Westminster Abbey and Palace once stood on a small island known as Thorney Island, where the river Tyburn and the river Fleet meet the Thames. The maps of 1593 show the entry points, north and south of Westminster Abbey, where the Tyburn and Fleet flowed into the Thames.
Nowadays most people think the Thames is the only river, flowing like a major artery through the heart of London, but that wasn’t always the case.
There are 21 direct branches of the Thames within inner and greater London. Most of them are now buried deep underground. Their names are a reminder of London’s once agricultural past. The Mutton Brook, The Crane, The Quaggy, and The Silk Stream are but a few. The Falcon’s Brook in Streatham may even be named for Queen Anne Boleyn, as her badge was the Falcon. Or maybe it was just a rich wooded forest where kings practised falconry.
Westminster Abbey derives its name from the Minster in the West. The merchants of Old London controlled the city in the east and had the large Saint Paul’s Cathedral, so King Henry III built Westminster Abbey (on the site of Edward the Confessor’s church) to cement the power of the crown in the west. The island must have seemed almost spiritual, surrounded by rivers with the Abbey in the centre, a brooding presence sometimes shrouded in an ethereal mist.
LONDON’S LOST RIVERS MAP
