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white, and clean,
    The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green.
    (Morris)
    From then on all references to the Fleet are couched in this elegaic tone, obsessionally contrasting past with present in favour of the former. The river, having disappeared below ground, had ceased to be a perceived fact but had become a myth, a mysterious presence, an embodiment of all that civilisation has lost.
    Yet it is fair to add that so rapid and complete was the transformation of Kentish Town, as of many analogous areas, between roughly 1840 and 1870, that there must indeed have been many inhabitants of the district in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth, whose own childhood memories had assumed the quality of an improbable dream. This is an old man writing to a local newspaper in 1909:
    The Angler’s Lane of today connects Prince of Wales Road with Kentish Town road, and is, of course, a lane of brick and mortar. When I knew it as a boy it was one of the loveliest spots imaginable – so deserted in the early hours of the morning that, when the anglers were not there, some of the youngsters from the cottages around, and some who were not youngsters, used to bathe in the river.
    I passed through Angler’s Lane some time ago, an aged man in a bathchair, and I found it hard to realise that my wheels were rolling their way over the Fleet river!
    The history of the Fleet river has been described as ‘a decline from a river to a brook, from a brook to a ditch, and from a ditch to a drain’. The drain is the classic symbol for man the destroyer, but in fact, today it is only a ‘drain’ in an innocuous sense, not the more usual fetid one. It has become a storm relief drain, taking the overflow from particularly heavy downpours. This is essential in cities, for whereas rain sinks readily down through grasslands or ploughlands or indeed unpaved roads, and is soon absorbed, rain in areas largely covered by stone, asphalt and tarmac cannot sink away and must be channelled. Harmless, necessary Fleet.

    Because the river was there, defining the contours of the land, the road came. But where the earliest road lay is not absolutely certain. Norden, the Elizabethan topographer, identified Watling Street, the ancient road to Chester, as the way that is now Tottenham Court Road, Hampstead Road as far as Camden Town, then Chalk Farm Road, Haverstock Hill and so on to Hampstead and the north. At all events Watling Street seems to have been a pre-Roman track, which was improved and perhaps partially paved by the Romans and then, during the Dark Ages, was allowed to fall into decay till resurrected by Abbot Leofstan of St Alban’s shortly before the Norman Conquest.
    It has been suggested that an alternative route for Watling Street is the one described by Norden as also very ancient: the way from Holborn on the edge of the City, up Gray’s Inn Road to King’s Cross (site of an undetermined ancient battle, as its old name, Battle Bridge, suggests) and thence up what is now called St Pancras Way but was for centuries called Longwich Lane and then the King’s Road. At the level of the present day Crowndale Road (Fig Lane, where a fig tree survived till the late nineteenth century) the road would have forked, one branch curving west to pick up the route of what is now the Hampstead Road and the other continuing north through Kentish Town to Highgate.
    I slightly prefer the second of these alternatives, for several reasons. Firstly, it follows the course of the river and hence the valley, the most logical place for an early road to be. Secondly, it starts from a point much nearer the City than Tottenham Court Road: it is a little hard to see why, in very distant times, the main road to the midlands should have been located so far to the west of the small settlement that was London. Thirdly, the route up Gray’s Inn Road passes at least two very ancient sites, Battle Bridge and St Pancras church itself. There