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.