Friday 6 June 2008

The Fleet river floweth by...

A brilliantly useful comment from a reader brings this map: http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/284-londons-lost-rivers/


and comes at a time when I'm told that the now Jubilee Line Underground was going to be the Fleet Line on the basis that it was going to go through Fleet Street and reflected something of the line of the Fleet River...

Sounds convincing, but any confirmations out there?

Ed Fordham

2 comments:

HE Elsom said...

Not journalistic-grade confirmation, but I remember it well. The Tories on the GLC made it an election pledge to rename the about-to-open line, and were elected partly because of the bollocks that the Callaghan government made of everything. There was a hoo-ha because the last-minute renaming and rebranding cost a fortune, and very few people gave a toss. After all it was only a silver jubilee, and people my age felt it was all pretty specious anyway. Whereas the Fleet Line was resonably descriptive and had resonanaces with both the history and the geography of London.

Wikipedia is probably your friend for more information.

Anonymous said...

A little research in various publications from the London Transport Museum will easily confirm the original plan for the Jubilee Line to be called the Fleet Line. An interesting book called "Extending the Jubilee Line", published in 1997 and effectively a summary of the business case for the Jubilee Line Extension to Canary Wharf and Stratford, reports that early plans appeared in 1943, with more detailed proposals in 1965. I quote "... the major new project costing some £57m (£600m in 1996 prices)...was for a new line from Baker Street to New Cross and Lewisham - to be called after the long buried river that it roughly followed - the Fleet line....Parliamentary powers were granted for construction of the Baker St to Charing Cross section of the Fleet line in 1969 with work getting under way two years later".