When I was growing up I was told a few stories and tales about how Cranbrook Road was built on top of the Brook Cran. I decided to research it and read books, looked at maps and visited the library. I soon discovered that the road is named after the village in Kent called Cranbrook and has nothing to do with rivers. In an early census I found the builder of the road, Mr Gurr aged 18, living in Cranbrook. By the next census he had married and had a few children and the first was born in Hawkhurst. He named the house he built in Cranbrook Road for his family, Hawkhurst, confirming the link to Kent and not rivers. However with so many tales of water under the houses I still looked for something I knew didn’t exist. I looked at a lot of the lost river books, but they generally only list the source of the streams and not the course of them. The reason being is that they were redirected so long ago, some of them became boundaries making it difficult to tell if the boundary was picked as the stream/rivers/brooks were there already or if they were boundary ditches dug and then filled with water. There are two rivers that have source in Acton and flow towards the Thames via Chiswick, The Bollo and The Mill Hill Brook, Just to the east is The Wandle and Hammersmith Creek, The one that doesn’t have a source is the Stamford Brook. I’ve seen a few maps mislabel the Mill Hill Brook or the Wandle as Stamford Brook, but that is probably a cartographers mistake*. The name probably derives from “Stone Ford of the Brooks” rather than a name of a brook. As the brook was once the boundary of London and still is the boundary of Chiswick and Hammersmith it seems more likely to be a boundary ditch filled with water rather than a natural brook. When the rivers were diverted, or if they were, will always remain unknown, but what is obvious on maps is that they all appear to change direction when they reach the High Road/ Bath Road. Although there are no remains of the Roman roads through Chiswick I would expect they used similar engineering that can be found elsewhere. It seems most probable with their knowledge of viaducts that they would divert the water, rather than have it wash away the roads that they built. The Bollo now acts as a natural flush for the sewers, Sir Bazalgette copied the idea rather than created it. Probably the best clue its natural route isn’t along Bath road, is a letter from the Duke of Devonshire complaining that the water was flowing over his land. He complained that the Bollo wasn’t being maintained and the water was flowing over his land and needed to be fixed. So although he stated the two were not connected, it does suggest without maintenance that is the route the Bollo would have gone. The water in Chiswick House, apart from when the Duke complained, probably hasn’t connected to the Bollo since before the Romans built the roads through Chiswick. The Ornamental Lake is supposedly fed from Spring Grove, I’ve never researched it myself, but at a guess it must be via a pipe rather than a natural route. The Mill Hill Brook ran across the north of Chiswick and was the boundary between Turnham Green and Acton. The early people of Turnham Green removed the northern Roman road, the modern day boundary between Hounslow and Ealing boroughs, and encroached on the land to the north, that was part of Acton, up to the next natural marker, the Brook. That is why today most of that part of Chiswick is in a different borough. It also created another boundary along Woodstock Road. The orientation of Woodstock Road is because of the brook that was there, it is still there today, but it is in the sewer pipe under the middle of the road. Since Sir Bazalgette it connects to the sewer pipes along Bath Road, but before that it could have connected to Turnham Green. The reason the shops are single stories on one side is because they are built on a natural sink. During the winter it would act as drainage for the High Road and during the summer the water would be used sprinkle the roads to keep the dust down. On the other side of the High Road Sir Bazalgette chose to put the sewer pipes along Devonshire Road rather than Chiswick Lane, which suggests there was something there before then. At the end of Church Steet on the river there is an outlet pipe which could connect to Woodstock Road, but I have yet to find any evidence to prove it. If you look at Chiswick Lane (North and South) and Devonshire Road / Church Street they run almost parallel with a slight curve, the type you get alongside rivers. Although it would have to be pre-Roman, were those roads once along the banks of a brook? If they were it’s more likely to be a marshy area with water flowing over it, rather than a river. If they were that would mean that Cranbrook Road was built on a brook. *Cartographers have always as a form of copyright made mistakes on their maps, Agloe is a fairly famous and funny place name that was made up, but became real. I don’t think it is done with digital mapping, but if you are looking at an old paper map (or one that has been digitalised) be warry of place names. They can be changed easily and people do not get lost, as they could if you added or removed roads or rivers. P.S. As well as the side by side maps the National Library of Scotland also has overlay maps. They have OS maps dating back to the 1840’s and you can overlay them with an ariel view from Bing maps making it very easy to see what was there before. It’s fascinating to see how land ownership before influenced the layout of many of our roads. https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=15.0&lat=51.49276&lon=-0.26220&layers=250&b=1
Colin Potter ● 456d