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landscape, even though they are now covered by bricks and stone rather than trees and grass; they make up the contours of the modern city.
    From Marylebone Lane the Tyburn follows a southward course acrossOxford Street, where it then turns south-east intoSouth Molton Lane;Brook Street is named after it. It then pursues a circuitous course through the purlieus ofMayfair before finally emerging intoDown Street where naturally enough it descends intoPiccadilly. Oxford Street was once known as the Tyburn Road, andPark Lane as Tyburn Lane; the river of course also gave its name to the gallows set up byMarble Arch. The nameMarylebone is derived from the church of St. Mary by the bourne or brook.
    The Tyburn then crossesGreen Park, flows past Buckingham Palace, and runs throughVictoria andPimlico into the Thames byVauxhall Bridge. This was until recent times an area of marsh and swamp, so that the waters of the Tyburn in the vicinity were not much used. In
A Traveller’s Life
(1982) Eric Newby recounts how he came upon the stream in 1963 and recalls that “the bottom of the Tyburn was littered with some bizarre sorts of jetsam which included that morning a fine pair of unmounted antlers, a folio Bible in the Welsh language, half a pram and an old bicycle.” Rivers seem to attract unwanted and dilapidated things; consigned to the water, they can be made to disappear. The upper reaches of the Tyburn were far more wholesome, and in the thirteenth century a conduit was built to carry the water through wooden pipes from Marylebone Lane into the City. It was eventually discharged at the great conduit inCheapside.
    Other lost rivers flow north of the Thames, among themStamford Brook that rises atWormwood Scrubs in EastActon and falls into the Thames at Hammersmith. In its closing stages it becomes three streams, with myriad tributaries crossing and recrossing beneath the pavements unseen and unknown. Another river,Counter’s Creek, finds its source somewhere besideKensal Green cemetery before passing throughWhite City,Olympia andEarls Court; it reaches its end atChelsea, close toLots Road Power Station, where in the 1950s it was noticed as “a stagnant ditch with a few disheartened marguerite daisies and thistles growing beside the green slime.” On its route from Kensal Green Cemetery it passes close toHammersmith Cemetery andBrompton Cemetery andFulham Cemetery, perhaps out of atavistic attraction to the buried dead.Hackney Brook, in the east of London, also forms the northern boundary of Abney Park Cemetery. The buried river known only asthe Black Ditch rose inWhitechapel.
    Many people are fascinated by the course of the subterranean rivers; they track them, sometimes with maps and sometimes with dowsing rods, seeking for the life under ground. They pursue them as far as they can through unpromising surroundings of council blocks or shopping malls or derelict plots of marshy land. On stretches of their route the outer world is in mourning for its lost companion. A verse from Job may act as a summary: “Even the waters forgotten of the foot: they are dried up, they are gone away from men.”
    The river walkers pace their journey slowly, re-creating a sense of time that has been lost in the contemporary city—or perhaps time is altered by the presence of the buried river. It may follow the speed of the water beneath the ground. Time itself does not matter in the presence of the lost river.The Tyburn, for example,flowed in prehistory just as it flows now; it joins past and present in a perpetual embrace. We might be in Coleridge’s “Xanadu”
                   Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
                   Through caverns measureless to man
                   Down to a sunless sea.
    The Neckinger flows south of the Thames; it has its origin beneath theImperial War Museum, formerlyBethlem Hospital for the insane, and then runs underElephant and