We have yet to mention the third branch of the Tyburn, which started south of Buckingham Palace. It ran in a southerly direction across Victoria Street, for a short distance skirted the Vauxhall Bridge Road, then crossed it and ran through the marshy grounds then existing down to the Thames a little to the west of Vauxhall Bridge.
Such was the course of the Tyburn. Of the bridges that once must have crossed it not a vestige remains; but we have the record of one which was at the spot which is now Stratford Place, and where the Lord Mayor’s Banqueting-house stood, to which he resorted when he, the Aldermen, and other distinguished citizens went to inspect the head conduits from which the City conduits were supplied, on which occasions they combined pleasure with business, hunting the hare before and the fox after dinner. The Tyburn must at one time have been a stream of considerable size; in the year 1238 it was so copious as to furnish nine conduits for supplying the City with water. It had rows of elms growing on its banks, and as it generally, but erroneously, is supposed to have flowed past the southern corner of the Edgware Road, the name of Elm Place was given to a street (now pulled down) west of Connaught Place. How this error arose we shall show when speaking of the West Bourne. On the Tyburn stood the church of St. Mary _la bonne_; by the vulgar omission of letters ’burn’ became ’bone,’ hence Marylebone. The Tyburn, like the other brooks already discussed, is now a mere sewer.
Proceeding still further west, we come to the Westbourne, which, like the other brooks, rose in the northern heights above London. Around Jack Straw’s Castle at Hampstead various rills sprang from the ground, which, forming a united stream a little north of the Finchley Road, that stream, flowing west towards the spot known as West End, continued its western course till it reached Maygrove Road; it crossed that road, and taking a sudden turn south, it ran through Kilburn down to Belsize Road, south of which a small lake was formed, by its confluence there with a considerable tributary in the form of a two-pronged fork and its handle, coming from the lower southern heights of Hampstead. From the lake the Westbourne flowed in a westerly course, and near Cambridge Road received another affluent from the high ground where Paddington Cemetery now stands; still running west at Chippenham Road, its volume was further increased by the reception of a stream coming from the neighbourhood of Brondesbury, and from this point it ran due south, but with many windings, through Paddington, and across the Uxbridge Road, through part of Kensington Gardens, through the Serpentine in Hyde Park and across the Knightsbridge Road, and what was then called the Five Fields, a miserable swamp, and formed the eastern boundary of Chelsea till it discharged itself into the Thames, west of Chelsea Bridge, but divided into a considerable number of small streams.