CHAPTER VIII.
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.