The Other London • 49and other units of the General Hospital in Paris that Charles I’s French phy-
sician had wanted to replicate in London. The Guildhall and regional jus-
tices concentrated on keeping the streets and streams and slaughtering places
as clean as possible.
If citizens swept the passageways in front of their homes and shops, the
justices said, London’s infamous effluvia and miasmas would be reduced.
Property owners could be fined for allowing “nuisances” around their build-
ings, though they seldom were. The parish raker periodically carried dung-
pots away. When neighbors complained of “noisome smells” emanating from
the parish churchyard, its graves were covered with additional soil or quick-
lime. Tanners, brewers, butchers, and others whose livelihood resulted in
polluted public space were largely left alone.
Water was of great concern. Since the Middle Ages, London had devel-
oped an impressive conduit system, with miles of pipes carrying water from
country brooks and the Thames River to collection spots largely within the
wall. A lucky few in the city had water piped right into their homes or deliv-
ered by servants or water carriers, but the great mass of people inside the wall
fetched water from the neighborhood conduit. This water could be trusted,
by and large, but the poorer suburbs ringing the wall fell back on neighbor-
hood wells or, worse, polluted streams that drained into the Thames.
Since early times, small boats traveling up from the Thames to as far as
where Saint Pancras station stands today had used the Fleet stream. Over
the years, numerous tenements and shanties had been built on either side of
the once beautiful stream that wended its way southward from the country-
side. The results can well be imagined. A historian of the Great Plague,
Walter George Bell, describes the stream in the 1660 s as no better than an
open sewer. Its appalling condition affected three adjacent parishes in the
city’s western liberties: Saint Bride, Saint Sepulchre, and Saint Andrew Hol-
born. All three parishes had been hard hit in years of pestilence.^24
Water-filled ditches ringed the northern wall, remnants of marshlands that
once had stretched from Mooreditch in Saint Giles Cripplegate all the way
to the parish of Saint Leonard Shoreditch. Choked with rubbish and filth,
the neighborhood ditch slipped from desirable to derelict. Persons assigned
to the task by their parish periodically hauled away refuse from the ditch.
Wells were no longer the pristine sources of water that old-timers remem-
bered. A few stood next to land that had been appropriated by parishes for
burying the dead. Outside the north wall lay Crowders Well alley in Crip-
plegate parish. Folk memory held its well water to be “very good for sore eyes
to wash them with,” a preservative against “distempers,” and containing