Abbey River

The L-shaped conduit adjoins mixed-use flood plain: water-meadows landscaped for a golf course, a motorway and a fresh water treatment works on the island it creates, Laleham Burway to its east and north in turn.

In the 18th and 19th centuries the stream became ancillary to pasture, used for seasonal drainage and ornamental value of houses and a farm, Abbey Chase, adjoining its southern meander close to the centre of Chertsey, rather than corn, wheat and barley milling.

The manmade strictly-considered "island" the bypass channel forms is outranked in size since the 2002 completion of the Jubilee River by the example containing Dorney and Eton, Berkshire.

The contemporary decades of reduced capacity (see deposition) and multiple-barraged flow has led to the Environment Agency to propose negligible use of its route in the creation of two seasonal drainage channels — partly due to better biodiversity in shallow rivers it is proposed to intersect its course possibly thereby slightly adding to its final flow, but with a main outflow channel across its existing island.

In 1809 the millers, in concert with City of London Corporation, offered the stream as the Thames navigation channel by building a weir to protect Chertsey, Shepperton, and other areas downstream from floods, as well as keeping water levels sufficiently deep, but the latter decided to pursue its own shorter route plans, so built Chertsey Weir and Lock.

[8] The site of the abbey was bought in 1861 by Mr Bartrop, the secretary to the Surrey Archaeological Society, a combination of earlier collections and other archaeologists centred at Guildford Museum.