Friends of Wandsworth Common — Heritage Talk · January 2026
One of London's lost rivers and its place in local history
Welcome, everybody. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Stephen Midlane, chair of our Heritage Group, and this is the first of our 2026 heritage talks. We have quite an exciting programme coming up over the next twelve months, but this event is a sellout — and, as you may know, we have had to add a second session in February to accommodate everyone who wanted to come. That is clearly a testament to the drawing power of our speaker tonight, Philip Boys, whom I am sure many of you have seen before. Tonight he is going to be talking about one of London's hidden rivers — the Falcon Brook, local to our area. Philip, over to you.
When I was asked to come up with a title for this talk, I thought: "Hidden in plain sight." Rather naff, actually — and if anyone can suggest something better, please do. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to like it. As we go through this evening, I won't keep referring to the phrase, but do try to register — as I show you each map, each road name, each curve in a street — just how actively hidden this river has been, and yet how much it has always been there if you know how to look.
This is a History Boys Magic Lantern Show for the Friends of Wandsworth Common. My name is Philip Boys. There will be a first session tonight and a second one in February.
I have always lived around here, mostly on this side of things. But in 1980 we moved to Balham — to Calbourne Road, as it happens — and I always assumed the name Calbourne came from the Isle of Wight, where there is a gorgeous place with a beautiful stream of that name. It wasn't long, however, before I realised something odd was going on. The basement would flood periodically, rising two or three feet, drowning all my old love letters in the process. When I tried to rescue them — unsuccessfully — it looked, as I told local people, like rivers of tears.
They explained that spring tides cause the water table to rise. We brought someone in to tank the cellar — that is, to put an impermeable barrier around it — and the builder was delighted: "As soon as one person tanks their cellar, the water doesn't disappear, it goes into everyone else's cellar, so I get lots more work."
I got hold of the wonderful Stanford map of 1862, the first Stanford map of the area, and marked my house on it. There, right underneath, was marked "York Sewer." So I began to investigate.
I looked at a series of historical maps to see how different people had recorded the river across the centuries.
The Rocque map (which I date to approximately 1748, though it went through countless revisions) shows Wandsworth Common as it was — nearly two or three times its current size. There is already something here: a watercourse running to the north of Wandsworth Common, with large lakes, each about the same size as Wandsworth Common Lake today. It is clearly a very wet place.
The Faden map of 1790 shows the river again — unnamed, so far as I can tell — and I have coloured it blue so you can follow it on a modern aerial view. It runs from somewhere near Knights Hill, out towards Crystal Palace, through Tooting Common and Clapham Common and down towards the Thames. Some of it is very accurate; parts of the far end are probably a little fanciful.
A wonderful composite map drawn by J. G. Taylor — for many years headmaster of Sir Walter St John's Boys' School in Battersea, a school whose building still stands, now a private school — in his fabulous 1925 book Our Lady of Battersea covers the period from 693 to the Industrial Revolution. On it he labels our river the "Falcon Brook," and also shows Heathwall, another underground river, running up towards Battersea Creek.
Nicholas Barton revolutionised the study of hidden and lost rivers when he published his first edition in 1962. He drew a map — quite a good one — and does call our river the Falcon Brook, though it lacked the detail I wanted. Since Barton's book appeared, people have become fascinated by these rivers: exploring them, following them, and getting a certain strange satisfaction from doing so.
A blogger called Diamond Geezer traced the route exceptionally well, though his map is rather crude. More recently, a writer named Talling (I am not sure of the pronunciation) has produced a more generalised map — perhaps deliberately so, since he makes his living leading walks and may not wish to give all his routes away. I understand some of you have been on one of those walks — six hours long, ending in a pub.
Hydronyms are names given to rivers; toponyms are landscape names of any kind. Our river has accumulated a remarkable number of both. Starting at the top: it begins as the Hideburne or Hideburn. It then becomes the York Sewer and the York Ditch. Further down it is known as the Falcon Brook or Falconbrook. Parts of it are also called the Battersea Sewer, the Battersea Ditch, the Battersea Creek, the Streatham Ditch, and the Streatham Sewer.
The first recorded mention I know of comes from Bishop Waldhere, Bishop of London — who was also abbot of Chertsey, which then controlled this whole area — in 693. He had a charter drawn up because he wished to give Battersea and Wandsworth to his sister Æthelburh, who was abbess of Barking Abbey. The charter mentions, in Latin: "at Battersea, 28 hides; and elsewhere in the settlement which bears the name Wæclingum [Wandsworth], 20 hides; and on the western side, 20 hides by the river whose name is Hýdeburna." A hide was a unit of land, though its actual acreage varied enormously across different parts of the country — anywhere between 40 and 160 acres — which makes it difficult to calculate exact areas. Someone has estimated, using these figures, that a hide here was approximately 40 acres.
The next name — York — came from the Archbishop of York, who, naturally needing a palace in London, built a very large one at Battersea Creek. For a century or two, toponyms referring to York multiplied in the area: York House, York Road, York Bridge, York Gardens, York Mansions, York Tavern.
The name Falcon Brook derives from the family crest of the St Johns of Lydiard Tregoze in Wiltshire — technically a "falcon rising from a green hill, wearing golden bells on its legs and a red ducal crown around its neck." The St John family were in the area from around 1600 to the late eighteenth century, and several of their name are well known to us: Sir Walter St John, whose school I mentioned, and most famously Henry St John, who was always called "St John" rather than "Sinjun" — old boys of the school still call themselves "Sinjuns" — who became the first Viscount Bolingbroke. The name Bolingbroke is rich with pretension: it was the title assumed by Henry IV, who was born at Bolingbroke Castle, and the St Johns laid claim to this royal connection by naming themselves after it. It was not, in fact, true — but it was one way of bigging yourself up.
As a toponym, "Falcon" proliferates across the area to a remarkable degree. I jotted down as many as I could think of: Falcon Road, Falcon Lane, Falcon Terrace, Falcon Park, Falcon Bridge, Falcon Wharf, the Falcon pub, a school, an estate, apartments, mansions. And the Asparagus pub is shortly to be — or perhaps already has been — rebranded the Falconbrook. I think that is a shame: the Asparagus is a splendid and very specific name, evoking the economic history of Battersea as a centre of market gardening, with its famous asparagus and lavender. But there must be something in these hidden rivers that appeals deeply to people.
One practical tip: if you are walking around the area and you see a place name ending in -bourne or -burn — Woodbourne, Streatbourne, Fishbourne, Hideburn, Calbourne — it is ninety-nine per cent certain that it marks one or other branch of this river.
A geological map from around 1919–20 shows how the land lies. The Thames is up at the top. The River Wandle runs through the brown gravel, which is also relatively high ground. Wandsworth Common sits entirely on gravel — not surprising, since Commons tend to be placed on land that will not grow anything useful. Clapham Common and Tooting Common are similarly situated, at roughly the same elevation. The Falcon Brook and its branches run along the valleys between these gravel ridges.
The plateau between the Commons is not quite level: it tilts slightly in two directions, so when it rains the water tends to flow — down towards my cellar and my love letters. The river has two main upper branches: one running from beyond Tooting Bec, the other from the Streatham side. They converge and then flow northward to the Thames. The A24 — Stane Street, the old Roman road from London to Chichester — crosses the river at what would have been a ford, and those points still get very wet indeed.
Let me focus on the stretch I know best.
The Stanford map of 1862 shows Tooting Bec and the athletics ground. There was at that time a "manor house" whose owner complained to the Metropolitan Board of Works that his ornamental lake was becoming polluted with foul-smelling sewage. The Board's response was blunt: he should not have dammed the stream in the first place. Its function, they said, was as a sewer. Unlike the Wandle — a constant, powerful river that could drive mills — the Hideburn or Bourne is a seasonal stream, essentially a mechanism for getting rainwater off the land and into the Thames. When the Metropolitan Board of Works took over in the 1850s and 1860s, they put pressure on landowners to stop damming the stream and making ornamental ponds of it, because they needed to push the increasingly foul water through as quickly as possible.
Moving north: Brook Close — that is, Roofant Road and Ritherdene Road — and Fishbourne Road. On one side of the road, a rather unprepossessing modern block is called, if you look closely, Falconbrook Mansions. On the other side, a school called Hideburn School. These echoes of the past keep surfacing.
The northern branch runs up Alderbrook Road — and in fact there is an Alderbrook Road behind Oldridge Road. You can see the sewer line running dead straight beneath it. It becomes Calbourne Road and then joins Mayford Road, where the other branch — the Fernside branch — meets it. If you put your ear to the drain cover at that junction, you can hear the river running. That drain cover is, in my view, the Mona Lisa of drain covers.
From that junction the stream runs up Mayford Road, which has a curious jink in it: the road goes straight, then veers left, then turns again. What is happening is that the drain and the original river are running behind the houses in Birchlands Avenue, curving to follow the original stream. The houses themselves are curved to follow that line. On this side of Nightingale Lane, and throughout most of this area — built at the end of the nineteenth century — roads are dead straight. When they curve, there is almost always a reason, usually the presence of a river or stream, either at the time of building or historically, because the stream had been a boundary. This particular boundary, in fact, was the boundary between Clapham and Streatham, with Battersea on the far side.
A wonderful early-twentieth-century view looking down from the Common towards what is now Nightingale Lane shows the dip quite clearly — once you start looking for dips, you find them everywhere, because dips mean streams. Around 1800, when Napoleon was being very difficult, local militia groups came from the City of London to conduct manoeuvres in this area. There are accounts of them retreating behind the bridge on this road — not yet called Nightingale Lane — to await the pretend French and then going off for a drink. The bridge over the Falcon Brook was a real military feature in the landscape. Much later, in 1934, the steep descent to the crossroads at Bolingbroke Grove and Ravenslea Road was causing so many accidents that it was said to be among the very first junctions in London to be fitted with traffic lights.
The stream then turns into Montholme Road — I am reliably informed by someone who lives at the start of that road that it runs through her back garden, though entirely underground. The path along the bottom of those gardens, behind all the houses at the foot of the hill, was formerly an access path; at the bottom of her garden the ground simply drops away.
The 1840 tithe map of the area between the Commons shows Bolingbroke Grove clearly, with the Three Island Pond (still familiar today) and several other ponds since lost. What would become Nightingale Lane is visible, with the five large houses of Bolingbroke Grove — brilliantly analysed by the Five Houses group, several of whose members are here tonight — and the farm at the north end.
The green lines on the map show the estate boundaries, and these are significant: in most cases the estates ended at the stream. In some cases, though, a landowner had bought right across — down to the stream and up the other side. Where the boundary followed the stream, that is where Northcote Road would eventually run. Where estates had spread to the far side, the land was broken up differently, which is why there is no continuous road running parallel to Bolingbroke Grove all the way from Nightingale Lane to Battersea Rise — which would have been extremely convenient for everyone.
You will also notice Broomfield House on the map, later renamed Broomwood. It puzzles me why everyone assumes William Wilberforce lived in Clapham. He did not — he lived in Battersea, and Broomwood was his house. A plaque on the wall of Roton Road records: "On the site behind this house stood, until 1904, Broomwood House, formerly Broomfield, where William Wilberforce resided during the campaign against the slave trade, which he successfully conducted in Parliament." (It was the slave trade, not slavery itself — a minor but not unimportant distinction.)
Wilberforce's son was Samuel Wilberforce — "Soapy Sam" as he was known — who grew up at Broomwood and later became Bishop of Oxford. He participated in the beating of the bounds of Battersea as a boy, and his great opponent in evolutionary matters, Thomas Henry Huxley, was a frequent visitor to the area. Huxley knew the area well: he was a regular at the Macmillan household at Tooting Bec. Macmillan the publisher published Huxley's book Physiography, in which he tried to create textbooks for ordinary readers using everyday local examples to explain much larger natural phenomena. In that spirit, here is a cross-section by Joseph Prestwich, a Clapham-based geologist, showing the formation of Nappy Valley in Battersea — demonstrating that even small amounts of water, acting over immense periods of time, will have a powerfully eroding effect. The Grand Canyon was created by exactly the same process as Nappy Valley.
You all know, because you have walked it, that the ground between Nightingale Lane and Battersea Rise goes down and then up. When it rained — and it was fine when there were only a handful of households between the two Commons, but very different when the large houses were subdivided, roads were laid, and thousands of people moved into small terrace houses — the water all ran down into the Falcon Brook, and the results were predictably grim.
Two of the three greatest names in lavatory engineering lived within a hundred yards of the Falcon Brook. The first is Thomas Crapper, who is well known but, in my view, somewhat overrated. The second — far more important — is George Jennings.
Jennings was the great pioneer of the underground, flushable public convenience. He installed cubicles at the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851 and charged a penny to use them — hence the phrase "spend a penny." His designs went all over the world. In developing his sanitary engineering work, he created wonderful terracotta bricks and glazed tiles — terracotta, like glazed tiles, can be kept clean — and had a block of flats built using his patent terracotta blocks. He lived on Nightingale Lane, in a much larger house.
Thomas Crapper, too, deserves more credit than he sometimes receives. He is sometimes dismissed, unfairly, because of his name. In fact, he was a genuine innovator: he standardised plumbing fittings so that plumbers could install them quickly and cheaply. His valves, ball mechanisms and cistern systems worked reliably and without making a terrible noise. He was also brilliant at self-promotion — showrooms where you could choose exactly what you wanted, advertisements with illustrations. Until about the 1890s, almost no houses had lavatories inside, because they were noisy, smelly and embarrassing, and sewer gas would rise through them. You left the house by the back door and used a small separate room. Crapper's innovations made it possible to think about installing lavatories on upper floors — which at the time seemed genuinely extraordinary. He lived just behind the junction of Bolingbroke Grove and Northcote Road, known as Clapham Junction.
Which brings us to the problem: if you have an immense volume of water and human waste, you have to send it somewhere, and the poor Falcon Brook simply could not cope. It was increasingly vile. Enter Sir Joseph Bazalgette — not from Battersea or Wandsworth, but from Wimbledon, so almost one of us. As you will know, he devised the brilliant system of large intercepting sewers running parallel to the Thames, taking the flow of local sewers by gravity downstream, away from London. By 1934 an enormous network of these sewers was in place. The Falcon Brook is a little anomalous in this system because it flows against the east–west grain; Bazalgette built an extraordinary aqueduct across what is now King George's Park, over the Wandle, disappearing underneath — or just to the right of — St Anne's Church, then straight across Wandsworth Common, down a road (once called Chatham Road, now Darien Road, now partially buried under a housing estate) to Clapham Common and beyond. Interestingly, the Bazalgette sewer and the Falcon Brook sewer ran one on top of the other at the bottom of Chatham Road — entirely separate systems, never linked.
Coming down towards Battersea Rise: a wonderful photograph — I think my favourite photograph of Battersea — by Leonora Green, who sadly left very few images. She is looking down from her window at the crossroads at Battersea Rise and Northcote Road, and the image is full of marvellous detail: a number 49 bus, a costermonger with a big basket on his head, and, on the corner, a pub covered in glazed tiles. (Butcher shops and pubs always had glazed tiles, because of the offences committed against the wall outside, which could then be washed down easily.) Charlie Chaplin's brother worked at that pub as manager. St John's Road is deeply flooded in the photograph, which is entirely unsurprising — this is exactly the point where those great lakes I showed you on the Rocque map once stood.
By the 1860s the lakes had been reclaimed — filled with refuse from the streets and building rubble — and the Falcon Brook had been canalised along the back of the properties on that corner. Then came the Clapham Junction railway tunnel, known locally as the "Falcon Bridge" — grotty, wet, full of pigeons, and much avoided. As part of Wandsworth's year as Borough of Culture, it was recently renovated to very considerable effect: pleasant to walk through, the inevitable drips now channelled behind enamel panels that can easily be cleaned if sprayed. My only complaint is that the interpretive panels in the tunnel contain almost no reference to the Falcon Brook itself — the very thing that explains why the tunnel is there.
On Lavender Hill, in a large house where the Battersea Arts Centre (the old Battersea Town Hall) now stands, lived Nassau John Senior, a Nassau Senior — an economist apparently "bone idle," as people who knew him say — though someone else probably wrote it — who wrote a letter describing conditions on Battersea Rise:
We are receiving constant warnings through the press of a visitation of cholera either this autumn or early next year. At the foot of the high ground called Battersea Rise there is a large open sewer passing in its course several rows of cottages inhabited by labouring people. This sewer — the Falcon Sewer — is as black as ink and as thick as gruel. The smell from it is, I need hardly say, most offensive.
People in the know say Senior would never have written it himself — he was too idle. It was almost certainly his wife Jane Senior, a remarkable woman who was a public health activist and educationist, and who died absurdly young. Jane was the sister of Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown's School Days.
The cholera scares of the nineteenth century produced some of the most vivid imagery of the period — cartoons in Punch of the Thames as "Father Thames," a decomposing giant surrounded by dying creatures; Faraday's famous letter calling on government to clean up the river; microscope images showing what was actually living in the water. All of this was very real, and very local.
Amongst those campaigning about public health was Tom Taylor, who was also one of the key figures in the campaign to save Wandsworth Common — it is very important to remember those people, because without them there would be no Common, and we would not be here tonight. Taylor was a poet — most people think him a terrible one, though I rather like his poems — and he wrote a piece imagining King Cholera processing westward from Persia and India, knowing that the conditions along the Thames would allow the disease to thrive.
Eventually, after tireless campaigning, a pumping station was installed at York Gardens, Battersea — necessary because Battersea sits so low, mostly within half a mile of the Thames and very easily flooded. A newer pumping station was installed in 1965, and its outflow went straight into the Thames — untreated. Vile.
Now something new is coming. The Tideway Tunnel — the super sewer — is approximately fifteen kilometres long (perhaps longer), running from Acton to Beckton, with the pumping station still at York Gardens. A great shaft was sunk there into the tunnel below. The tunnel is designed to stop 95% of raw sewage from reaching the Thames; it is up to seventy metres below ground and 7.2 metres wide — two double-decker buses, the universal language of scale. The drawback is that it only starts at Hammersmith or Acton, so everything from further upriver will continue to flow in regardless. But it is a very considerable improvement.
At the mouth of the Falcon Brook — Battersea Creek, where the river meets the Thames — stood the site of York House, and later Price's Patent Candle Company, owned by the Wilson family, who had a very large house and grounds where Spencer Park is today. When the Wilsons' lease reverted to Earl Spencer, he offered the people of Wandsworth and Battersea a reduction in the compensation he was owed if they would let him have the Wilson estate to develop — which is how Spencer Park came into being. Price's was at its height the world's biggest candle maker. Their candles were made from whale fat, animal fat, and crucially from coconut and palm oil, which was crushed on this very site. The raw materials came from all over the world — from Sri Lanka particularly, arriving in barges up the Falcon Brook.
Today, Battersea Creek is reduced to a small ornamental pond. And the mouth of the Falcon Brook — the Falconbrook, as it is sometimes styled — is a tiny aperture in the riverbank, now almost invisible. One day I hope to get down to the foreshore at low tide and photograph it. But thanks to the Tideway Tunnel, at least rather less will be coming out of it.
That, then, was the Falcon Brook — hidden in plain sight.
Question: My parents always told me that Mayford Road was named after a ford across the River May. Is that right?
Philip Boys: I imagine it is not impossible. The stream was not very large at that point, but it certainly got very wet — the people of Mayford Road were constantly complaining, and a special sewer was eventually put in just for them. I have never heard the stream called "the May," but who knows? I will keep alert to that possibility.
Comment from the floor: That was fantastic — a brilliant lift on what feels like the eighty-seventh day of January. I hope you might be persuaded to come back and cover some of the things you had to rush past.
Philip Boys: I am completely addicted to this subject, so that would be a pleasure.
Question: The Falcon Brook — at what point did it stop being an open river and become a pipe?
Philip Boys: It happened gradually, section by section. Farmers routinely piped or buried stretches of streams to drain their land, and that would have happened to some parts early on. Looking at maps in sequence, you can see it happening: for example, around the middle of the nineteenth century the Fernside Lake — roughly the size of one of the lobes of Wandsworth Common Lake today — was fed by the Falcon Brook from Tooting. By the mid-century you find instead just a row of trees marking where the stream had been, which tells you it had been put underground. That corresponds to the period when the Metropolitan Board of Works was pressuring landowners to drain and clean out their ornamental ponds. The main stretch under Northcote Road was probably laid down in the early 1860s, as houses and shops began to be built there. Northcote Road was slow to develop — nobody wanted to live there because it was still considered unhealthy — but as it built up, so the stream was enclosed. I suspect the original pipes are still there, though I would love to know their condition. I did manage to collar two sewer workers once and ask them about it, but they had to go underground and carry on with their work before they could tell me much.
Question: I have a map from 1862 of the area between the Commons, and it seems to say "waterfall" in about four places.
Philip Boys: Yes — and boathouses too, on several of the estates. The stream was large enough for a punt or a small rowing boat. There were waterfalls all the way down; the last one I know of was just as you reached Battersea Rise, just before the stream entered the final lake. A "waterfall" in this context simply means that the landowner had backed up the water to make it picturesque — and incidentally to make a pond for fishing.
Question: Could you remind us where the two upper branches of the river rise?
Philip Boys: That is a really interesting question. There is a wonderful poem — a modernist piece, following Ezra Pound — which is actually about precisely that point: where does inspiration come from? The poet argues there is not a single source. It is something that diffuses into you from everything you have experienced — just like the Falcon Brook, where the entire catchment area filters a trickle down from all directions. He actually quotes Pound in making the comparison. I will leave it there — over to you.
Thank you so much, Philip — what a wealth of information. Please put your hands together once more.
This is the first event in our Heritage programme for 2026, and we have three more coming up in February. On the 5th of February we are inviting people to come and share their memories of living around and on the Common since the 1960s, looking back over sixty years of events and activities. On the 11th of February, Sue Dent — known to many of you — will be talking about Clapham Junction. And then we have the second session of Philip's talk on the Falcon Brook. All the details will be in the newsletter, which is on its way to you. We very much look forward to welcoming you to future talks. Thank you all for coming.