[#] Wherever there are such brooks the same phenomenon appears. Visitors to Nice may have witnessed the sudden rise of the Paillon, and the Birsig at Basle, usually a fine thread of water, has repeatedly risen five or six feet high in the market-place of that town.
Here we take our leave of the Fleet, and proceeding westward, find nothing to arrest our steps till we come to a spot which once went by the name of the Strand Bridge; not Waterloo Bridge, which originally was so called, but a ’fair bridge,’ as Stow calls it, erected many hundred years ago over a brook which crossed the Strand opposite to the present Strand Lane, and descended from the ponds in Fickett’s Fields, part of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, now all built over. This bridge probably disappeared about the year 1550, when an Act was passed for paving the streets east and west of Temple Bar, and ’Strand Bridge’ is specially mentioned in the Act; the paving of the Strand seems to have done away with the brook and the bridge over it. The name of Strand Bridge was also given to the landing-stage at the bottom of Strand Lane, which descends in a tortuous line from the Strand down to the Thames. In this lane there is at the present day the old Roman bath, which, it is supposed, is supplied from the well which gave its name to Holywell Street, and which supply never fails.
There are no written records or other traces of any brook descending from the northern heights through London west of the Strand, till we come to the Tyburn.
This brook, like the Fleet, took its rise near Hampstead, but turning westward, and receiving several tributary streamlets, it ran due south through the Regent’s Park, where it was joined by another affluent from the site of the present Zoological Gardens, from which point it turned to the west and crossed the Marylebone Road opposite Gloucester Terrace, and after running parallel with it for a short distance it took a sharp turn to the east, following the hollow in which the present Marylebone Lane stands, the windings of which indicate the course of the brook. On reaching the southern end of High Street, it again turned to the south, crossed Oxford Street, ran down part of South Molton Street, turned west again to the south of Berkeley Square; thence it flowed through the narrow passage between the gardens of Lansdowne House and Devonshire House, whose hollow sound seems to indicate the existence of the watercourse below. It next crossed Piccadilly, ran due south through the Green Park, passed under Buckingham Palace, directly after which it divided into three branches, one of which ran through the ornamental water in St. James’s Park, whence it fell into the Thames: the middle branch ran into the ancient Abbey at Westminster, where it turned the mills the monks had erected there. But from old maps it appears that this arm of the Tyburn, at a point a little north-west of the Abbey, threw out a branch which in a northerly course rejoined the park, and then in a curved line to the east reached the Thames at a point not far from Westminster Bridge, and to the north-east of it. The spot where this branch touched St. James’s Park was close to Storey’s Gate. Now last year (1898) when the ground was being excavated for the foundations of the new Institute of Mechanical Engineers, the workmen came upon the piles and brickwork of an ancient wharf. The structure was wonderfully well preserved; it had evidently been well constructed, probably by the monks, and may have been for the accommodation of the fishermen bringing their goods to the monastery. But at present, and until further information is obtained, if ever it is obtained, we can only form conjectures as to the purposes of the wharf; but its discovery on that spot is curiously illustrative of the history which still lies hidden under our streets.