Thread by @holland_tom

Massively looking forward to celebrating my 26th wedding anniversary tomorrow with @sadieholland67 by walking London's sleaziest vanished river, the #Neckinger

@sadieholland67 Almost certainly, the #Neckinger derives its name from the 'Devil's Neckcloth', or hangman's noose - the gallows which once stood at the mouth of the river, where pirates used to be hanged.

@sadieholland67 Even by the standards of London's other lost rivers, the #Neckinger was notoriously squalid: winding through the marshes of Lambeth and the mud flats of Southwark, it was lined by asylums, factories and shanty towns. It provided the setting for Bill Sykes' death in Oliver Twist.

@sadieholland67 'The water is covered with a scum almost like a cobweb, and prismatic with grease. In it float large masses of green rotting weed, & against the posts of the bridges are swollen carcasses of dead animals, almost bursting with the gases of putrefaction" - Morning Chronicle (1849)

One exciting possibility for geography fans is that the #Neckinger - because the entire course of the river is flat, with barely a slope - might originally have been an oxbow lake.

Lending credibility to this thesis is that the #Neckinger was linked to the Thames at both ends via artificial conduits. The 3 western channels, on the South Bank, have long since vanished - but an eastern channel can still be seen downstream of Tower Bridge.

It seems the nature of London’s lost rivers always to be shadowed by mystery & uncertainty. Did the #Neckinger, for instance, truly take its name from the gibbet at its eastern mouth? Here, from the early 19th C, is an alternative & altogether less interesting etymology:

And so to the South Bank, which until the late 18th C was part of Lambeth Marshes, low-lying fields marked by dykes & a single raised road, & full of ducks. I learn from @teabolton that in the 14th C it was owned by the Black Prince - hence its original name of ‘Prince’s Meadows’

3 sluices fed the #Neckinger: the westernmost ran from where Waterloo Bridge now stands under the IMAX; the easternmost under Tate Britain. The central sluice ran from what is now the Oxo Tower. No trace of it remains, but its line still marks the boundary of Southwark & Lambeth.

There are lots of waterbirds here, but none of the ducks with which Lambeth Marshes used to teem until the 19th C. Duck-baiting was a favourite sport, held in taverns along the side of the #Neckinger - the most famous, near what’s now the Imperial War Museum, being the Dog & Duck

"Another not less cruel sport still lives in the tavern sign 'Dog and Duck.' The birds were put into a small pond and chased by dogs. Watching the frightened creatures dive to escape their pursuers constituted the chief joy of the performance.” #Neckinger

The street names behind the Oxo Tower still commemorate how, in the 14th century, when a straggle of houses began to appear among the Lambeth Marshes, they had to be built along a network of river walls & dykes #Neckinger

This is all that remains of the “commanding & temple-like” Unitarian chapel on Stamford Street built beside the #Neckinger in 1821, & demolished in 1965

In the 18th C, the #Neckinger ran through open fields where milliners would dry the skins used to make hats 🎩

Opposite @youngvictheatre, on what is now Short St, there used to be a spa, “well known for the cure of all cancerous & scorbutic humours.” In the 19th C, however, a doctor pronounced that the water was “mere soakage from a swamp.” #Neckinger H/t @teabolton

This is a stretch of Lambeth so venerable that a road called Ufford Street turns out to have been named after an Archbishop of Canterbury who died in 1349 before he could be formally consecrated... #Neckinger

This pub used to be called the Half-the-Way Inn. On 27 Nov 1665, Samuel Pepys went for a walk along the #Neckinger, & stopped for a drink there, “it being bitter cold.”

Mead Row was built on water meadows in the 1730s. The Lambeth Asylum for Girls, an orphanage, was built soon after, then a blacking factory, & then in the 1970s a housing cooperative. Its name - Wellington Mills - preserves a trace element of the vanished #Neckinger

William & Catherine Blake lived at the end of the row on which the orphanage stood. Since the girls all wore distinctive uniforms, it is hard to think they were not in his mind when he wrote his great poem, Holy Thursday poetryfoundation.org/poems/43661/ho…

Blake’s house - where he & his wife would sit naked in the garden like Adam & Eve, reciting Paradise Lost to each other - is long gone, but the memory of his name lives on

Anyway, back to the #Neckinger. A pub called the Dog & Duck stood beside it on St George’s Fields until 1799. A school for the blind was then built on the site, & then the new Bethlem Hospital (aka Bedlam). Today it serves as the Imperial War Museum.

The Dog & Duck alludes to the amusement that Londoners used to take in variously shooting ducks or watching them baited & torn to pieces by dogs (see above)

“Saint George’s Fields are fields no more,
The trowel supersedes the plough;
Huge inundated swamps of yore
Are changed to civic villas now.”

1812 doggerel quoted by @teabolton #Neckinger

Here once flowed a river! (To be precise, a stretch of the #Neckinger known as the Lock Stream)

The river & water meadows seem VERY long gone at Elephant & Castle #Neckinger

Let’s not lose everything

The New Kent Road, beside which the #Neckinger flowed, was indeed once flanked by meadows

Here, between Gt Dover Street & Tabard St, but what in the 13th C were open fields through which the Lock Stream flowed, a leper hospital once stood. The last leper was admitted in 1557. It then became a hospital administered by St Bartholomew’s, & was closed in 1760 #Neckinger

Hartley’s Jam Factory, opened in 1901, at a time when Bermondsey was known as ‘London’s Larder’. Production ended here in 1962. Inevitably, it’s now a complex of luxury flats. #Neckinger

The #Neckinger may have gone but there is still a leather goods shop on what was once it’s bank...

Bermondsey Square was where Bermondsey Abbey stood until its almost total destruction in the Reformation. Abbey Street was once the nave. 5-7 Grange Walk once formed a side of the abbey gatehouse, & are the only physical traces of the Abbey still standing. #Neckinger

The origins of Bermondsey Abbey reach back at least to 715. It was refounded by Lanfranc as a Cluniac priory in 1089. Katherine, Henry V’s widow, died here, & Elizabeth Woodville, Edward IV’s love match & mother of the Princes in the Tower, retired here in 1487. #Neckinger

The appeal of the site to the monks who founded Bermondsey Abbey here was that the #Neckinger gave them access to the Thames, & its tides could power water mills

It was the tides flowing up the #Neckinger that kept the local tanning industry - Europe’s largest - supplied with water. Since an important ingredient of the chemicals used in the process was dog shit, it was not the most perfumed of areas...

Gone but not forgotten! #Neckinger

#Neckinger Mills: one of the last of the Bermondsey tanning factories, it shut as late as 1981

We enter what was once Jacob’s Island: an island created in the 17th century, with the aim of using the #Neckinger’s tidal waters to power as many mills as possible. By the 19th century it was a rookery so notorious that Dickens used it as the setting for Bill Sykes’ death...

“Dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations, every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage: all these ornament the banks of Jacob's Island.”

Dickens in Oliver Twist #Neckinger

The ditches were filled in after a repeated cholera outbreaks in 1854; most of the buildings were then destroyed by fire in 1861. These warehouses are all that survive from Jacob’s Island #Neckinger

Jacob’s Island retains its notoriety to this day as an archetype of the Victorian slum...

https://twitter.com/hallierubenhold/status/1156533706145841152?s=21

And there it is - the literal, extant #Neckinger! Dug out by monks in the 13th C, & joining with the Thames to this day!

Asylums, slums & leper hospitals. Never let it be said that @sadieholland67 & I don’t know how to celebrate our wedding anniversary...