If you spend far too much time looking at a map of an area you know well, geometric alignments and patterns emerge. At first, it is hard to tell if these patterns are illusions of the imagination or obscure clues to the origins of the place.
In Hoxton, the roads converge to a point just north of Old Street roundabout. There are winding streets that bend for no apparent reason. Here and there, the regular pattern of streets and blocks is broken into triangles. The origins of these patterns are explained by maps of the land made before the village of Hoxton became subsumed in the northward growth of London. The patterns divine the hidden presence of water in ponds and the presence of lost streams. The maps reveal that the roads used to converge at a bridge over the River Walbook. The winding streets and diagonals mark the alignment of the river and its tributary brooks flowing into marshy Moorfield and The City.
This drawing shows the alignment of the River Walbrook based on evidence from historical maps and from reading the urban pattern. It also records the location of wells and springs and other features with watery associations. The street pattern is based on the 1880 plan of the area and shows how the pattern of streets and buildings still responds to the pre-existing river pattern even after 1,800 years of continuous adaptation and change.
John Stow, the sixteenth-century antiquarian and historian, refers to the springs in this area in his book ‘A Survey of London Written in the year 1598’.
He notes: Of Springs.
‘There are also about London, on the north side, excellent suburban springs, with sweet, wholesome, and clear water that flows rippling over the bright stones, among which Holy Well. Clerken Well and Saint Clements are held to be of most note; these are frequented by greater numbers and visited more by scholars and youth of the city when they go out for fresh air on summer evenings. It is a good city indeed when it has a good master.’
‘The first to wit, Holy Well, is much decayed and marred with filthiness purposely laid there for the heightening of the ground for garden plots.’
‘Somewhat north from Holy Well is one other well-curved square with stone, and is called Dame Annis the Clear, and not far from it, but somewhat west, is also one other clear water called Perilous Pond, because diverse youths, by swimming therein, have been drowned; and thus much be said for fountains and wells.’
Stow describes the youth of London City walking out to meet and have fun close to the water springs outside the City of London one thousand years ago. Walk into Hoxton and Shoreditch on any evening of the week, and you will see the young people of London enthusiastically revelling in the same activities today. The hidden flow of water still influences the living city.
VERY GOOD STEVE