A FEW SUBURBAN SPAS.
‘Of either sex whole droves together
To see and to be seen flock thither,
To drink and not to drink the water,
And here promiscuously to chatter.’
_Islington Wells or the Threepenny Academy_, 1691.
IN connection with sculptured signs, and again when alluding to the
arms of the Fowler family, and to Canonbury, I have had occasion to
describe houses in Islington. I shall now take up the thread of my
discourse, from the White Lion on the west side of the High Street,
and ask the kind reader to explore with me the sites of some of the
old places of entertainment nearer London. A short distance further
south is the Angel, rebuilt in 1819. This was one of the picturesque
old galleried inns which have now become almost extinct. Close at
hand, on the opposite side of the way, is the old Red Lion tavern,
very much rejuvenated; it puts forward a bold claim to date from the
year 1415. On the gables are shields, apparently modern, with lions
in relief. Seventy or eighty years ago this house stood almost alone
on the high-road. Here Tom Paine was said to have written his ‘Rights
of Man,’ and the tradition is that Goldsmith, Thomson, nay even the
great Dr. Johnson, visited it. In the middle distance of Hogarth’s
picture of ‘Evening,’ there is a house, supposed to be the old Red
Lion, which shows how rural were its then surroundings. The scene is
laid in front of the Myddleton’s Head--also at that time apparently
a country wayside inn, which, says Pinks, had been built in 1614. A
portrait of the worthy founder of the New River Company projects by
way of sign from the gable. This house stood on the south side of
Sadler’s Wells Theatre, from which it was separated by the New River.
Malcolm has recorded that in 1803 it was still picturesque. He says:
‘A few paces northwards (from Islington Spa) conduct the passenger
under a portrait of Sir Hugh Myddleton (tolerably well painted), who
faces his river adorned with tall poplars, graceful willows, sloping
banks, and flowers.’ How changed is now the scene! The trees have long
since perished as utterly as the anglers,[81] ‘the noble swans’ and
water-fowl, of an earlier time; and Sir Hugh would no longer face
his once pleasant stream, which in its old age has disappeared from
sight, and taken refuge under ground. In 1831 the Sir Hugh Myddleton
tavern replaced the former house of entertainment. This, in its turn,
has now ceased to exist, having been pulled down, with other houses in
Myddleton Place, to make room for the new thoroughfare[82] from the
Angel, Islington, to Holborn Town Hall, opened July 9, 1892, under the
name of Rosebery Avenue.
One of the leading characteristics of London citizens of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was their taste for frequenting
public gardens and houses of amusement in the suburbs. Many of
these were originally health-resorts--‘spas’ or ‘wells,’ they were
called, from the springs of mineral water which had formed the chief
attraction. In such places the northern suburbs abounded, and the
parish of Clerkenwell[83] might be considered their headquarters. At a
time when travelling was toilsome and costly, sometimes even dangerous,
it was useful to have a little Buxton or Harrogate close at hand. To
supply the demand, some enterprising person discovered a spring with
rare healing powers; some doctor wrote it up, and the place became,
for a time at least, fashionable. Such a spa in St. George’s Fields I
have already described. Let me say a few words about others equally
interesting, in the neighbourhood in which we now find ourselves.
Not far from the site of the Myddleton’s Head, on the north side of
the New River, no longer visible, and close to the New River Head,
stands Sadler’s Wells Theatre, built on the site of one of these places
of health-resort. It seems that some time before 1683, a certain Mr.
Sadler, said to have been a surveyor of highways, had put up a wooden
building hereabouts, which was known as Sadler’s Music-house. In
that year his servants, when digging in the garden for gravel, were
reported to have discovered a mineral spring, and in 1684 a pamphlet
was published by a doctor named Thomas Guidot, puffing the curative
powers of the water. He speaks of five or six hundred patients being
there every morning, and assures us that the spring had merely been
rediscovered: ‘The priests belonging to the Priory of Clarkenwell,
using to attend there, making the people believe that the virtues
of the waters proceeded from the efficacy of their prayers.’ ‘These
superstitions,’ he adds, ‘were the occasion of its being arched over
and concealed at the time of the Reformation.’
In spite of this fine puff, the waters, apparently, soon ceased to
attract, though they continued to be sold in Sadler’s name for some
time, as shown by an advertisement of June, 1697.[84] In 1699 the
building was advertised as Miles’s Musick-house. The place had then
become known as a resort for very disorderly characters. Miles was
succeeded by Francis Forcer, whose father, a musician, seems to have
lived on the spot.
The son, said to have been an Oxford man, introduced the diversions of
tumbling, and rope-dancing with the pranks of Harlequin and Scaramouch.
He died in 1743, and in the following year the establishment was being
carried on by one John Warren, when it was presented by a Middlesex
Grand Jury as a place of ‘great extravagance, luxury, idleness, and
ill-fame.’ Soon afterwards it got into the hands of Mr. Rosoman,[85]
who in 1765 pulled down Sadler’s wooden erection, and built a regular
theatre on the site.
Towards the end of last century Sadler’s Wells was still some distance
from London, and the roads were by no means safe. George Daniel, in his
‘Merrie England,’ says: ‘It is curious to read at the bottom of the old
bills and advertisements the following alarming announcements, “A horse
patrol will be sent in the New Road that night, for the protection of
the nobility and gentry who go from the squares and that end of the
town; the road also towards the city will be properly guarded.” Again,
“June, 1783.--Patroles of horse and foot are stationed from Sadler’s
Wells gate along the New Road to Tottenham Court Turnpike; likewise
from the City Road to Moorfields; also to St. John Street, and across
the Spa fields to Rosoman Row, from the hours of eight to eleven.”’
On Easter Monday, April 2, 1804, a new sort of entertainment called
‘Naumachia’ was produced at Sadler’s Wells. An immense tank had been
constructed under the stage and beyond it, which could be filled by
water from the New River, and emptied at pleasure. On this aquatic
stage, the boards being removed, was given a mimic representation of
the Siege of Gibraltar, in which real vessels of considerable size
bombarded the fortress, but were subdued by the garrison and to all
appearance burnt.[86] After a time the success of the novelty was
prodigious, and many pieces of the same kind were afterwards produced.
This theatre was distinguished a generation ago as the home of
Shakespearean drama, under the management of that sterling actor Samuel
Phelps. It was rebuilt in 1879. The actual site of the old well has
long been lost; Malcolm asserted that it had been discovered some time
before he wrote ‘in the space between the New River and the stage-door’
of the theatre, and that it was said to have been encircled with stone,
with a descent of several steps. Cromwell, however, writing a few
years later, tells us that ‘persons who have an intimate acquaintance
with the theatre for the last half-century have no recollection of
the discovery; and as it is known that springs yet exist under the
orchestra and stage, it seems probable that the ancient healing
fountain might be traced to that situation.’
For a few years, during the first half of the seventeenth century,
there was a rival to Sadler’s Wells in a popular place of amusement
called ‘The New Wells near the London Spa.’ There were gardens here,
and a theatre, in which took place what we should now call variety
entertainments. Mrs. Charlotte Charke--the eccentric daughter of Colley
Cibber, was one of the performers. Ceasing to attract, it was closed in
1747, the theatre being afterwards used as a chapel under the auspices
of John Wesley, and, according to Pinks, the houses Nos. 5 to 8,
Rosoman Street now occupy the site.
Lysons, Halliwell Phillipps, and others, have confused the mineral
spring discovered by Sadler with a mineral spring of greater celebrity
called the New Tunbridge Wells; but, though near each other, they
were quite distinct. In 1699 a narrative poem was published under the
title of ‘A Walk to Islington, with a Description of New Tunbridge
Wells and Sadler’s Musick House,’ in which the fame of the wells is
ascribed to its medicinal water, and that of the music-house to such
good cheer as cheesecakes, custards, bottled ale and cider, and the
diversions of singing and dancing. An article in the _Gentleman’s
Magazine_ for December, 1813, puts the matter beyond a doubt; and
their relative positions are clearly marked in Horwood’s map of 1799.
New Tunbridge Wells, or the Islington Spa (really, of course, in the
parish of Clerkenwell), was a spring of chalybeate water in a garden,
the entrance to which until 1810 was opposite the New River Head on
the south side; No. 6, Eliza Place marked the site. This street, a
continuation west of Myddleton Place, has, like it, been absorbed by
Rosebery Avenue. The spa was open to the public before 1685, as is
proved by a curious advertisement in the _London Gazette_ of September
24 in that year: ‘Whereas Mr. John Langley, of London, Merchant, who
bought the Rhinoceros and Islington Wells, has been represented by
divers of his malicious adversaries to be a person of no estate or
reputation, nor able to discharge his debts; which evil practices have
been on purpose to ruin and destroy his reputation,’ etc. The character
of the company soon after this may be judged from a burlesque poem,
published in 1691; it contains the lines which head this chapter.
In 1700 there was ‘music for dancing all day long, every Monday and
Thursday during the summer season. No mask to be admitted.’ A few
years later the spa became fashionable, being patronized by ladies of
such position as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. It was at its zenith in
1733, when the Princesses Amelia and Caroline, daughters of George
II., came daily in the summer and drank the waters. At this time, as
we learn from the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, ‘Such was the concourse of
nobility and others that the proprietor took above £30 in a morning.
On the birthday of the Princesses, as they passed through the Spa
Field (which was generally filled with carriages), they were saluted
with a discharge of 21 guns, a compliment which was always paid them
on their arrival; and in the evening there was a great bonfire, and
the guns were discharged several times.’ Islington Spa continued with,
on the whole, declining fortune throughout the rest of the eighteenth
century. Soon afterwards it was found necessary to curtail the garden,
and a great part of the old coffee-room was pulled down. About the year
1810, the old entrance being closed, a new one was made in Lloyd’s Row;
and finally, in 1840, what remained of the garden was altogether done
away with, and two rows of houses, called Spa Cottages, were built on
the site. Even now there is a house at the corner of Lloyd’s Row and
Spa Cottages, the residence of the last proprietor, which recalls the
vanished glory of other days by the inscription in capital letters,
‘ISLINGTON SPA, OR NEW TUNBRIDGE WELLS.’ At the back, in the cellar
of No. 6, Spa Cottages, I have seen grotto-work with stone pilasters;
on each side are steps descending. Here, I believe, was the original
chalybeate spring; for many years it has ceased to flow.
Horwood’s map of 1799 shows some of these suburban spas and places of
amusement very distinctly. Islington Spa is marked just south of the
New River Head, and over a hundred yards south-west of Sadler’s Wells.
The garden is of considerable size, running east, apparently to St.
John Street Road. A short distance to the west, and also near the New
River Head, is Merlin’s Cave--a rural tavern and holiday-resort of
Londoners--named, it is said, after an artificial cave, dug out in 1835
in the royal gardens at Richmond, by order of Queen Caroline, and of
which there was here, perhaps, a humble imitation.
Again, some distance to the south of the New River Head, at the corner
of Rosoman Street and Exmouth Street, one sees the words ‘London Spa,’
on a public-house with that sign erected in 1835 to replace a former
building. This is on or near the site of another mineral spring once,
as we have seen, sufficiently famous to be named in a description of
the New Wells,[87] a neighbouring establishment. In ‘Poor Robin’s
Almanack’ for 1733, occurs the following doggerel, which refers to the
month of July:
‘Now sweethearts with their sweethearts go
To Islington or London Spaw;
Some go but just to drink the water,
Some for the ale which they like better.’
In point of fact, the spa ale sold here seems before the middle of the
century to have become famous, when the mineral water was no longer
heard of. Spa Fields, which adjoined, were an open waste, a Sunday
resort of Londoners of the lower class addicted to rough sports. I
have already referred to these fields at page 69, when speaking of the
Ducking-pond public-house and its successors, the Pantheon, and Spa
Fields Chapel, the first of ‘the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion.’
She died in the house adjoining it on June 17, 1791.
At the end of last century one might have had an almost rural walk
from the London Spa west to Bagnigge Wells, a more famous place of
entertainment. The way would have been along Exmouth Street, then
built on the south side only, and called Braynes Row; a relic of its
early days remains in the form of a tablet between Nos. 32 and 34,
which has inscribed on it ‘Braynes Buildings 1765.’ At the end of this
street was a turnpike, and at right angles to it was the Bagnigge
Wells Road, the lower portion of which had the suggestive name of
Coppice Row. North-west from the turnpike, it ran between fields as
far as a little group of houses called Brook Place, and then a few
more steps would have taken one to Bagnigge Wells,[88] within the
borders of St. Pancras. There was a tradition, unsupported, I believe,
by any evidence, that Nell Gwynne had here a place of summer abode,
‘pleasantly situated amid the Fields, and on the banks of the Fleet,’
then a clear stream flowing rapidly and somewhat subject to floods.
This was Bagnigge House, a gabled building, some trace of which still
remained as late as the year 1844. Inside, it had originally some
curious decorative features; over a chimney-piece in one of the rooms
were the Royal arms and other heraldic bearings, and between them ‘the
bust of a woman in Roman dress, let deep into a circular cavity of the
wall, bordered with festoons of delf earth in the natural colours and
glazed.’ These were afterwards removed from this position, and set
up in a long room built for assemblies and balls, which, formed the
eastern boundary of the garden. An aquatint print of the interior of
this room was published by J. R. Smith in 1772, after a painting by
Saunders. The place seems to have been opened for purposes of amusement
early in the eighteenth century; for in Beckham’s[89] curious work, the
‘Musical Entertainer’ (_circa_ 1738), is an engraving of Tom Hippersly
there, mounted in the ‘singing rostrum,’ regaling the company with a
song. The inevitable healing springs, which always, no doubt, made
their appearance when wanted, were, it would seem, a comparatively
late discovery, first introduced to the public by Dr. John Bevis,
who in 1760 wrote ‘An Experimental Enquiry concerning the Contents,
Quality and Medicinal Value of two Mineral Waters lately discovered at
Bagnigge Wells near London.’ One was supposed to be purging, and the
other chalybeate; he gives an elaborate account of each. About the year
1775 the place[90] was ‘The Sunday Ramble’ as ‘by no means barren of
amusement, and visited in the morning by hundreds of persons to drink
the water, and on summer afternoons by numerous tea-drinking parties.’
The writer tells of ‘beautiful walks ornamented with a great variety
of curious shrubs and flowers all in the utmost perfection,’ and ‘a
small round fish-pond, in the centre of which is a curious fountain
representing Cupid bestriding a swan, which spouts the water to a
great height.’ The Fleet,[91] or, as it was sometimes there called,
the Bagnigge River, now a sewer, but at that time still comparatively
undefiled, flowed through part of the garden; it was crossed by a
bridge, and the banks were rich with vegetation, insomuch that, as
Archer tells us, Luke Clennell, the artist, often came here and made
foreground studies for his pictures. But tastes change: the mineral
waters ceased to attract; people of fashion came no more. As early as
1779 Bagnigge Wells is described as a place
‘Where ‘prenticed youth enjoy the Sunday feast,
And City matrons boast their Sabbath rest,
Where unfledged Templars first as fops parade,
And new-made ensigns sport their first cockade.’
Later it became a mere cockney tea-garden, and gradually declined, till
in Lewis’s ‘History of Islington,’ 1842, it is described as almost a
ruin. Shortly afterwards it was closed and dismantled, and now all
trace of it has disappeared, save the name, which has been appropriated
by a modern tavern at the corner of King’s Cross Road (formerly
Bagnigge Wells Road) and Pakenham Street, and a curious stone tablet
surmounted by a grotesque head, of which I here give an illustration.
[Illustration]
This is now to be seen built into the wall between two modern
houses--Nos. 61 and 63, King’s Cross Road--probably near the
north-western limit of the garden. It is mentioned by Dr. Bevis in 1760
as having been ‘over an old Gothic portal taken down about three years
ago, and now replaced over the door from the high-road to the house.’
At that time, I believe, the grotesque head was added. About thirty
years ago, as may be learned from a letter in the _Builder_, January,
1863, the doorway was pulled down and the stone fixed where one may
still see it, in front of the houses built on the site. I was glad to
find this stone still in existence; it is worth rescuing from oblivion.
The inscription runs as follows: ‘This is Bagnigge House neare the
Pinder a Wakefielde 1680.’
The latter place, thus referred to, was an old country tavern in the
Gray’s Inn Road. Mr. Wheatley says it was on the west side, and that
the small houses between Harrison Street and Cromer Street, till
recently called Pindar Place, occupied the site; and, confirming his
statement, it is shown in Strype’s map on the west side of ‘the road to
Hamstead.’ The modern public-house with this sign is on the east side.
Tom Brown, in his ‘Comical View of London and Westminster,’ published
in 1705, gives us a pleasant glimpse of the then surroundings--of a
stile near Lamb’s Conduit, and ‘a milkmaid crossing the fields to
Pinder of Wakefield.’ There is mention of it immediately after the
Great Fire, by Aubrey. When the inscription was first put up, Bagnigge
House and the Pinder of Wakefield were probably next-door neighbours,
though their sites are now separated by a dreary wilderness of bricks
and mortar. Palmer, in his ‘History of St. Pancras,’ records that
in 1724 the Pinder of Wakefield was destroyed in a hurricane, the
landlord’s two daughters being buried in the ruins. The word Pinder,
equivalent to pinner or penner, was applied to the keeper of the public
pen or pound for the confinement of stray cattle. George a-Green, or
the Pinder of the town of Wakefield, is the subject of a prose romance
supposed to be as old as the time of Queen Elizabeth. He (so runs the
legend), with his back to a thorn and his foot to a stone, thrashed no
less a foe than Robin Hood.
Before quitting this branch of my subject, I will say a few words
about a former health-resort within a stone’s throw of the old Pinder
of Wakefield. On the east side of Gray’s Inn Road, near the upper
end, by the King’s Cross Station on the Metropolitan Railway, is a
shabby-looking passage called St. Chad’s Row, which, turning to the
north, runs into King’s Cross Road, and here is the site of the well
named after St. Chad or St. Ceadda, who founded the bishopric of
Lichfield, and died in 672. In Laurie and Whittle’s map of 1800, the
extension of Gray’s Inn Road northwards is called St. Chad’s Road.
The well, however, as far as I can ascertain, was not particularly
ancient--or, if so, the early records are lost. Hone describes it in
his ‘Everyday Book’ in the following prophetic words: ‘St. Chad’s
Well is near Battle Bridge. The miraculous water is aperient, and was
some years ago quaffed by the bilious and other invalids, who flocked
thither in crowds.... A few years and it will be with its waters as
with the water of St. Pancras’ Well, which is enclosed in the garden of
a private house near old St. Pancras Churchyard.’
The garden attached to St. Chad’s Well seems in the last century to
have been famous for its tulips; at least, if one may believe an
advertisement in my possession, which has the date 1779. It speaks of
‘The largest and richest collection of early Dutch tulips ever yet seen
in Great Britain, now in bloom, with many fine double hyacinths of
various colours raised by Van Hawsen, to be had of Richard Morris at
St. Chad’s Wells, Battle Bridge, near London; the lowest prices marked
in the catalogue, which may be had as above, and the flowers seen
gratis. No person admitted with a dog. Seedsmen and gardeners will be
furnished wholesale with Duke Vantol, Claremond, and many other sorts
of early tulips at the Dutch prices, and with the usual discount: the
grand present Auricula at 1s. per pot: Gold and Silver Fish cheap.’
Mr. Pinks gives the particulars of the sale by auction of St. Chad’s
Well on September 14, 1837. It seems that there was then a brick house
facing Gray’s Inn Lane, having a pump-room and a large garden at the
back. The water appears to have been still sold three years afterwards,
when a pamphlet was issued setting forth ‘the characteristic virtues of
the Saint Chad’s Wells aperient and alterative springs.’
[Illustration]
[Illustration]