ISLINGTON SPA, OR NEW TUNBRIDGE WELLS
A poetical advertisement of the year 1684[7] refers to “the sweet gardens and arbours of pleasure” at this once famous resort, situated opposite the New River Head, Clerkenwell. The chalybeate spring in its grounds was discovered at or shortly before that date, and the proprietor in 1685 is described in the London Gazette[8] as “Mr. John Langley, of London, merchant, who bought the rhinoceros and Islington Wells.”
The original name of the Spa was Islington Wells, but it soon acquired (at least as early as 1690) the additional title of New Tunbridge, or New Tunbridge Wells, by which it was generally known until about 1754, when the name of Islington Spa came into use, though the old title, New Tunbridge, was never quite abandoned.[9]
Although the place could not at any period boast of the musical and “variety” entertainments of its neighbour Sadler’s Wells, it soon acquired greater celebrity as a Spa, and from about 1690 to 1700 was much frequented. The gardens at this period[10] were shaded with limes and provided with arbours; and, in addition to its coffee-house, the Spa possessed a dancing-room and a raffling shop.[11] The charge for drinking the water was threepence, and the garden was open on two or three days in the week from April or May till August.
As early as seven o’clock in the morning a few valetudinarians might be found at the Well, but most of the visitors did not arrive till two or three hours later. Between ten and eleven the garden was filled with a gay and, in outward seeming, fashionable throng. The company, however, was extraordinarily mixed. Virtue and Vice; Fashion and the negation of Fashion had all their representatives. Sir Courtly Nice drove up to the gate in his gilt coach, and old Sir Fumble brought his lady and daughter. Modish sparks and fashionable ladies, good wives and their children, mingled with low women and sempstresses in tawdry finery; with lawyers’ clerks, and pert shopmen; with sharpers, bullies, and decoys. A doctor attended at the Well to give advice to the drinkers, not a few of whom came for the serious purpose of benefiting their health.
Richard Temple
Viscount Cobham, &c.
Walker & Equtall Ph Sc
But the chief attraction was the Walks; the promenade where the beau strutted with his long sword beribboned with scarlet, and ladies fragrant with Powder of Orange and Jessamine discussed one another and the fashions:—
Lord! madam, did you e’er behold
(Says one) a dress so very old?
Sure that commode was made, i’ faith,
In days of Queen Elizabeth;
Or else it was esteemed the fashion
At Charles the Second’s coronation:
The lady, by her mantua’s forebody,
Sure takes a pride to dress like nobody.[12]
Others of more plebeian estate preferred the seclusion of an arbour shaded with climbing shrubs and sycamore, where sweethearts could chat, or, if so minded, enjoy a late breakfast of plum-cake and ale. Older people retired to the coffee-house to smoke and talk politics over their coffee, but the man about town and his female friends were to be found deep at play in the raffling shop, or speculating in the Royal Oak Lottery.[13] Again and again it was the Board that won, while the projector and the man with cogged dice in his pocket looked cynically on. At about eleven a.m. the dancing began. Music for dancing all day long was advertised in 1700 for every Monday and Thursday of the summer season. But the music of that period seems to have been only the harmony of three or four by no means accomplished fiddlers, and it is doubtful if the dancing ever continued beyond the morning and afternoon.
In the early years of the eighteenth century the Spa seems to have gone out of fashion,[14] and in 1714 The Field Spy speaks of it as a deserted place:—
The ancient drooping trees unprun’d appear’d;
No ladies to be seen; no fiddles heard.
The patronage of royal personages at last revived its fortunes. In the months of May and June 1733, the Princess Amelia, daughter of George II., and her sister Caroline came regularly to drink the waters. On some occasions the princesses were saluted by a discharge of twenty-one guns, and the gardens were thronged. On one morning the proprietor took £30, and sixteen hundred people are said to have been present. New Tunbridge Wells once more, for a few years, became the vogue. Pinchbeck, the toyman, prepared a view of the gardens which he sold as a mount for his fans. A song of the time, The Charms of Dishabille, which George Bickham illustrated with another view of the gardens, gives a picture of the scene (1733–1738):—
Behold the Walks, a chequer’d shade,
In the gay pride of green array’d;
How bright the sun! the air how still!
In wild confusion there we view
Red ribbons grouped with aprons blue;
Scrapes, curtsies, nods, winks, smiles and frowns,
Lords, milkmaids, duchesses and clowns,
In their all-various dishabille.
The same mixed company thus frequented the Spa as of old, and when my Lord Cobham honoured the garden with a visit, there were light-fingered knaves at hand to relieve him of his gold repeater. The physician who at this time attended at the Well was “Dr.” Misaubin, famous for his pills, and for his design to ruin the University of Cambridge (which had refused him a doctor’s degree) by sending his son to the University of Oxford. Among the habitués of the garden was an eccentric person named Martin, known as the Tunbridge Knight. He wore a yellow cockade and carried a hawk on his fist, which he named Royal Jack, out of respect to the Royal Family.
ISLINGTON SPA IN 1733. BY GEORGE BICKHAM.
Fashion probably soon again deserted the Spa; but from about 1750 to 1770 it was a good deal frequented by water-drinkers and visitors who lodged for a time at the Wells. One young lady of good family, who was on a visit to London in June 1753, wrote home to her friends[15] that New Tunbridge Wells was “a very pretty Romantick place,” and the water “very much like Bath water, but makes one vastly cold and Hungary.” A ticket costing eighteenpence gave admission to the public breakfasting[16] and to the dancing from eleven to three. It was endeavoured to preserve the most perfect decorum, and no person of exceptionable character was to be admitted to the ball-room.[17] This invitation to the dance reads oddly at a time when the Spa was being industriously recommended to the gouty, the nervous, the weak-kneed, and the stiff-jointed.[18]
In 1770 the Spa was taken by Mr. John Holland, and from that year, or somewhat earlier, the place was popular as an afternoon tea-garden. The “Sunday Rambler” describes it as genteel, but judging from George Colman’s farce, The Spleen; or Islington Spa (first acted in 1776), its gentility was that of publicans and tradesmen. “The Spa (says Mrs. Rubrick) grows as genteel as Tunbridge, Brighthelmstone, Southampton or Margate. Live in the most social way upon earth: all the company acquainted with each other. Walks, balls, raffles and subscriptions. Mrs. Jenkins of the Three Blue Balls, Mrs. Rummer and family from the King’s Arms; and several other people of condition, to be there this season! And then Eliza’s wedding, you know, was owing to the Spa. Oh, the watering-places are the only places to get young women lovers and husbands!”
In 1777, Holland became bankrupt, and next year a Mr. John Howard opened the gardens in the morning and afternoon, charging the water-drinkers sixpence or threepence, or a guinea subscription. He enriched the place with a bowling-green[19] and with a series of “astronomical lectures in Lent, accompanied by an orrery.” A band played in the morning, and the afternoon tea-drinking sometimes (1784) took place to the accompaniment of French horns.[20] Sir John Hawkins, the author of The History of Music, frequented the Spa for his health in 1789. On returning home after drinking the water one day in May (Wednesday 20th, 1789) he complained of a pain in his head and died the next morning of a fever in the brain. “Whether (as a journalist of the time observes) it was owing to the mineral spring being taken when the blood was in an improper state to receive its salubrious effect, or whether it was the sudden visitation of Providence, the sight of the human mind is incompetent to discover.”
The Spa continued to be resorted to till the beginning of the present century when the water and tea-drinking began to lose their attractions. The author of Londinium redivivum, writing about 1803,[21] speaks, however, of the gardens with enthusiasm as “really very beautiful, particularly at the entrance. Pedestals and vases are grouped with taste under some extremely picturesque trees, whose foliage (is) seen to much advantage from the neighbouring fields.” At last, about 1810, the proprietor, Howard, pulled down the greater part of the old coffee-house,[22] and the gardens were curtailed by the formation of Charlotte Street (now Thomas Street). At the same time the old entrance to the gardens, facing the New River Head, was removed for the building of Eliza Place.[23] A new entrance was then made in Lloyd’s Row, and the proprietor lived in a house adjoining. A later proprietor, named Hardy, opened the gardens in 1826 as a Spa only. The old Well was enclosed, as formerly, by grotto work and the garden walks were still pleasant. Finally in 1840, the two rows of houses called Spa Cottages were built upon the site of the gardens.
A surgeon named Molloy, who resided about 1840–1842 in the proprietor’s house in Lloyd’s Row, preserved the Well, and by printed circulars invited invalids to drink the water for an annual subscription of one guinea, or for sixpence each visit. In Molloy’s time the Well was contained in an outbuilding attached to the east side of his house. The water was not advertised after his tenancy, though it continued to flow as late as 1860. In the autumn of 1894, the writers of this volume visited the house and found the outbuilding occupied as a dwelling-room of a very humble description. Standing in this place it was impossible to realise that we were within a few feet of the famous Well. A door, which we had imagined on entering to be the door of a cupboard, proved to be the entrance to a small cellar two or three steps below the level of the room. Here, indeed, we found the remains of the grotto that had once adorned the Well, but the healing spring no longer flowed.[24]
Eliza Place was swept away for the formation of Rosebery Avenue, and the two northernmost plots of the three little public gardens, opened by the London County Council on 31 July, 1895,[25] as Spa Green, are now on part of the site of the old Spa. The Spa Cottages still remain, as well as the proprietor’s house in Lloyd’s Row, and beneath the coping-stone of the last-named the passer-by may read the inscription cut in bold letters: Islington Spa or New Tunbridge Wells.
[Besides the authorities cited in the text and notes and in the account in Pinks’s Clerkenwell, p. 398, ff., the following may be mentioned:—Experimental observations on the water of the mineral spring near Islington commonly called New Tunbridge Wells. London, 1751, 8vo; another ed., 1773, 8vo (the Brit. Mus. copy of the latter contains some newspaper cuttings); Dodsley’s London, 1761, s.v. “Islington”; Kearsley’s Strangers’ Guide, s.v. “Islington”; Lewis’s Islington; Gent. Mag. 1813, pt. 2, p. 554, ff.; advertisements, &c., in Percival’s Sadler’s Wells Collection and in W. Coll.; Wheatley’s London, ii. 268, and iii. p. 199.]
VIEWS.
1. View of the gardens, coffee-house, &c., engraved frontispiece to Lockman’s poem, The Humours of New Tunbridge Wells at Islington, London, 1734, 8vo (cp. Pinks, 401, note, and 402).
2. View of the gardens, well, coffee-house, &c., engraved by G. Bickham, jun., as the headpiece of “The Charms of Dishabille or New Tunbridge Wells” (Bickham’s Musical Entertainer, 1733, &c., vol. i. No. 42).
3. Engravings of the proprietor’s house in Lloyd’s Row; Cromwell’s Clerkenwell, 352; Pinks, 405. The house is still as there represented.