3-028-292 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Blackfriars Bridge end of the Thames Embankment, [London], 1870. '...a space of about eight acres has been reclaimed from the slime and mud of the river. More than 100,000 tons of earth or rubbish, and vast quantities of broken stone for the road, have been required...The contractor is Mr. T. Webster. A broad strip of the new land is added to the Temple Gardens. Outside these gardens is the magnificent new carriage road along the Embankment, with its broad foot pavements on each side; beneath which runs the Low-Level Sewer on the one hand, and the Metropolitan District Railway on the other... the termination of the river wall...[was] requisite to give room for the mouth of the Fleet, that famous covered stream, anciently an open tidal channel for the navigation of barges, then a flowing ditch, and finally a sewer...The natural mouth of the Fleet was precisely at the spot which is shown in our Engraving...The opening of the Fleet has been diverted in order to form the Embankment, so that it now comes immediately under Blackfriars' Bridge, and is quite out of sight. Only the surface water passes into the river, the sewage being intercepted here, as elsewhere, by the Low-Level Sewer of the Metropolitan Main Drainage system'. From "Illustrated London News", 1870.