Londoners have been drinking the New River for almost four hundred years. The aqueduct begins at Chadwell Spring, near Ware in Hertfordshire, and is soon joined by a cut from the River Lea. It winds south for some twenty miles and, for most of its history, ended in Islington, a few hundred yards south of the Angel. Both Hollar and Canaletto left elegant depictions of its Round Pond, from where elm pipes and the force of gravity took water to much of Central London. Nowadays, the New River flows into the great Ring Main, a kind of H₂O M25.

LRB 22 July 2004 | PDF Download