Why West London is 3 metres higher than it should be

It may not be obvious to the untrained eye, but much of West London is higher than it should be — by around 3 metres.

This is one of the revelations in a new book that looks at the development of West London based on the excavations carried out by Crossrail.

Although the book touches on the Crossrail research, it is very much wider look at the history of London, from prehistoric to the modern day. Starting in the depths of time, when England was closer to the equator, and London the sea bed, it moves through the era of when elephants roamed the land.

Although not part of the Crossrail excavations, rhinoceros and elephants have been found in Trafalgar Square, but Crossrail did uncover reindeer bones, from a later time when the ice age covered much of the UK.

The barrier of the ice sheet reached to Finchley, and it’s the legacy of that which formed much of London. For example, the Thames today is only where it is thanks to the ice sheet blocking its old path to the north of London.

Leaping forward through the ages, the book touches Saxon times, revealing the origins of some of our familiar district names, such as Paddington (Pada’s farm) and Kilburn (cows’ stream).

London’s growth as a modern city stems from the break with Rome and the restrictions on the Monarch to raise funds from Parliament. With the churches stripped of their wealth, and sold to developers, the rise of housing as planned estates had begun.

It’s later that as London spread that some of the great squares of London were laid out. The book reveals that often many of the bricks for the grand houses came from the square they surrounded. The clay from the ground being fired into bricks locally.

That tended to leave a hole, which was often filled in with night-soil — or human waste. London’s great garden squares are literally built on shit.

But why is West London thought to be 3 metres higher than it otherwise should be? Have a look at Georgian terraces and notice how they have a lower floor.

That’s not the basement, it’s the old ground floor and the road was raised up to form the roof of the coal cellars. The legacy of that road raising was continued in many Victorian streets as well. And thus, within a hundred years, London rose upwards by around 3 metres. Handy in this modern age of climate change and rising sea levels.

Although most of the Crossrail archaeology affects the surface few metres, there was a surprise even deep down in the tunnels, when a Tunnel Boring Machine ran into the brick-lined wall of an unusually deep water well.

As a book, it’s less about archaeology though, than a good romp through the history of London from the geology that shaped it to the genealogy of those who built it.

Having read it, some of the curious street patterns around Oxford Street will start to make sense, and the layout of the grand squares seem more coherent. It’s a book that will leave even the most ardent of London history fans having learned at least something new about the underlying history of West London.

The book, New Frontier: The Origins And Development Of West London is available from here and here