- 11 minutes ago
For decades, cities hid rivers to make room for roads, buildings, and to mask the smell of polluted ones. Now, places worldwide are uncovering them. We went to Sheffield to find out why.
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00:00This is how to make a river disappear.
00:04It's been done with rivers all over the world, likely where you live too.
00:09You've probably walked over them without even knowing it, just like me right now.
00:16Today, cities are spending millions to dig them back up.
00:21But why? And how do you even unbury a river?
00:28To find out, we've come to a city that was once part of England's industrial heartland.
00:34Below Sheffield, there are many buried rivers.
00:37We are going underground to explore them and understand why they were even covered up in the first place.
00:46Hello!
00:47Julia?
00:48Yes, nice to meet you.
00:49Anthony, nice to meet you.
00:50Hello.
00:50So you ready?
00:52This is Anthony Wood.
00:53He takes people on tours in Sheffield's culverts.
00:56They are the tunnels built to hide the city's rivers.
01:00The tours are organized by a local charity, the Sheaff and Porter Rivers Trust,
01:04which works to protect and restore the city's rivers.
01:07Its chair, Simon Ogden, is coming along on the tour and we'll hear more from him later.
01:13So yeah, we're about to enter underneath the train station.
01:17Like dark and tiny spaces are really not my comfort zone, but we'll see.
01:23It's all cool, don't worry. How are you with spiders?
01:27Fine.
01:28Well, we'll see about that.
01:30We're lucky there hasn't been much rain recently, so the water level is low.
01:35After heavy rain, tours like this often have to be called off.
01:41Just watch your feet around here because it's a...
01:44How does it, like it just happens because people, people throw stuff in the river?
01:50Yeah, exactly.
01:52What is it?
01:53It's not a PC, but I don't...
01:55More like a, not a DJ set, but something with sound, no?
01:58Yeah.
01:59It's a bit of a mystery, but probably something that was very, very expensive at one point.
02:04But yeah, we do find these interesting little mysteries occasionally.
02:10What type of material is that? Like what is it built with?
02:14So you're looking at a variety of different materials and it depends on the period of time that the different
02:18elements were built.
02:19So this is originally built in late 1860s, around 1870, because the train station itself was opened in 1872.
02:28So you've got these big stones that were part of that.
02:30Over the years, more stones, bricks and later concrete were added bit by bit.
02:35So you're ready?
02:36Yes.
02:37Let's test your claustrophobia.
02:39I guess so.
02:45And then you'll see the spiders on the roof all around you.
02:48Oh my, oh okay, I don't like...
02:50But you said you're good with spiders.
02:52Yeah, but I don't like them that much.
02:55Rivers were key to Sheffield's industrial success.
02:58Together with the city's hills, they were perfect for water power.
03:02This drove the city's most important industries.
03:05First cutlery, and later steel.
03:09If rivers are so important to a city, why did they bury them?
03:13At the time, the rivers were already effectively open sewers.
03:17So they'd been abused and abused horribly.
03:20Literally hundreds of people died as a result of the water being so polluted.
03:24London had the same problem.
03:27And it got so bad, it became known as the Great Stink.
03:30This is a satirical cartoon from that time.
03:33But rivers didn't just disappear in England.
03:36New York, Vienna, Moscow, Seoul, cities all over the world buried them too.
03:42Sometimes because the water was polluted, but also to make space for the cities to grow.
03:46In some cases, the buried rivers became part of these cities' first sewage systems.
03:52You can put rivers in pipes, box-shaped tunnels, or an arch structure like the one we are in right
03:59now.
04:00Down here, you can still see how the arches were built.
04:04So you'd put a wooden arch over it, you'd build a frame.
04:08And once you had the frame, you could build the actual stones over it.
04:12Because the arch is one of the strongest forms you can get.
04:14So that was sporting the wooden frame that they built the arch over.
04:18In Sheffield, rivers were covered in stages from the 1860s up until the 1910s.
04:25It's hard to say exactly how many culverts there are across the city, because many cannot be accessed.
04:32But this map gives a rough idea.
04:35These are the parts of the rivers that flow underground.
04:38It only shows culverted sections longer than 50 meters.
04:42And all of these are streams that appear on historical maps but have no visible trace today,
04:48so we don't know what happened to them.
04:51This is the river Sheff.
04:53And this is where it's covered.
04:56Welcome to the Sheff.
04:57When we got to here, we stepped into the Sheff.
04:59So that's the end of the porter and the confluence with the Sheffs.
05:03While the Sheff and the porter brook are covered a lot, the don is open and flowing right through the
05:08city.
05:08The don is a lot harder to culvert.
05:10It's a lot more expensive because it's so much wider and so much bigger and so much more of a
05:15change in flow.
05:18And underground rivers don't make great homes for fish or plants.
05:24Plant-wise, you basically eliminate everything.
05:28Unless if you have a bit of daylight, you're not going to have any plants.
05:31In terms of the fish, for the most part, it's not good for them.
05:35They need daylight.
05:36They need the light for the plants, to have the insects.
05:39It's the whole ecosystem that relies on itself.
05:41It can also hit fish populations if they cannot pass through such structures to reach their breeding grounds.
05:48And there's one more problem and it's quite a big one.
05:51Tunnels can only take a limited amount of water.
05:54We'll see what that means later.
05:58So, did you enjoy that, now that you're back to safety?
06:01Yeah.
06:01It was fine, but I'm also, I'm relieved.
06:04Okay, so let's leave the past behind and let's go look at where Sheffield is actually removing such structures right
06:11now.
06:12We are in the center of Sheffield, right where the city was founded.
06:17Here, the city is opening up a section of the river Sheff.
06:20This is called daylighting or, more technically, deculverting.
06:25But before we can visit the construction site, I have to elevate my outfit.
06:31And then, super heavy shoes actually, but they are here to protect my feet, so I take it.
06:41We are meeting Simon Ogden again.
06:44He has spent decades working with Sheffield's rivers.
06:46He used to work with the city council and has been involved in this project as well as earlier ones.
06:53Why did the city decide to open up that part of the river?
06:56So, Sheffield is named after the river Sheff, and yet the river was almost invisible for maybe 150 years.
07:03So, when the opportunity came to create a park here, it seemed an obvious thing to do to open up
07:10the Sheff field.
07:11But there are lots of other reasons as well.
07:13Climate change.
07:14With so much more extreme weather, it's a bad idea to have rivers in tunnels because the tunnels are like
07:22a pipe.
07:23When the pipe gets full, the water will go somewhere else.
07:27And somewhere else is people's streets and houses and schools and stations.
07:32So, we need to create more room for the river and also slow the river down as well.
07:38Because when water goes through a pipe, it goes very fast.
07:40And why was that part of the river even buried in the first place?
07:44Because the river was so polluted, where we're standing now was the slaughterhouses for the town.
07:53So, everything that they couldn't sell from the animals, blood, s***, bones, was thrown in the river.
07:59The river was seen as being a health hazard.
08:01This health hazard is now open again, and I can confirm, it isn't one anymore.
08:06But opening it wasn't easy.
08:09They had to do it bit by bit.
08:11Literally cutting the ground from underneath their feet.
08:15To understand more about how all of this works, we are meeting Dylan Ryan.
08:20He is an engineer working on the project.
08:23What are these yellow thingies here for?
08:26The yellow elements are hydraulic jacks.
08:29So, where we're stood right now is all soil.
08:32And all of that is bearing onto these walls and trying to push it inwards.
08:36So, the lid of the culvert, which we've now taken off, initially would hold those walls in place.
08:42So, since we've taken them off now, we need to replace that function.
08:45And here we've used these temporary hydraulic jacks that we can actually use to exert a pushing force and keep
08:53those walls in place.
08:55Eventually, permanent structures will do that job instead.
08:58Wow, that looks crazy.
09:02So, let's go into the river.
09:06These are part of the stabilizing structure that will keep the walls in place once the hydraulic jacks come out.
09:12There will be two of these stacked on top of each other against each wall.
09:18Then, these U-shaped elements are put in the middle and get filled with concrete.
09:23This is what it'll look like when it's done.
09:26But there's one thing I don't quite understand yet.
09:31This being a river, I don't see much water, to be honest.
09:35Back on top, Dylan explains why.
09:39So, some of the solutions that we've come up with to support the existing culvert walls need us to actually
09:46access the riverbed, put in some structural elements down there.
09:50So, it's important that we take whatever measures we can to make sure that the waterbed is safe for access.
09:56So, to do that, we put a dam just in front over here, where we're able to collect the water
10:01and send it down a pipe.
10:03That allows the river to still maintain its flow into the connecting river Don, while the workers have safe access
10:11to carry out the works.
10:13Even with all this in place, the river doesn't always cooperate.
10:18A few weeks before our visit, work had to stop completely because this is what it looked like.
10:25There's still a lot to do.
10:27Putting in the stabilizing structures, building a way for fish to get through and creating the stairs so people can
10:33get close to the river.
10:34The original budget for the entire project, including a park, was around 20 million pounds.
10:41It was supposed to open in 2026, but costs are expected to be more than a third higher and the
10:47project is postponed to summer 2028.
10:50The money comes from a public fund.
10:52In an interview with the BBC, critics said that the council could have done a better job at planning to
10:58avoid delays.
10:58The council says everything is late and costs more because the project is more complex than they expected.
11:06But this is not the first river getting dug up again in Sheffield.
11:10So, we are here at Matilda Street, where part of the river Porter Brook has actually already been daylighted, along
11:17with creating a little park.
11:21And all of this used to be a car park.
11:25Just like this one.
11:28We are meeting Tom Wild here.
11:30He studies river ecosystems in cities.
11:33So, what would you say are the biggest benefits of daylighting rivers?
11:37Mainly really flood prevention, reducing pollution and bringing nature back into the city.
11:43Because often these systems of the past, maybe from centuries ago, the capacity of the pipes, for instance, is too
11:50small.
11:51And so, under heavy flow conditions with climate change, heavy rainfall or flashier flows, the rivers tend to block up
12:00these pipes.
12:01And so, opening them up is a flood solution.
12:05Culvert collapse occurred Monday afternoon in Coolville, Ohio.
12:10And this is what can happen when there's too much water flowing through a culvert.
12:15So, opening them up reduces that risk and might save money in the long run.
12:20Open water does something else too.
12:23It cools the city.
12:25Which is especially important as cities tend to trap heat and have to find ways to deal with hotter summers
12:31in the future.
12:32But there are other reasons for daylighting rivers as well.
12:36In Utrecht, a canal was removed to create a highway in 1970.
12:41In 2002, citizens voted to bring the canal back.
12:45They ended up with a greener city with more space for plants and animals and bicycles.
12:52Check out our video where we visited Utrecht to take a closer look.
12:57A pioneer in daylighting streams is Zurich.
13:02They started decades ago and have since opened more than 15 kilometers of streams around the city.
13:08And it actually saved them money because it improved their sewage system.
13:14This spot in Seoul used to look like this.
13:18In the early 2000s, the city uncovered the Buried River.
13:23The structure had become unsafe and they wanted to revive the area.
13:28It worked.
13:29But there has also been criticism.
13:32Saying the restored river was too artificial and that it promoted gentrification in the area.
13:39So, why isn't every city doing this?
13:42Firstly, the cost can be more significant because of existing infrastructure and services.
13:48There could be a busy road on top of the hidden river, for example.
13:52And the land might also not belong to the city, but to a private owner.
13:57And that makes things more difficult.
14:01So, we can look at that balance of how much it's going to cost to invest.
14:04But also, in the longer term, how does that change the overall, let's say, sustainability and resilience of those places.
14:14In Sheffield, history was important too.
14:17The city began right here and gets its name from the river Sheaf.
14:21No sheaf, no sheaf field.
14:23But there will always be some places where daylighting is not really an option.
14:28By the way, if you're ever in Sheffield, a few years ago this was installed as a reminder of the
14:34hidden rivers and also to let some light in to help fish pass.
14:38And it's actually quite impossible to open it up here.
14:47Do you know of any hidden rivers where you live?
14:50Let us know in the comments below, subscribe for more videos like this and check out DW.com.
15:04We'll see you next time.