Rookeries, Railways and Radicals – Architecture Down The Fleet River

DEPARTS Outside Kings Cross mainline station (in front of clock tower)
Euston Road, London N1C 9AL

Weaving a route from Highgate to the Thames, The River Fleet is one of London’s most celebrated yet notorious water courses. Long buried in a network of sewers and pipes, the Fleet has been both life source and life taker carving out a landscape of urban hills, ditches, slums and warehouses that in the 19th century became the epicentre for commercial speculators, railway pioneers, reformers and the revolutionary political agitators of the 19th and early 20th century city. From hidden viaducts and railway monuments to model dwellings, Grecian villas and constructivism, this walk treads the quaggy banks and oozy wells of the epic Fleet Valley to chart the architecture and buildings of London’s most radical of arteries.

An OnStreet walk by The London Ambler - Mike Althorpe