Lost Rivers

Fleet Street remembers what the map does not. Before it was a row of newspaper offices it was a tidal creek, wide enough for barges, rising on Hampstead's ponds and reaching the Thames at Blackfriars. Georgian improvers began arching it over in the 1730s, in stages, until by most accounts no open reach remained inside the old walls.

It survives as a storm relief sewer, several metres down in places, still charged after heavy rain with more water than its Victorian brickwork was built to hold. Residents near Bride Lane describe only a faint give in the pavement, and a smell after storms that older neighbours call, without much irony, the river.

The Walbrook is older than the wall it is named for. Roman surveyors used it to bring the city its water and take away rather more; timber revetments dredged from its bed still carry tool marks from the first century. By the time Stow wrote his Survey in 1598, it ran mostly underground already, culverted piecemeal by property owners who simply wanted the ground above.

There is no famous arch to visit here — only a shallow valley you can feel in the legs on Bank and Walbrook streets, dipping and rising within the space of two blocks, and a scatter of Roman finds in a museum case that came out of its mud.

Minetta Brook is the neighbourhood's worst-kept secret: a trout stream, by early accounts, that ran down through what is now Washington Square and into the Hudson, and that never entirely agreed to leave. Greenwich Village was built over it in the early nineteenth century, its crooked streets laid along the brook's old bends rather than the city grid's straight lines — which is why Minetta Street still looks wrong on a map drawn for anything else.

Basements along its course flood without rain. Co-op boards budget for sump pumps as a matter of course; a fountain in one lobby is fed, tenants will tell you, by the brook itself, rising through a pipe nobody installed and nobody has managed to cap.

Garrison Creek cut a ravine deep enough that nineteenth-century Toronto built some of its finest bridges over it, then, finding the ravine more useful as a place to put refuse, filled it in and buried the creek inside the fill. Trace its route today and you walk a string of parks — Vermont Square, Bickford, Christie Pits — that mark not planning foresight but simply ground too soft to build on afterward.

The creek still needs somewhere to go. In heavy rain the combined sewer that replaced it surcharges, and a newer relief tunnel, cut far beneath the old bed, now does the joining of storm and sewage that the creek once did for free.

Cheonggyecheon is the rarest kind of entry in this guide: a river put back. Covered first with concrete in 1958 and then, in 1976, roofed entirely by an elevated expressway, it spent decades as infrastructure rather than water. In 2003 the expressway came down, at considerable expense and over the objections of merchants who depended on the traffic it carried, and by 2005 a river ran again through the middle of the city.

It is not the river it was — the banks are concrete, the flow is partly pumped from the Han to survive the dry season — but people sit at its edge on their lunch break with their shoes off in the water, which is rather the point of a river an office district otherwise has no reason to keep.

The Bièvre tanned Paris's leather for six centuries and paid for the privilege with its health; by the late nineteenth century it was, by common account, the foulest watercourse in the city, and it was buried in stages between 1874 and 1912 largely as a public health measure — unusual, in this guide, for being about the water rather than the ground above it.

It has come back, in fragments. A short daylit stretch south of the city, reopened in the 1990s and 2000s, is clean enough now to be a plausible garden feature rather than an embarrassment — a small, hedged concession that the river might have been worth keeping after all.

The colony at Sydney Cove existed because of the Tank Stream and nearly failed because of it: the fresh water that decided the 1788 landing site was fouled within a decade by the settlement it made possible, its banks stripped, its water undrinkable soon after. By 1850 it ran entirely inside a brick tunnel beneath what had become the colony's financial district — tidy symbolism, if you want it.

The tunnel survives in good repair beneath Pitt and George Streets, brick-arched, and is opened for public tours a few times a year — the only entry in this guide you can currently book a ticket to walk through.

For most of the twentieth century the Saw Mill River ran beneath a parking lot in the middle of downtown Yonkers, culverted in the 1920s to make room for the mills, and later the mall, that the mills became. The daylighting project that uncovered it in 2011 is a smaller, less photographed cousin of Seoul's — three hundred metres of river and a park where the parking lot used to be — but the mechanism is the same: a city deciding, after ninety years, the water was worth more visible than paved over.

Fish returned before the landscaping was finished. Nobody had told them the river was supposed to be gone.