The Lavant may be small but it has helped shape our city
Great cities usually have a river. Thus London has the mighty Thames, Worcester the scenic Wye and Chichester the diminutive Lavant.
The go-to source for information on this little-known river is Ken Newbury’s monograph, The River Lavant, first published in 1987 but now out of print.
Ken starts his account with the great forces of nature which created local geology, but I am no geologist, so that section of the book quickly faded from memory. What
I do remember is that the
Lavant is a ‘winterbourne’ and has had its course much altered over the centuries by man. A winterbourne is a stream, often a chalk stream, which flows only after wet weather. The Lavant rises in East Dean, where its springs feed the village pond, and is well watered as far as a pumping station just north of Lavant village.
If I remember rightly, that pumping station was opened in 1959. It extracts a prodigious quantity of water every day, which is why our little river is more of a winterbourne south as opposed to north of Lavant.
It is believed that the river originally reached the sea via Pagham Rife and Pagham Harbour, but that the Romans diverted it to provide a water supply to their city of Noviomagus, which in time became Chichester. That name is a corruption of Cissae Castra, meaning ‘Cissa’s Camp’, but I do not know how one Roman name supplanted the other. Possibly, the military base (castra) evolved into a Romanobritish settlement.
I suspect the Roman alteration to the river’s course was near Chichester Crematorium, where the river changes direction from south-east to south-west. From there onwards, it can be followed via roads and footpaths as far as Needlemakers, where it disappears into a long culvert beneath Eastgate Square and Market Road.
Such was the pressure in the culvert during the 1994 city flood that the river made a spectacular re-appearance, bursting out as a diagonal sheet of water between wall and pavement where businesses like the Turkish Restaurant and Turners Pies now operate. Everyone knew about the River Lavant then, through national TV reports!