The Square Mile just got 1.5 acres bigger. And the River Fleet is a wee bit longer.
For the first time since the 1990s — by our reckoning — the City of London has grown a bit bigger. The new addition is an area of reclaimed land called Bazalgette Embankment. It's a sizeable walkway and plaza, grafted on to the existing Victoria Embankment besides Blackfriars Bridge.
Thank the Thames Tideway Tunnel. This is the super sewer, which recently opened beneath the Thames to collect excess run-off and stop so much crap going into the river. The sewer's construction required numerous access shafts along the route. These have now been capped and their tops turned into pocket parks. The Bazalgette Embankment is the biggest of the lot. Appropriately, then, it's named after Joseph Bazalgette, the chief engineer behind the original Embankment and sewer.
What's here? Well, most of it is open plaza, offering a space to admire the Thames and South Bank, away from the traffic of the main road. But our eyes are also drawn to a series of obsidian monoliths dotted around the structure. These are 'Stages', a selection of sculptural forms by artist Nathan Coley, which are intriguing to look at but also serve variously as seating, a performance stage, a gentle waterfall (in which kids are welcome to splash), and as inky verticals between which to frame photographs of the South Bank.
In the artist's own words, these are "...chunky, abstract, brooding objects that don't reference anyone or anything. They can be joyful, beautiful and brutal at the same time". In other words, make of them what you will.
You'll also find further examples of the twisty ventilation shafts, which are a feature of all these Tideway pocket parks (see also Chelsea and Putney). Each is inscribed with site-specific poetry from Dorothea Smartt.
Wonderfully, her words are written in the Doves Press typeface, which was rescued from the Thames and reconstructed a few years ago (a fascinating story if you've never gone down that rabbit hole). The space, which will be managed by Thames Water and the City of London, will also include a cafe or two in some purpose-built units near the bridge.
Fans of 'London's lost rivers' will particularly want to see this place. In olden times, the River Fleet met the Thames where Blackfriars Bridge now stands. It's still down there, as a sewer. As part of the Tideway project, a new sluice was built to take any excess Fleet water down beneath the Bazalgette Embankment, and thence into the Super Sewer. Put another way, the River Fleet just got extended by a few dozen metres. All those walking guides to the lost river will need an addendum.
The new embankment also has its green pockets. A small woody area contains over 70 saplings. These include a few plane trees, whose ancestors massively line the original Embankment. Among the foliage, you might spot a lion or two — decorative mooring rings again from Bazalgette's day. This is one of the few places on the river where you can easily get close to one.
The completion of the Bazalgette Embankment will be good news to cyclists and pedestrians. The works have necessitated a slightly anarchic dog-leg to the Embankment cycle-path, which crosses over the carriageway and is governed by traffic lights. I've twice seen impatient pedestrians hit by cyclists on this frankly dangerous pinch point. The sooner it's removed, the better.
Pedestrians will also now be able to wander by the riverside right up to, under, and beyond the Blackfriars bridges. By our reckoning, for the first time in London's history, it'll be possible to walk from Westminster to the Tower of London entirely along the north bank (with the minor exceptions of the tunnels beneath Cannon Street station and Southwark Bridge, but those are still close to the river).
It is a genuinely impressive space, which somehow combines heritage, sewer gas discharge, public art and some jolly good views into a pocket plaza we can all cherish. I just wish they could have put a glass floor over the main shaft, so we could all gawp down into the maw of intercepted filth.
The Bazalgette Embankment can be found just west of Blackfriars Bridge on the north bank. It will open to the public in the November/December timeframe (after a few teething issues have been resolved).
All images by Matt Brown unless otherwise stated.
