River Fleet - in Fiction

In Fiction

Ben Jonson's poem On the Famous Voyage (discussed in Andrew McRae's article, cited below) provides a mock-epic account of a journey along the excrement-lined ditch during the early seventeenth century.

The 19th-century River Fleet is part of one of the settings a story of the BBC series Doctor Who entitled The Talons of Weng-Chiang, starring Tom Baker: in one episode the Doctor claims he once caught a large salmon in the Fleet, which he shared with the Venerable Bede. It is also mentioned in the Eighth Doctor audio adventure Dead London.

The Christopher Fowler crime thriller The Water Room uses the River Fleet as a major setting.

In Neil Gaiman's television serial and novel Neverwhere, the Great Beast of London is said to be a bull that ran into the Fleet while it was still partially open to the air, and vanished underground into the depths of London Below, growing huge and fat off the sewage.

In The Devlin Diary by Christi Phillips the Fleet is a major part of the story as one of the characters works to build filters to rid the river of the long despised sewage.

In the detective novel "Thrones, Dominations", set in 1936 London, Lord Peter Wimsey and Police Superintendent Charles Parker descend into the Fleet and nearby subterranean rivers, in search of the body of a murder victim - and barely escape drowning when a sudden heavy rain causes a flood underground.

In Dickens' Oliver Twist, Fagin's lair is on Saffron Hill, adjacent to the Fleet (and in some adaptations, reached by a footbridge across it, which collapses under the weight of pursuers).

The River Fleet is also mentioned in the novel "Rivers of London" by Ben Aaronovitch, as well as Blue Monday by crime novelist Nicci French.

In The Door in the Wall, Marguerite de Angeli's juvenile fiction set in early 14th century England, Brother Luke soothes lame Robin's anger at being called Crookshanks by explaining to him that they are all named for some quality unique to themselves. He gives as an example Geoffry Atte-Water "because he lives by the River Fleet and tends the conduit there with his father."

The 1966 Modesty Blaise strip cartoon story "The Head Girls" features the underground section of the River Fleet, where Modesty & Willie Garvin are tethered by the villainous Gabriel in the expectation that the rising tide will drown them.