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the vast steel pipe that carries what was the Fleet River and is now the Fleet sewer over your head.
    The Fleet looks safely contained now, although you never know. It surprises me that no terrorist has made common cause with the surly and embittered Fleet, which, in Peter Ackroyd’s words, became ‘a river of death’ as it sidled through the meanest streets of London en route to the Thames. In
London: TheBiography
Ackroyd describes its progress with melancholy relish. It ‘moved around Clerkenwell Hill and touched the stones of the Coldbath Prison; passed Saffron Hill, whose fragrant name concealed some of the worst rookeries in London … Then it flowed down into Chick Lane … the haven of felons and murderers.’ The Fleet made its last public appearance in June 1862, when it burst into the Met building works east of King’s Cross. There is a famous illustration of the resulting chaos of collapsed brickwork, littered with wooden buttresses heaped as for a giant’s game of pick-up-sticks.
    The inundation is described in Arnold Bennett’s novel
Riceyman Steps
, which was written in 1923, but set in 1919:
    On the Wednesday the pavements sank definitely. The earth quaked. The entire populace fled to survey the scene of horror from safety. The terrific scaffolding and beams were flung like firewood into the air and fell with awful crashes. The populace screamed at the thought of workmen entombed and massacred. A silence! Then the great brick piers, fifty feet in height, moved bodily. The whole bottom of the excavation moved in one mass. A dark and fetid liquid appeared, oozing, rolling, surging, smashing everything in its restless track, and rushed into the mouth of the new tunnel. The crown of the arch of the mighty Fleet sewer had broken.
    The central character’s uncle tells the story ‘with such force and fire’ that he has a stroke and dies. The London Underground has been tangling with the buried rivers of London ever since – and with the Thames. What became the Jubilee Line was initially called the Fleet Line, an act of propitiation, perhaps, to this most abused river. When I mention that Fleet pipe at Farringdon, people will tend to say, ‘Yes, and it appears again in that great big pipe that goes over the platforms at Sloane Square station’, which isvery satisfying since it gives me the opportunity to point out that the Fleet would not suddenly veer west at Farringdon in order to make a beeline for Chelsea. The river carried in the pipe at Sloane Square is the Westbourne, and the pipe is said to shake in a rainstorm. Behind one of the innocent-looking doors on the platform at Sloane Square is a horizontal metal grille, beneath which is a pump, working away in the seething tributaries of the Westbourne. But that’s nothing compared to Victoria Station, where a million gallons a day are pumped away, most of it from the Tyburn brook. There is a pumping house underneath the station that an Underground press officer once refused to let me see, sadistically adding, ‘It resembles the set of
Phantom of the Opera
.’ It is possible that the Waterloo & City line is nicknamed ‘The Drain’ because of the water pumped away, but there are other theories, the line being drain-like in so many ways. At the start of the Second World War floodgates would be installed at the ends of the under-Thames sections of the Bakerloo and the Northern lines to save them from inundation should bombs damage the riverbed.
    The other famous image from the Metropolitan before its official opening is a photograph of ‘Mr Gladstone at the Private View’. It was taken on 24 May 1862, and it shows Gladstone, Mrs Gladstone and John Fowler, the swaggering and super-rich engineer of the Met, together with other dignitaries and shareholders of the line sitting in two rough contractors’ wagons. The photograph reveals that Edgware Road had an arched glass roof, which