The Neckinger river, its name comes from Neckinger Wharf, or 'Devil's Neckenger', where Thames pirates were executed with a rope known as the 'Devil's Neckcloth' until the mid- eighteenth century.
In 18C, they built a stone bridge across the Neckinger and ran two large mills. One was on the Neckinger and the other, a tidal mill, on the Thames at Rotherhithe, where Albion and Canada Docks now stand. After the dissolution of the monasteries the Rotherhithe mill was converted into a water-raising machine to pipe water to Southwark and Bermondsey. The other mill, by Millstream Road, became the first gunpowder factory in England to be powered by water. Later both were rebuilt as paper mills and became the first mills in England to make paper from straw.
The river was also used by tanners, who often complained that the owner was 'shutting off the tide when it suited his purpose to do so, to the detriment of the leather manufactures'. The conflict came to court and 'the ancient usages of the district were brought forward in evidence, and the result was that the right of the inhabitants to a supply discomfiture of the mill-owner', wrote Sir Charles Knight in 1842.
Tide-mills were dependent on a multitude of reservoir catchments called tide-streams, which filled with water every high tide. At low tide, water was let out through bottlenecks and powered the mill. This is why the Neckinger, and its neighbour, Earl's Sluice, often gets lost in the artificial ditches and watercourses on the south bank of the Thames, their exact course a mystery.
Beyond Abbey Street the river corssed Jamaica Road and divided into two branches. Between the two lay Jacob's Island, one of the most squalid blots on the Victorian Landscape. The Morning Chonicle of 24 September 1849 lampooned it, not only as the 'Venice of Drains', but as the 'Capital of Cholera'. It described the water surrounding its as 'the colour of strong green tea'. Charles Dickens called Jacob's Island 'the filthiest, the strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are hidden in London', and immortalised it in Oliver Twist, as the backdrop to Bill Sikes' terrible end.
In such neighbourhood, beyond Dockland in the Borough of Southwark, stands Jacob's Island, surrounded by a muddy ditch, six or eight feet deep and fifteen or twenty wise when the tide is in, once called Mill Pond, but known these days as Folly Ditch. . . Crazy wooden galleries, with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; window, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud and threatening to fall into it - as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations, every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garage: all these ornament the banks of Folly Ditch.
South of the Neckinger, and possibly one of its tributaries, runs Earl's Sluice, which flows down Denmark Hill to the Old Kent Road and Rotherhithe, joined there by a tributary from Peckham, the Peck.
At the Old Kent Road there was watersplash, later replaced by a bridge. It was known as Thomas-a-Watering, after Thomas a Becket. It was the first stop for pilgrims on their way to Canterbury, and Chaucer refers to it in The Prologue:
And forth we ridden, a little more than paas,
Unto the waterying of Sain Thomas,
ther our hoost bigin his hors areste.
From Roterhithe New Road, where it enters the swamps of south London, crisscrossed wimill-ditches and tidal-streams, its course becomes uncertain. One theory is that it joins the Neckinger in Bermodsey. Another is that if falls into the Thames near Rotherihithe station. The third says that reaches the Thames at South Dock by St George's steps. Like the corpse of Bill Sikes, the answer lies forever buried in the mud and slime beneath the streets of south London.
From London under London by Richard Trench and Ellis Hillman
