a few people were asking about the Tyburn after the Big Royal Dig. I hope this is enough for you though I advise digging out a map!! _
I've had my copy of the "Lost Rivers of London" by N. Barton open since Monday and I've been puzzling the problem of the lower course of this minor tributory of the Thames as the live TV progressed. I waited for the final summary programme with interest but things got heavily edited down and it wasn't entirely clear. I doubt that a single TT trench can alone answer all the questions even if they try to sell the argument. Many of these streams moved their courses up and down along the flood plain where the riverfront was nearly flat.
To set the scene and clear up a couple of confusions, the River Tyburn was always a minor stream between the two larger tributaries, the Westbourne and the Fleet, either side of it. The Westbourne rises from Kilburn and the west side of Hampstead Heath, passes just west of Paddington and through the middle of Hyde Park where it is dammed up to form the Serpentine boating lake whereafter it flows under 'Knightsbridge'. You can then 'see' it in it's square steel culvert as it crosses over the platforms of Sloane Square tube station. Thence down to the main river looping around the Royal Hospital. Two strings of ponds (recent dispute over whether bathing <brrrr> for locals should be free or not) hold the feeder waters from the Hampstead and Highgate sides of the main part of Hamstead Heath which make the main source of the river Fleet. The Fleet is a sort of liquid Northern Line flowing past Kentish Town, Camden Town and Kings Cross. The very noticeable V-notch in the back lanes between the old 'New Times Building' and the main Mount Pleasant Post Office is very clear before the Fleet joins Farringdon Street and Ludgate Circus where, as the 'Fleet Ditch', it was famously a stinking sewer in the 18thC. Wren designed a Venetian-style up-market development around the inlet from Ludgate Circus downwards but it was quickly a failure as lowly commerce intruded and it was all covered over within half-a-century.
The Tyburn is left to drain the space in between the Fleet and Westbourne; it catches some run off from the southern edge of the Heath and the Belsize Park area through St. John's Wood into Regent's Park where it feeds the lakes in the park there. The rectangular symmetry of the planned grid of Georgian streets between Marylebone Road and Oxford Street is broken by the winding Marylebone Lane which is the exact line of the Tyburn until it was culverted and became a road. After parting with lower Marylebone Lane it crosses Oxford St at an undetermined point (although probably misidentified in various construction excavations during the last century). Oxford St dips going west from Bond St Station so it must be somewhere around there. Going across Mayfair it passes Grosvenor and Berkley Squares, bisecting Green Park, then emerges at the front of Buck House and the Victoria Memorial. Here the problem starts but first a couple of side-points:
1] first is a confusion over the gallows at 'Tyburn' for public executions. The river Westbourne had a small side-stream which was called the Tyburn Brook running from just by Marble Arch into the middle of the current Serpentine Lake. Barton is somewhat ambiguous about this but implies that the tiny brook might have got its name from the nearby gallows site. The Tyburn place name occurs as a manor further upstream and Oxford St was Tyburn Rd for a period as Park Lane was once Tyburn Lane. Tyburn Way is a tiny leg, just to the left of Marble Arch, probably now only for buses, taxis... ...and royal funeral processions {sic!}.
2] during day 3, Mick referred to water coming from Hyde Park which is incorrect if he meant natural water courses; there is a problem in that the Abbots of Westminster did pipe water from Hyde Park - presumably around the contours of Constitution Hill somehow - despite the swampy nature of the much closer St James Park area. One guess is that this source was deemed unsafe to drink. _
The competiting theories about the final route of the Tyburn basically boil down to whether it either turns right at Buckingham Palace to the Westminster Abbey precinct via St James Pk or goes straight on roughly southwards east of Victoria Stn to Vauxhall Bridge passing Pimlico tube station or else both routes - themselves either together or at separate times. Addtionally, TT may have found a channel more to the south-west perhaps an early post-ice-age course.
Two suggestions are made for the etymology of Tyburn; one is Teo-burna or 'two bournes' suggesting the bifurcation of the watercourse and the other is a Frisian term meaning boundary stream - each hinting at alternative theories.
The evidence is good for the monastic precinct of the Abbey of Westminster being an island in late Saxon times; the Charters of Offa and Edgar both describe the Abbey on 'Thornea Island', i.e. ~ea=eyot=island - the island of brambles or thorns. The topographical and underground evidence further confirms this as in construction trenches a small bridge and the steep dip in the natural clay were found at Great College St. bounding the Abbey. Earliest maps show a stream entering Westminster from the west traces of which were found north of Abbey Orchard Street after it which would have split around the island. A disastrous flood in 1928 turned Westminster back into Thorney Island where all else was water again, for example the Tate Gallery flooded filling the basement galleries.
The Thorney Island route is further evidenced in Edgar's 951 Charter in the clear description of the boundaries of the Abbey estate which is bounded in the north by the 'Broad Military Way', i.e. Oxford St to High Holborn, then to the east by the short lower reach of the River Fleet and 'London Fen'. The Thames forms a meandering south-east frontage and finally the detail of the western boundary is the interesting bit. The Tyburn from Oxford St to Cowford {=Buck House} is specifically mentioned as the boundary (note: Cowford is recorded in 951 over a century before Domesday as said during one BRD transmission). Thereafter the estate edge follows a sequence of landmarks; from Cowford the 'old ditch' (roughly towards Victoria) , Bulinga Fen (a marshy stretch), Pollenstock (perhaps a row of poll{ard}ed willows) and finally to 'Merflete' (a boundary inlet/stream) near Vauxhall Bridge probably just to the west of it. Mere can mean either lake/marsh or boundary, both Germanic roots, but the former etymology would make Merefleet somewhat tautologous. If this line was the active course of the Tyburn at the time, it would surely have said so even though we know this became the line of a sewer by the mid 17thC. The 'old ditch' may have been either man made or as likely a dry stream bed only carrying away heavy or winter rains and floods when flow down the Tyburn didn't want to make a sharp turn at 'Cowford'. _
What's the probable story?
As early as 1236 a conduit was constructed intercepting water from the Tyburn at Oxford St. piping a water supply to The City of London, always short of water supplies from the earliest times. If this reduced the Tyburn markedly except in flood conditions, it may have dwindled into the marsh in St. James Park that Henry VIII was known to have drained. Should the Tyburn have become too unhealthy or too unreliable in the summer this may explain why (unclear but Barton implies before 1612) Westminster Abbey resorted to building a conduit from the river Westbourne at Hyde Park to satisfy its water needs. Both these conduits would have followed the contours of the topography at a shallower descent than the natural tributaries rather like contour aqueducts for Roman towns did. The former skirted the edge of the West End and was carried across the old Fleet Bridge (close to the modern Holborn Viaduct) into the City decanting into a cistern in Cheapside; this was quite a feat of civil engineering for its day. But I remain rather troubled by potential routes for the Abbey's conduit.
Furthermore, springs were tapped progressively further out towards Paddington in the 14th and 15th centuries, implying the Tyburn was delivering insufficient water for the demand from The City.
However, as previously alluded to, by the time of the Eburne Manor plan of 1663-70 the Tyburn is shown following the southern course, connecting the landmarks mentioned above, as the sewer 'Kingschoole Sluice' or King's Scholars' Pond Sewer as named in documents of that period. Today the street following this line beyond King's Scholars' Passage is called Tachbrook St. There is no sign of the easterly course to Westminster on the survey.
There is a photo printed in Barton of the lower end of the King's Scholars' Pond Sewer (or Tachbrook sluice if you want to call it that at this point) showing it still to be open from Lupus St down to Bazalgette's modern embankment at Vauxhall Bridge. It's a dry bed square concrete lined storm sewer about 20' across and 15' deep - quite a substantial thing - but certainly no active stream in it, just a storm sluice (note: a 1924 witness report of this in flood). With land prices now so extreme this could well have been built over in recent years as part of an area re-developement - worth a look next time at the Tate. _
So finally, what about the possible prehistoric course that the BRD found on the final day of the Bank Holiday? Well, it's not entirely clear where it was but one thing is sure - Constitution Hill lies to the west - so it won't be running uphill!! With the mention at Victoria's accession in 1837 of poor drainage and flooding (perhaps lack of run-off from all those huge roofs and large paved areas in the palace courtyard) and the 2 static canals of St James Pk and the 18thC Buck House, water was not far away even if not in great quantify and not too difficult to control into desired use.
Once Constitution Hill slopes away on the south there was probably very little separating the beds of the rivers Westbourne and the line of the Tackbrook sewer. In prehistory there may well have been a course going a bit west of south connecting with the river Westbourne or going through Victoria down what was dug as the Grosvenor Canal by the Chelsea Water Company in the 18thC. Victoria Station was the company's resevoir and they operated early Newcomen Engines to pump water up to Hyde Park until railway mania bought it all up, filled in most of the canal for the bed of the railway lines and new station.
There are two reasons of geography why the Tachbrook sewer was unlikely to be a recent natural course of the Tyburn because the outlet is on the inner bend of a floodplain meander of the Thames whereas these normally form on either the outer bend or a straight section; also on the other side of Vauxhall Bridge is the outlet to the River Effra, one of the southern tributaries (and close to the site of a Time Team dig on the Thames foreshore a few years back!) and apparently two opposing streams are also hydrologically unstable. Hopefully a geographer/geologist can explain to us how these processes work in detail but the shifting meanders move downwards towards the sea directing the streams with them.
However, look back 2000, 4000, 6000 years with minor changes up and down of sea level then along the Thames river front we can easily imagine gravel terraces submerging and reappearing; changes in the meanders follow, with eyots forming and eroding and water channels switching their routes back and forth. That's the natural forces but human intervention has changed the river ever since the Romans founded Londinium and rubbish began to fill in the river Walbrook from the 1stC and port frontages were built out from the banks; Thorney Island may have been re-ditched for defensive purposes before even the monks of Westminster settled there. There were dozens of mills all down the river and up the inlets going back to medieval times. Many of these were tide mills including Westminster (mentioned in a 1475 lease) and the inlet may have been enlarged to make the storage reservoir larger so modifying the inlet quite early in history; this is a reminder that we find by survey or archaeology may no longer represent the original landscape when and where we might expect to find it. _
A passing thought before you make your bedtime cocoa: one of the earlier Time Teams, way back when, was an attempt to hunt for the hypothesised Roman river crossing (by ford) at Westminster - they looked at bit further towards Lambeth Bridge and grubbed around Lambeth Palace gardens. Roman occupation traces have also been found on Thorney Island under the Abbey so a settlement there is plausible. Wherever the ford was exactly located, the road would have had to pick its way around the Tyburn whatever its route was in AD43. The certain starting point is the junction of Watling St (Edgware Rd) with Oxford St at Marble Arch and Park Lane is more or less in line, so this leaves the intriging possibility that Roman road crossed Buckingham Palace Gardens too!!
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hope not too many typos... sourced mostly from Barton [revised 1992] reassembling the parts on the Tyburn fragmented over several chapters and etymology checks from the Shorter O.E.D.
Thanks for that, Pete. I thought the Tyburn rang a bell. The Vauxhall prog was shown the year of the Foot and Mouth outbreak. Yes, I remember vthe older prog too. They were looking for the crossing with Gustav Milne and therre was the idea that there was a sandbank stretching across to Thorney Island.
I like your idea about the road carrying on under Buck House.
thanks Steffan, so at least one person has read it! Page views have slowly clocked up to 90 at time of posting - it seems if you discuss the detail of the archaeology or finds of a TT programmes no-one bothers but if the thread topic has the words Tony, Phil, Mick, MDing, St George etc. in it then hundreds or thousands read it!
Your post was really interesting, especially the discussion on the lower reaches of the Tyburn and Kingschoole Sluice. I have been trying to find out more information about this place in particular as my great-great-grandfather was the 'Engineer in Charge' of the the pumping house where Kingschoole Sluice meets the Thames near Vauxhall Bridge. He and his family were listed as living there in the 1901 census and to find out some background information about the place and the waterway he worked on is fantastic.
I have recently been to the site and there is a plaque stating that Rio Cottage (the name listed in the 1901 census) was built in 1832, and although a small cottage is still on the site, it appears that the current building is newer or at least has had substaintial development since its days as a pumping house.
As you say, it is likely that the sluice has now been developed over. It enters the Thames as a tunnel from under Rio Cottage and still has no obvious flow of water in it.
At http://london.openguides.org/index.cgi?Lost_Rivers is a map that shows the different courses the Tyburn may have taken after Buckingham Palace - showing both the island around Westminster Abbey and the route south through Victoria and Pimlico.
I note that your summary of the Abbey Estate boundary from the 951 Charter mentions an area called Bulinga Fen. This is also the name of the area at the time of the 1901 census but, as far as I am aware, the name is no longer is use at all apart from Bulinga Street located near the Tate Gallery.
Originally posted by Pete: thanks Steffan, so at least one person has read it! Page views have slowly clocked up to 90 at time of posting - it seems if you discuss the detail of the archaeology or finds of a TT programmes no-one bothers but if the thread topic has the words Tony, Phil, Mick, MDing, St George etc. in it then hundreds or thousands read it!
Interesting Pete, but do remember that not all of us are bothered about London archaeology, some of us live in other places
