River Walbrook


The Walbrook is a subterranean river in the City of London that gave its name to the Walbrook City ward and a minor street in its vicinity.
The Walbrook is one of many "lost" rivers of London, the most famous of which is the River Fleet. It played a very important role in the Roman settlement of Londinium, the city now known as London.

Name

The etymology begins soon after Londinium was captured by the invading Anglo-Saxons in the late 6th century. It is thought that the brook's name comes from weala broc meaning "brook of the foreigners". Another theory is that it was so named because it ran through or under the London Wall.
The main branch flowing from the parish of Shoreditch was known as the Deepditch, Flood Ditch or just The Ditch.

Division of the City

Walbrook divided the city into two hills: Ludgate Hill to the west and Cornhill to the east.
It is thought that in the Anglo-Saxon period there may have been two Stallerships in the City, one for the land west of the river, and one for the east. Even beyond the walls, the river separated landholdings, with the Soke of Cripplegate to the west and the Soke of Bishopsgate to the east. By the 11th century the two halves of the City had a distinct economy, character, customs and regulations.
The division of the City into two parts persisted even to the time of John Stow, writing 1603

Impact of London's Wall

seems to have had an unintended impact on the river, acting like a dam to impede the flow of the river and create the marshy conditions which characterised the open space at Moorfields. The wall's surrounding ditch may have diverted some of the water that would otherwise have gone through the City.

Course

The Walbrook had many small tributaries and the course of the various branches are ill-mapped and ill-understood. Each new excavation in the area brings a refined understanding.
Modern maps of London in the Roman period show the Walbrook as having many tributaries. Roman London - a New Map and Guide shows six branches. Most of these branches are to the West of the main stream.

Within London's Wall

The brook flowed southward through the centre of the walled city, bringing a supply of fresh water whilst carrying waste away to the River Thames, at Dowgate; it effectively divided the settlement in two.
Stow in the 16th century suggested there was a branch, called the Langbourne to the east, rising at St Katherine Coleman and running SW along Fenchurch Street, along Lombard Street, into Sherbourne Lane and presumably into the Walbrook. Later scholars have been doubtful. Ralph Merrifield reported a stream flowing SW through the area that would later be the Roman Forum, which would have flown into this putative stream in Lombard Street. The main mentioned at the top of this section reports another stream called the 'Lorteburn' flowing directly into the Thames; perhaps there has been confusion between these various streams.
It emerged just to the west of the present-day Cannon Street Railway Bridge. During Roman times it was also used for transport, with the limit of navigation some 200 m from the Thames, where the Bucklersbury building now stands. It was there the Romans built a port and temple to Mithras on the east bank of the stream. The temple was found and later excavated during rebuilding work after World War II. The Roman Governor's palace was found further down the east bank of the stream, near its entry into the Thames.

Covered over

When the church of St Margaret Lothbury was rebuilt in 1440, the Lord Mayor Robert Large paid for the lower Walbrook to be covered over. By the time of the first maps of the area, the "copperplate" map of the 1550s and the derivative "Woodcut" map of c.1561, the whole Walbrook within the city walls was culverted. John Stow, the historian of London, wrote about the Walbrook in 1598, saying that the watercourse, having several bridges, was afterwards vaulted over with brick and paved level with the streets and lanes where it passed and that houses had been built so that the stream was hidden as it is now.

Modern developments

In the 1860s, excavations by General Augustus Pitt Rivers uncovered a large number of human skulls, but almost no other bones, in the bed of the Walbrook. This has been seen as reminiscent of a passage in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain in which a legion of Roman soldiers who surrendered to Asclepiodotus after being besieged in London were decapitated by his allies the Venedoti, and their heads thrown into a river called the Gallobroc. However, Geoffrey's History is unreliable, and other theories have been proposed. Some historians consider these skulls to be a result of the rebellion of Boudica. In the late 20th century, archaeologists proposed that the skulls represented ritual deposits of heads related to the Celtic cult of the head. Excavations in Drapers Gardens in the early 21st century revealed a cemetery in which graves had been scoured by the River Walbrook, and it was suggested that skulls might come from this. More recently, the skulls have been dated mostly to the early 2nd century AD, and it has again been suggested that the skulls are the consequence of an anti-Roman rebellion in the 120s when London suffered a second major fire often called the Hadrianic fire.
The construction of the massive infrastructure of the London sewerage system, with five main sewers, incorporated many existing culverts, storm sewers, and sluices. This included the culverted Walbrook, which by 1860 had been linked into a network of 82 miles of new sewerage lines, channelled to the Northern Low Level Sewer at a point near the Bank of England. Many small leaks stream into the rounded sewer for much of the year when the water table is high enough.
On 18 June 1999, during the "Carnival Against Capitalism", timed to coincide with the 25th G8 summit, fire hydrants were opened along the route of the Walbrook by Reclaim the Streets, symbolically releasing the river to "reclaim the street" from the "capitalist forces" of city growth which had subsumed it.