The Falconbrook is a stream that once rose in Balham and Tooting, draining most of that parish as well as the south of Battersea including Clapham Junction, and a narrow strip in the rest of Battersea where it entered the River Thames.
The river was culverted in the 1860s, and today is entirely underground.[1] In 2007 rainfall caused it to rise and flood Falcon Road near Clapham Junction station.
The Falconbrook, a south west London brook, now underground for its entire length, has been throughout replaced by surface water drains diverting water away; its course forming a very slight depression is used from its source for a conveniently cheap, Victorian, anti-environmental solution — a combined sewer — to the Southern Low Level Sewer in the London sewerage system. The source of the Falconbrook is Streatham Hill, with an additional source to the west at Furzedown south of Tooting Bec Common. From its source the Falconbrook flowed west through Balham, then turned north one residential block before Wandsworth Common as it was joined by the Tooting Bec feeder and continues to carve a ravine which is formed by St John’s Road and Northcote Road in Battersea Rise. Springs feeding the first drain underneath the foundations of a row of shops (nos 2–36 Streatham High Road, the A23 road).
During their construction, extra access space was built below the basement floors to accommodate the springs when in full spate. The brook flowed (and now sewer flows) along Drewstead Road, past Woodfield Avenue, passed through the north of Tooting Bec Common, north down Cavendish Road (passing Weir Road), west along the approximate line of Kenilford Road, along Oldridge Road, turned north by Holy Ghost School, west of Rusham and Montholme Road and along Northcote Road, 8-11m AOD.[2][3] After St John’s Road it flowed along Falcon Road, Battersea just before its end turned west emptying in the River Thames west of Lombard Road and north of the London Heliport.[2]
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