Sloane Square Underground Station - Sloane Gardens, London, UK
N 51° 29.540 W 000° 09.395
30U E 697384 N 5708410
Sloane Square tube station serves the Circle and District lines and is located between Victoria, to the east, and South Kensington, to the west, stations.
Waymark Code: WMG31A
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 01/06/2013
Views: 5
This article, on the 150 Great Things
About the Underground website [visit
link], tells us how a river is carried over Sloane Square
station:
"This is possibly the most
inelegant object I’ve featured on the blog so far. Steady those trembling nerves
– it’s a giant metal tube!
Inside, however, is one of a
famously elusive and vaguely bewitching brood: London’s lost
rivers.
Sloane Square station was opened,
rather sweetly, on Christmas Eve 1868. Inaugural passengers, perhaps in search
of a last-minute festive goose or clementine, would have had good cause to
wonder as to the identity of the iron vessel hung in a decidedly non-festive
fashion above their heads.
But this was no unexceptional strut
or inert girder. Contained within was what remained of the River Westbourne,
whose contents were en route from Hampstead Heath to the Thames.
Knowledge of this particular
waterway no doubt was and still is kept to a minimum. How much of the river
still runs through the pipe is possibly of an equally small magnitude. But there
it goes, trickling – or maybe pouring – over the heads of travellers, a minor
but rather fascinating engineering marvel.
You can get a better idea of the
route of the river (if not a clearer view of the pipe) by peering through some
of the railings between the buildings that surround the station:
I believe you used to be able to
get a much clearer view from up here, before residents tired of a) the sight of
trains b) the sight of people struggling to catch sight of trains c) the sight
of anything except their own valuable homes. This is sad, because there are far
more objectionable things in the Sloane Square neighbourhood than a grey
conduit.
Such was the ingenuity of the
Victorians, however, that a channel of water passing directly through the
location of a proposed station became not a dilemma but an opportunity. And such
was their fortitude that the opportunity survives to this day, inviting odd
glances, sporadic frowns and the occasional knowing smile towards the taming of
this ‘Bourne supremacy."