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.