THE BLACK PRINCE, NEWINGTON BUTTS, 1788.
LAMBETH WELLS
In the last century Lambeth Marsh and the fields in the neighbourhood were a favourite resort of Londoners for running-matches and outdoor sports, and the Lambeth Wells offered the special attractions of music and mineral water-drinking. The Wells (opened to the public before 1697) were situated in Three Coney Walk, now called Lambeth Walk, and consisted of two springs, distinguished as the Nearer and Farther Well. The water was sent out to St. Thomas’s Hospital and elsewhere at a penny a quart, and the poor had it free.
The usual charge for admission for drinking the waters was threepence, including the music, which, about 1700, began at seven in the morning, and was continued on three days of the week till sunset, and on other days till two. The season began in the spring, usually on Easter Monday.
Attached to the Wells was a Great Room, in which concerts and dancing took place. During the season of 1697 there was a “consort” every Wednesday of “vocal and instrumental musick, consisting of about thirty instruments and voices, after the manner of the musick-meeting in York Buildings, the price only excepted,” each person to pay for coming in but one shilling. These concerts began originally at 2.30 p.m., but afterwards at six, when no person was admitted in a mask.
About 1700 these shilling concerts seem to have been discontinued, but the Wells remained in some repute till about 1736, when they found a rival in the spring of the Dog and Duck, and the attendance fell off.
In 1740 the owner was named Keefe. About 1750, under his successor Ireland, a musical society under the direction of Sterling Goodwin, organist of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, gave a monthly concert there. At the same period Erasmus King, once coachman to Dr. Desaguliers, read lectures there and exhibited experiments in natural philosophy (admission sixpence). There were gala dancing-days in 1747, and in 1752 (June 27), when a “penny wedding in the Scotch manner was celebrated for the benefit of a young couple.”
At a later date (after 1755?[312]) the place was condemned as a nuisance, and the magistrates refused the dancing licence. The Great Room was then used for Methodist services, and the music-gallery for the pulpit, but the preacher (we are told) being disturbed greatly in his enthusiastic harangues was obliged to quit, and the premises were afterwards built on, or devoted to various purposes, with the exception of the dwelling-house, which (before 1786) was turned into a tavern, under the sign of the Fountain. The present Fountain public-house, erected on the site of the older Fountain in 1829, is No. 105 Lambeth Walk, nearly opposite Old Paradise Street (formerly Paradise Row). The Wells themselves, though long closed, were still in existence in 1829, but a house was subsequently built over them.
Brayley and Mantell (Surrey, iii. 400) writing about 1841, say that part of the grounds continued “long within memory” to be used as a tea-garden.
[Nichols’s Parish of Lambeth (1786), p. 65, ff.; Gent. Mag. 1813, pt. 2, p. 556; Manning and Bray, Surrey, iii. 468; Brayley and Mantell, Surrey, iii. 399, ff.; Allen’s Lambeth, p. 346, ff.; Walford, vi. 389].