There is the mysterious River Fleet, for instance—the largest and most important of London’s subterranean rivers, the “hollow stream.” Once a broad tidal basin and an important artery bringing goods and business into the capital, it has repeatedly endured abuse at the hands of humans, choked and polluted with discarded carcasses and putrefying offal from the meat markets and tanneries lining its banks—next, all at once, it was deemed too filthy, too malodorous, too unpleasant to look at and therefore no longer of use. A solution was found to hide it from sight, cover its ugliness under stacks
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