September 29th
– Today marks the 400th anniversary of the opening of the
“New River”.
London’s water supply
In the late
twelfth century (the time of the chronicler FitzStephen), water drawn from the
City’s rivers, or from springs or wells, was pure and clean and sweet and
wholesome. Later, though, “the tide from the sea prevailed to such a
degree that the water of the Thames was salt; so much so that many folks
complained of the ale tasting like salt” (and
obviously they couldn’t have that).
And, by the beginning of the thirteenth century, the supply had become
so contaminated by waste as to be not only unpalatable but unsafe to drink, for
fear of contracting a potentially lethal water-borne disease such as
typhus. So, a supply had to be brought
in from outside. A so-called Great
Conduit was built, by public subscription, in 1236, to bring water from a
spring at Tyburn, roughly opposite where Bond Street tube station now
stands, to Cheapside, about three miles
away, by way of a system of lead (!) pipes. Sections
have recently been discovered 2m
below Medieval street level in Paternoster Row and in Poultry.
The Great Conduit was extended
at either end in the fifteenth century so as to run from Oxlese, near where
Paddington station now stands, to
Cheapside and Cornhill, about six miles away (water was then either piped
directly from the conduit to homes and businesses that could afford the expense
of the installation of “quills”, or collected from stand-pipes, and carried
there by property owners, or, in buckets suspended from shoulder-yokes, by
“cobs”, of whom there were 4000 by 1600).
The so-called Devil’s Conduit
under Queen’s Square probably dated to around the same time, a photograph taken
in 1910, shortly before its demolition in 1911-13, showing it to contain graffiti from 1411.
By the sixteenth century, the system had become inadequate to meet the demands of the rising population
(it had also become subject to much abuse and over-use by individuals and by
commercial and industrial concerns). A
short-term solution to this problem was
provided by the construction by the
Dutchman Pieter Maritz in 1580 of a – rather rickety – apparatus under one of
the arches of London Bridge that allowed
water to be pumped from the Thames into
the heart of the City, or, in the case of the original demonstration to City officials,
over the spire of the church of St Magnus the Martyr! The apparatus was destroyed in the Great Fire
of 1666, but thereafter replaced by Maritz’s grandson, and continued in use, after a fashion, until the
early nineteenth century.
The “New River”
A longer-term
solution was provided by the construction by the Welshman and wealthy merchant,
goldsmith, banker and Member of Parliament Sir Hugh Myddelton in 1609-13 of
a 10’ wide and 4’ deep canal, or “New
River”, all the way from springs at Amwell and Chadwell in Hertfordshire into the
City, an incredible 37 miles away, which is still in use to this day (parts of
it can be seen along the “New River” walk in Islington, for example in
Canonbury Grove). Myddelton had to
overcome any number of technological
obstacles, and much land-owner and political opposition, to see this
major civil engineering project through to completion, doing so with a mixture of drive and determination,
the financial support of 29 investors or “adventurers”, and the tacit backing
of the king. His financial backers had
to wait some time until they profited
from the enterprise (actually, until 1633, although by 1695 the New River
Company ranked behind only the East India Company and Bank of England in terms
of its capital value). The public health benefits of Myddelton’s project were
immediate, though, and
immeasurable, and indeed it has been
described as “An immortal work – since men cannot more nearly imitate the Deity
than in bestowing health”.
 |
| Myddelton statue, Holborn Viaduct |
 |
| Myddelton statue, Islington |
.JPG) |
| Section of New River, Canonbury |
 |
| White Conduit |
Notes.
Myddelton died in 1631, and was buried in the church of St Matthew Friday Street, where he had served
as a warden. Concerted attempts to locate his coffin and monument
following the church’s demolition in 1886 were unfortunately ultimately unsuccessful.
Remarkably,
some of the fittings from the New River Company’s offices, including Grinling
Gibbons’s “oak room”, still survive, in the
London Metropolitan Water Board building in Islington.
.JPG)
