Every Drain Remembers a Stream

About this book

Under almost every town there is a stream that nobody has seen for a hundred years. It still runs. It is still, in its way, a stream. And some of the most surprising wildlife on Earth is finding its way back to it. In Every Drain Remembers a Stream, nature writer Brynn Halloway follows city water from the iron grate at the bottom of the hill to the sea and back again. She shows how to read a street for the river buried beneath it, why whole cities put their streams into pipes, and what happens to the frogs, toads and newts that fall through the grating. Then she takes the lid off: the expressway in Seoul that was pulled down to bring a stream back into daylight, the river in Yonkers that saw the sun again after ninety years, the concrete canal in Singapore that was taught to meander, and the city of Zurich, which has been quietly uncovering its brooks since 1988.