Our Roman Bath
An American once told me in Vienna that the Strand possesses a Roman bath well worth seeing, but, being a perfectly good Londoner, I did not believe him—till I went there.
This bath, which was constructed in A.D. 200—seventeen hundred and twenty-five years ago—is exactly opposite Bush House, in the Strand! Think of it! Bush House and Rome! It is in the basement of No. 5, Strand Lane, an astonishing, narrow, dingy alley that in one step takes you back to the darkest days of Victorian London, when lanterns glimmered in passages and "Peelers" twirled truncheons and wore stovepipe hats. No. 5 belongs to the Rev. Pennington Bickford, Rector of St. Clement Danes, who bought the house three years ago to save the bath, which was—O incredible London!—in danger of destruction.
After writing my name in a school exercise book, which contains addresses in China, Japan, America, Canada, Australia (but few in London), I was taken by an intelligent young man into a high-vaulted place of red brick. What a splendid bath! How different from the bath-rooms of modern London, which are tucked away in houses like afterthoughts. Even a rich man I know, who has ten bath-rooms in his house, has no bath as fine as this. It is, of course, sunk in the floor. It is fifteen feet six inches in length by six feet nine inches—a proper lovable, wallowable bath, built by the only nation that understood baths and bathing.
It is an apse-headed oblong in shape, and I have seen exactly the same thing in the Roman ruins of Timgad, among the mountains of North Africa. No doubt it belonged to some rich Roman who built his villa seventeen hundred years ago some little distance from busy London, so that his wife and children might enjoy the flowers of the Strand, the peace, and the river.
The young custodian took a long-handled ladle and dipped it into the clear, limpid water which for seventeen centuries has been trickling into the bath! It comes from an unknown spring bubbling from a "fault" in the London clay.
"You'd be surprised at the visitors, mostly Canadians and Americans, who want to take off their clothes and plunge in," said the guide, "not because it's a Roman bath, but because Dickens used to bathe here, and mentions it in Chapter thirty-five of 'David Copperfield.'"
"And do you ever let them?"
"Not likely! When I tell them how cold it is they change their minds. It's always three degrees above freezing."
"How do you know?"
"Because I fell in once," he replied simply.
* * *
I tried hard as I stood there on the level of Roman London, thirty feet below the London of to-day, to picture this spot in its glory. It was no doubt tiled with veined marble, and the London spring water ran in over marble, and the roof perhaps held frescoes showing nymphs and fauns and Pan playing his pipes.
Signor Matania, the artist, has made a fine picture of this bath as he thinks it was when Roman ladies came there to swim without bathing costumes. A pretty picture, but—was the water ever deep enough?
"Some think it was a hot bath, and some think it was a cold one," said the guide, "but nobody knows. Perhaps we shall know when Mr. Bickford digs underneath, as he wants to do, in search of the heating system."
* * *
I climbed up out of Roman London, and a few steps took me to the sight of Bush House and omnibuses racing past to Charing Cross.