Hydracity Detour 4 – Micro locations of Watery confluences.

Following Hydracity Detour 3 IL curates another series of explorations of watery vents and veins across the Metropole. Designed to coincide, as a number of individuals/artists, explorers and walkers, join together in a simultanaeous on the ground mapping – to plot and flow along some of London’s least known or hidden waterways with the aim of recording various micro environments and confluences – in exploring potential bio-diversity, difference and hidden beauty found within the Watery Commons of Thames Valley basin system.

For Saturday 27 February 2021 – Sailor Forbes voyages along the Darent to the confluence of the River Cray and down to Dartford Creek. (Part 1 of InspiralLondon 3 part Darent Valley Walk).

An echo of the Wogebourne River flowing down to Thamesmead – R&D on the ground mapping by Calum F Kerr

And walking in and on the marshy bogland of River Peck – further investigations by Rachel Gomme

And on Sunday 28 February a tracing of the Tyburn along its lower reaches, entering the marshy floodplain of the Thames south of Green Park. One branch of the stream wandering toward the Thames at the northern end of Whitehall while its twin entered south of the site of current House of Parliament. Between the forked flow of the Tyburn, the small gravel island of Westminster.

From the 13th century the Tyburn supplied water for London through pipeways made of elm trunks. Now, entirely drained off into the sewer and hidden underground, the Tyburn flowed west of the modern Marble Arch, near to the northeastern corner where the Middlesex Gallows once stood as a place of public execution.