the part of the route through the City of London were subsequently abandoned. An alternative name for the River Fleet was ‘Holborn’, deriving from the word ‘Bourne’, cf ‘Burn’, meaning ‘river’ or ‘stream’. This gave its name to that part of London.