The Fleet rises on the Heath, flows down through Camden, between St Pancras and King’s Cross, along the valley beneath the Holborn viaduct and out into the Thames at Blackfriars.
The tides turn slowly between the rural, the industrial and the post–industrial. At first rivers were just a resource – to water the cattle, to transport goods, or to drink. The existing waterways were augmented with a ‘New River’ in Islington and later the Regent’s canal. But as the city expanded the waters grew fouler and more pestilent and the modern world fled from its fetid waste. Piece by piece the Fleet was covered until it became just a part of Bazelgate’s utopian solutions – arteries for waste and shit that run beneath the city’s streets.