The gardens, in the rear of the Rotunda, were converted in 1777 into the Spa Fields burial-ground, which became notorious in 1843 for its over-crowded and pestilential condition, and for some repulsive disclosures as to the systematic exhumation of bodies in order to make room for fresh interments.
Spa Fields Chapel was pulled down in the beginning of 1887, and the present church of the Holy Redeemer was erected on its site, and consecrated for services of the Church of England on 13 October, 1888. Such have been the strange vicissitudes of the Pantheon tea-house and its gardens.
[Pinks’s Clerkenwell; Walford, O. and N. London; The Sunday Ramble; Tomlins’s Perambulation of Islington, p. 158; Notes and Queries, 1st ser. ii. p. 404; Spa Fields Chapel and its Associations, London, 1884.]
VIEWS.
1. View of Northampton or Spa Fields Chapel, with the Countess of Huntingdon’s house adjoining. Hamilton, del., Thornton sculp., 1783. Crace, Cat. p. 589, No. 43.
2. Exterior of Chapel and Lady Huntingdon’s house, engraving in Britton’s Picture of London, 1829, p. 120.
3. Later views of the Chapel (interior and exterior) engraved in Pinks’s Clerkenwell, pp. 146, 147.
THE LONDON SPA
The London Spa public-house, standing at the corner of Rosoman Street and Exmouth Street, marks the site of a seventeenth-century inn called The Fountain.
A spring of chalybeate water was discovered on the premises of this inn about 1685, and was a special inducement held out to the public by the proprietor, John Halhed, vintner, to visit his house. In August 1685, Halhed, in advertising the virtues of the water, stated that no less an authority than Robert Boyle, the chemist, had adjudged and openly declared it to be the strongest and very best of these late found out medicinal waters. The honest vintner, in giving other local wells their due, maintained that his was equivalent, if not better, in virtue, goodness, and operation, to that of Tunbridge (so mightily cry’d up) or any other water yet known. On 14 July, 1685, the house was solemnly nominated and called the London Spaw, by Robert Boyle, in the presence of “an eminent, knowing, and more than ordinary ingenious apothecary ... besides the said John Halhed and other sufficient men.” The name of the Fountain seems thenceforth to have been superseded by that of the London Spa. In inviting persons of quality to make a trial of the spring, Halhed expressed the wish that the greatness of his accommodation were suitable to the goodness of his waters, although he was not without convenient apartments and walks for both sexes. The poor were to be supplied with the water gratis.