Curiosities of old Clerkenwell & tributaries of the River Fleet (4K)

Looking along Cowcross Street here in Clerkenwell, one of the old medieval streets of the area, and it's somewhere up there along Cowcross Street that one of the tributaries of the River Fleet rises, the Faggerswell Brook or the Fackerswell Brook. And looking north here along Turnmill Street, another of the old medieval streets of the area of Clerkenwell. It's just up along there that you can find the Clerkswell that gives its name to the area, and we will be visiting that a little bit later. And looking up along Benjamin Street you can see the shape of the valley of the River Fleet. Peter Ackroyd, one of the great chroniclers of London, in his wonderful book Londoner Biography, he describes Clerkenwell as a kind of shadowland, London's shadowland. Of course Ackroyd lives not far away, or certainly lived not far away. St John's Garden over there. I can see a wall in the middle. I've never noticed that before. I think we have to go and look. This walk is going to be a little bit like that. We're on the scent of a clue. We're trying to answer a mystery and what better place to be than Clerkenwell, the home of the Clerkenwell mystery plays, of course, for which it was famous in the Middle Ages. We really are in medieval London here. Let's go to St John's Garden. Never actually been in there. Walked past it many times. So the plaque on the wall there tells us this is the consecrated graveyard of St John's Clerkenwell, presumably the Priory of St John. The famous Priory of St John is what this area is often known for really, because we have the gate, the medieval gate of the Priory, which we will pass through. It made this a hub of crusaders and knights. The Priory of St John, Clerkenwell Green, Smithfield, all that, that's covered in a video I made a couple of years ago, which I will link to below. But of course, there was loads of things I didn't cover in that video. And even that isn't the real reason I came here today. It's something I spotted. It's a conundrum that I try to get to the bottom of in some small way. With your help, I need you with me on this. I don't have all the answers. This is looking up along Britain Street. Love the old borough signage. Borough of Finsbury, but this is Brissett Street, if that's how you pronounce it. He was a Norman. Jordan de Brissett owned the manor of Clerkenwell. And it was Jordan de Brissett who in the 1140s established two religious institutions here in Clerkenwell, the Priory of St John and the Nunnery of St Mary. And there we have the Holy Tavern. But that was always called the Jerusalem Tavern. I'm not sure at what point it became the Holy Tavern. It has the date 1720 there on the door. But I was informed when I made my video here a couple of years ago, that actually this isn't the original building at all. But I'm sure there'll be more comments about that. And I have to go down St John's Path. These little paths and alleyways are some of the great features of Clerkenwell. You really feel medieval London is alive and well. Today's walk, by the way, is in two parts. First part here. The other part is another tributary of the River Fleet. So it's a kind of, there's definitely a watery vibe. I mean, I'm giving, I don't want to give too much away. You want to know what you're watching, don't you? We're not just on an aimless drift today. It's very much a spirit of inquiry. After we've hunted down the mystery on this side of Clerkenwell, we're going to cross the River Fleet and walk one of the tributaries. One of the most obvious ones, and I've not deliberately walked it before. I've walked it without knowing that was what I was walking. Passing alley here. It's not the original name of this alley. They've changed one letter to make it a little less crude. I'll let you guess what its original name was, but if you've ever passed here on a Monday morning, you'll know. So this majestic medieval structure here was once the main entrance or certainly the main southern entrance to the precinct of the Priory of the Order of the Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem. I think that's the full title, the Priory of St John anyway, and the original gatehouse was established in the 1140s. That was burnt down by Watt Tyler and his followers during the Peasants' Result of 1381. They burnt the buildings in the Priory of St John and they beheaded the Prior of St John, who was Richard II's principal tax collector, and they camped out in Clerkenwell Green and watched the Priory burn. This one here was built in 1504 and then in 1557 you have the dissolution of the monasteries and the Crown took possession of the Priory. The Order of St John was established to support pilgrims to the Holy Land, to Jerusalem, and the Crusaders as well, and so consequently after the establishment of the Priory here, Clerkenwell was alive with the Crusaders and knights and the various retinue that went along with them. You can kind of picture it, can't you? Now all that stuff about the Priory, St John, Watt Tyler, Peasants' Revolt and all that, that's just to set the scene. That's not the video. I've talked about some of that in a previous video. Really, we're here for the water. This area is full of water. It's full of springs. They're everywhere underneath our feet. There's water, water everywhere. Some of it's well documented, some of it's not so well documented. Some of it is still mysterious and occluded and hidden, and that's what we like. We like the hidden and the occluded. That's what we're hunting down. That's the eternal quest. So looking north across St John's Square, this would have all sat within the precincts of the Priory of St John to establish that. Jerusalem Passage here, another of the lovely little alleyways of Clerkenwell, and again within the precincts of the old Priory. So at the other end of Jerusalem Passage, we arrive on Haylesbury Street, and this marks the southern boundary of Clerkenwell's other great religious institution, which isn't talked of anywhere near as much. This was the nunnery of St Mary, established around the same time in the 1140s. This is looking along St James's Walk. Clerkenwell Green here, the site of the Clerkenwell mystery plays, and the scene of much of, well, some of the great moments in London's radical history, all the way from what Tyler's Rebellion, where they camped here, his followers camped on Clerkenwell Green and watched the Priory of St John burn, all the way through to the May Day marches, and the May Day marches still muster here on Clerkenwell Green. Down there, we have Marks Memorial Library, in an 18th century building, which was a school for Welsh people, or poor Welsh people in London, and became the Marks Memorial Library in the 1930s, I think 1933. It's where Lenin used to sit and work, and wrote his newspaper, The Spark. And at one end of Clerkenwell Green, we have the Clerkenwell Session House, the courthouse. That is mentioned in a something we will cover soon, which isn't in that video. The Clerks well is down there, we will come back for that though. Clerkenwell Green, the Clerks well, the radical history, we've done that, we did that in the Clerkenwell video whenever it was. Christmas, January 2022, I think it was. That is not why we're here today, it's all context, it's all context for what's to come up here. Although I hadn't been in the Marks Memorial Library the other day, and I went to the Lenin room, which is kind of interesting. That's well worth a visit though, go in there, go in the Lenin room, it's kind of amazing. Although it's not the room where Lenin actually worked, but it's an approximation of it. Right, now, now to the reason I'm out here today, making a video. We're going to go up here, up Clerkenwell Close. We are heading up here, up Clerkenwell Close. So the Church of St James here, sits on the site of the chapel of St Mary's nunnery. This is where the nunnery chapel would have been roughly, if not on the exact site of the church, then within the church yard. This church dates from about 1720, I think. The Three Kings, which is a very fine pub. So Clerkenwell Close, I think, ran around the outside of the nunnery of Augustinian Canonesses. That's not easy to say, is it? Augustinian Canonesses. And they became incredibly wealthy because they started to rent out tenements within the precinct and around the precinct to people, and it became very popular with wealthy knights and ladies. This particular area around Clerkenwell Close was particularly popular with wealthy residents who were drawn to the area by the associations with both the Priory of St John and the Nunnery of St Mary. Now the reason we're out here today, is I was walking along here the other day with some friends on the way to meet someone for lunch. And at this point here, I stopped dead in my tracks because I saw something which reminded me of something I'd read. I mean, look, there's water here. Clearly water. That's all right, don't worry. No, that's perfectly fine. I've done it. Thank you, appreciate that. And there's definitely water down there and it's got a fair old whiff to it actually. A proper old whiff to it. You can smell it from here. So in Stowe's 1603 survey of London, he lists several wells in Clerkenwell. I'm going to read them actually. He lists the Clerkswell. That's the one that's recorded down there. We'll go and have a look at that. Clerkswell, the Skinnerswell, the Todwell, Loaderswell, the Radwell and the Fagswell. Well, at the beginning of the walk at Farringdon Station, that's roughly where the Fagswell is. And I walked along the Fackerswell when I did my walk around Clerkenwell. In fact, that walk around Clerkenwell started when he just actually wanted to walk that tributary of the fleet. And I became interested when I was walking down Goswell Road the other day, I came across the reference to the Godswell, which was said to be between the Priory of St Mary and the fleet. And also the Skinnerswell is said to be in a similar location. So when I saw that, is that running away from the Skinnerswell? Is it running away from the Godswell, in fact? Who knows? I don't think we're going to answer that question. It could just be sewer water, but who knows? I think someone in the comments will be able to shed light on this mystery. Another Clerkenwell mystery. And just here on the corner of Clerkenwell, close near our spurious watercourse, we have the site of the two prisons I've just discovered, if I'm talking to a wonderful man in the street. There was a prison that was built here in 1615, the Middlesex House of Correction. There were two, actually. One became more notable than the other. The first was called the Clerkenwell Bridewell. And then the other became the more notorious Middlesex House of Correction. So the Clerkenwell Bridewell prison, which was built here in 1615, was mostly for vagrants and various people of the street that felt foul of the law, and they were locked up here. There was another smaller prison on this site as well, that was built later. Before a much larger prison, the Middlesex House of Correction was built a little bit further north on Bowling Green Lane. And that was the site of the famous Fenian outrage of the 1860s, when members of the Fenian society blew up a portion of the prison to free one of their members. It was notable particularly for kind of political prisoners. So we'll just go loop back to go down St James's Walk here, St James's Walk I should say, the churchyard, and then visit the Clerkswell, and then we'll walk a tributary of the River Fleet, the Lamb's Conduit. So when I stood back there in Clerkenwell Close filming myself standing over a drain, a legit local historian came past, in fact a legit historian who lived locally, was a proper Clerkenwell person, born and bred, and he told me that actually part of the cloisters of St Mary's is down here in the churchyard still, which was great. What a lovely fellow, he told me about Pink's History of Clerkenwell, remember that Pink's History of Clerkenwell from the 1860s, apparently 800 pages long. He wasn't sure however what that water under the street was, it probably is just the drain. So I can't seem to find the old nunnery cloister walls in the churchyard here at St James's, so if anyone knows where they are you could let me know in the comments and I'll post a photo in the community tab on my channel here. Right, shall we go for a little look at the Clerkswell down here? So here we have the Clerkswell which you can view by appointment, and I love it, it says by appointment and staff availability, and I must try and make an appointment to go in there, sadly I don't, you know, I can see it through the window, I don't know if it'll show on the camera through the window, but it's it's basically down there, you have to, you can see you can go down there in the steps, so it's great that they've done that with the Clerkswell, and look you've got information on the wall here, you've got plaques there on the wall, I think unfortunately you're mostly going to see the reflection of my face on the wall, and although obviously I've included the Clerkswell in my River Fleet video, and possibly in one before that, it's certainly been in various blog posts in the past, it's here really because it marks an important part of that landscape of wells, of Clerkenwell, and it's the one where we know where it is right, because it's there, but it's a reference point for both the God's Well and the Skinner's Well, and of course the River Fleet just running over here, so we're going to actually cross the River Fleet and pick up one of its tributaries, the Lamb's Conduit. You can see where the Fleet is flowing down there in Hockley in the Hole, there's a lot of people outside the coach pub there, which I think must be from the Italian Fiesta, which was earlier today, that came from St Peter's Church on Clerkenwell Road, I'm guessing that's what it is, and they're all stood over the, where you can actually see the river, and that was great, it's the Italian Fiesta down there today, a lovely family scene, what a wonderful thing to just pass through. So according to Nicholas Barton's Lost Rivers of London, on the map you know I should say, it looks like the confluence between the Fleet and the Lamb's Conduit is roughly here, so just underneath Rosebury Avenue, Rosebury Avenue is just running up there, so Nicholas Barton, the great Nicholas Barton, where would I be without Nicholas Barton, in his classic The Lost Rivers of London, this lovely edition was gifted to me by a wonderful man when I did a talk at the Hertford Literary Festival, and so this is what I'll read you what Barton says, he talks about this area here near Rosebury Avenue, slightly north of Clerkenwell Road, he says from here onwards the valley of the river is even today increasingly obvious, lying in the upper part rather west of King's Cross, a lower down almost exactly in the line of the Farringdon Road and spanned by the Holborn Viaduct. This lower part of the fleet received two tributaries, one came from the west and was employed in 1577 by William Lamb, gentleman of King's Chapel, together with several other springs in the area as a source for a conduit. As late as 1800 an octogenarian clergyman could remember being sent into the country as a convalesce after an attack of smallpox to a row of houses on the west side of the present Lamb's conduit street. All space before him was open fields, a streamlet of water ran under his window and he saw a man snipe shooting, who sprung a snipe near the window and shot it. The other attribute he came from the west near the Charterhouse, that's the Thackerswell Brook just near, runs along the top of Smithfield and that's in a video I made a couple of years ago. So we're going to walk the short distance of the Lamb's conduit so I can feel like I've walked both of those tributaries of the fleet. Actually I've walked off camera in the wrong direction, actually the way we've got to go is this way. When you look along Gray's Inn Road looking north you can see the very pronounced lower ground there where that pedestrian crossing is, the zebra crossing, the flashing lights there, that is the course of the Lamb's conduit that's Roger Street just there which marks the course of the river. I guess the first thing we notice is we're looking uphill, rivers obviously don't always form valleys, I don't know, I'm sort of riffing a little bit here, bearing in mind that we're going back to the source so we've originated on that higher ground, that could just be the amount that the street level has gone up over the years. You have to remember as well this was a conduit that was exploiting a spring and a river and as mentioned in Barton, the conduit was bringing drinking water down there and kind of fell out of business when the new river took over which I guess was like what 1613 or so. This is a lovely really interesting part of town. I've made a little video around I'll link to it below, it's great, I love Brownlow Mews. Obviously I take personal delight in the fact that Roger Street has a junction with John Street, okay we're missing an S from the Roger but I'll take it. And the other significance of Roger Street and I guess the location of the conduit is it marks the southern boundary of the ancient parish of St Pancras, the boundary here being between the parishes of St Pancras and the parish of Holburn. Holburn, I prefer to say Holburn and the river was called the Holburn originally, Holburn, so you know and you've got some really beautiful kind of art deco architecture along here which is fantastic. Conduit must have gone through there, there's that underground car park now so we'll have to go along the Mews here and pick it up on the other side. I've included this in another video but it always is worth mentioning down in Doughty Mews you've got the Egypt Exploration Society founded in 1882. And you can see the point in the land where the Lamb's Conduit crosses the street here and passes into Long Yard which is just the other side of these buildings to the left. We'll just go along Great Ormond Street, famous for its hospital but it's so green and leafy isn't it? And we turn into Lamb's Conduit Street here and I'd never noticed that lower lying portion of the land, for the hundreds of times I've walked along here to go to Corham's Fields with the kids when they were little and past the actual, I'll show you at the end, the fountain, the shape of the land there. And Long Yard here marks one of the heads of the Lamb's Conduit, certainly the course that we've just walked here. I think there was more than one source according to the map in Barton. You can see this back on the wall, I'll read it because it won't come out very well on the video. The Lamb's Conduit, the property of the City of London, this pump is erected for the benefit of the public. I don't think it's the original pump well obviously no pump there but it marks the spot of where the pump was located. And the Victorian public fountain here at the end of Lamb's Conduit Street is currently being restored. I don't know what the relationship is between this and the Lamb's Conduit, there's got to be one surely, maybe it was working, it was drawing from the same spring or one of the springs that rose in the land here. Anyway I'll take it as a marker that the walk has ended. Well thank you for joining me on that really wonderful, it's for me a really wonderful exploration of some of the curiosities of Old Clerkenwell and this walk along one of the tributaries of the River Fleet. For me obviously they're linked by this idea of wells and springs and water, all the kind of mysteries gurgling away beneath our feet as we wander around the street. I'm going to indulge in the mystery of imbibing some London water in the form of ale now on this on this warm evening. Thanks to my wonderful supporters on on Patreon, on here, on YouTube, the YouTube members, thank you to you for turning up to watch these videos as I wander around the streets trying to remember the notes I've read. I've made too many notes this week I can't, I had to stop, I got snowed under, I've got piles and piles and piles of books and maps and stuff out and it was like a bit too much but I hope there's something coherent in there and how lovely to meet that wonderful Clerkenwell historian in the streets who didn't catch his name. Anyway I'm rambling now as I always do at the end. I look forward to seeing the next walk wherever that may be. Yeah, I've got half an idea actually.