The source of the #Tyburn: the bucolically named Shepherd’s Well. The waters from the spring were famously clear, & until well into the 19th century rose amid spreading fields... 
The name of the neighbouring house & passageways still bear witness to the vanished spring, & the pastoral quality of its environs... #Tyburn
What Freud - who spent the last year of his life beside the #Tyburn - would have made of London’s lost rivers, buried & suppressed, who can say?
I learn from @teabolton’s excellent guide that this stretch of the river boasts the highest concentration of psychiatrists in the UK
I learn from @teabolton’s excellent guide that this stretch of the river boasts the highest concentration of psychiatrists in the UK
Not the most thrilling of photos, but the white car is parked directly over the #Tyburn. The dip in Adelaide Road is just about visible...
This, in happier times, was once a cricket ground. The #Tyburn was literally its boundary. In 1863 a UFO was spotted here, “3 times as brilliant as Venus, & moving from east to west.”
And so we enter St John’s Wood, where once the crystalline waters of the #Tyburn flowed through a wood owned by the Knights of St John...
The pipes spanning the Regent’s Canal on Charlbert Bridge are apparently an aqueduct, transporting the #Tyburn into Regent’s Park...
Winfield House, given to the US government in 1947 by the much-married Woolworth heiress (& Cary Grant’s ex), Barbara Hutton. It’s the home of the US ambassador. The only stretch of the #Tyburn above ground flows through its gardens - but alas, I lack the security clearance...
The Boating Lake in Regent’s Park, originally created in the early 19th century by damming the #Tyburn. The finger of the lake which leads to the grounds of Winfield House is, according to @teabolton, “the closest we will come to seeing the Tyburn above ground.”
The waters of the #Tyburn flow over the Circle Line at Baker Street in a large iron conduit...
When you know it’s there, you spot it: a faint dip in the Marylebone Road, marking where the #Tyburn crosses it. The trace elements of London’s vanished natural geography are so haunting...
Picture yourself in a boat on a river...
The #Tyburn flows under 40 Montagu Mansions, where in 1964 the Beatles went to a New Year’s Eve party, & the site of the Apple Boutique, where they blew all their money on Magic Alex 🍏
The #Tyburn flows under 40 Montagu Mansions, where in 1964 the Beatles went to a New Year’s Eve party, & the site of the Apple Boutique, where they blew all their money on Magic Alex 🍏
The reason the playground is so much higher than the street-level is because 80,000 bodies lie buried beneath Paddington Gardens - which was once a burial ground... #Tyburn
In the 18th century, the #Tyburn was known locally as the Eye Brook
Another ghostly echo of the #Tyburn, just off Marylebone Lane, which twists & winds, exactly following the course of the river...
Listening out for the waters of the #Tyburn on Marylebone Lane
The #Tyburn flows down here to Oxford St - & to commemorate its riverine character, this lovely carving shows St Christopher carrying the infant Christ on his shoulders across a ford
This stretch of Oxford Street was originally called #Tyburn Street, & led to the gallows at Tyburn Hill - now Marble Arch
South Molton Lane, which exactly follows the line of the #Tyburn as it flows through Mayfair, now one of the wealthiest pieces of real estate on the planet, was once, back in the 18th century, so sewage-oppressed by the river that it was called Poverty Lane
Avery Street - built over the #Tyburn in the 1720s by Henry Avery - marks the eastern boundary of the Grosvenor Estate. Shops in the Conduit Mead Estate, on the facing side of the Tyburn, still pay rents that were originally set in 1754
There may be no nightingales singing in Berkeley Square, but the waters of the #Tyburn can be heard flowing loudly just off it, opposite Umu in Bruton Place
Awwww! It feels like the #Tyburn is personally welcoming us!
The view from Piccadilly westwards, towards Hyde Park Corner, & eastwards, towards Piccadilly Circus, at the point where the #Tyburn crosses it. Shallow it may be, but we are clearly in a river valley. (I’d never realised this before...)
The #Tyburn flows directly in front of Buckingham Palace. Queen Victoria is sitting on top of a sewer...
Back in the 11th century, when Edward the Confessor was building Westminster Abbey, the #Tyburn flowed into the marshes that surrounded the abbey, on Thorney Island. At some point, though, it was diverted westwards, towards what is now Pimlico. So that’s where we head!
Another reminder that the #Tyburn was also called the Eye Brook. The line of Aylesford Street, winding & curving, heads towards what, in the early 20th century, was the last stretch of the river to be covered: Tyburn Creek
Yay - journey’s end! The #Tyburn joins the Thames almost directly opposite the Effra - the route of which was also a wonderful journey of discovery...
https://twitter.com/holland_tom/status/1098906567271989250?s=21
The #Tyburn is the third of London’s buried rivers we’ve followed, after the #Fleet & the #Effra. They would not have been half as enjoyable without @teabolton’s wonderful book - massively recommended!
PS If you live in London but can’t face doing the whole of the #Tyburn, I do recommend following the line of the river through Mayfair. You will never see its street-plan the same way again...
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