About the middle of the eighteenth century the Well was in considerable repute, at least in the neighbourhood, and is said to have been visited in the morning by hundreds of people who paid threepence for the privilege of drinking. A hamper of two dozen bottles could be bought for £1. At that time the gardens attached to the Well were very extensive, and abounded with fruit trees, shrubs, and flowers.
During the last ten or twenty years of the eighteenth century few visitors frequented the Well;[63] though we hear of it again about 1809, as being much resorted to by the lower classes of tradesmen on Sundays.
In the early part of the nineteenth century it had a few visitors of note. Sir Allan Chambré, the judge, used to visit the Well, and Munden, the comedian, when living at Kentish Town, drank the water three times a week. Mr. Mensall, the master of the Gordon House Academy at Kentish Town, used to march his young gentlemen to St. Chad’s once a week in order to save in doctor’s bills. John Abernethy, the surgeon, was also a visitor. When Hone visited the place in 1825, the Spring of St. Chad was once more almost deserted. Hone found a faded inscription “St. Chad’s Well,” placed over a pair of wooden gates, one of which (to quote his description) “opens on a scene which the unaccustomed eye may take for the pleasure-ground of Giant Despair. Trees stand as if made not to vegetate, clipped hedges seem willing to decline, and nameless weeds straggle weakly upon unlimited borders.” “On pacing the garden alleys, and peeping at the places of retirement, you imagine the whole may have been improved and beautified for the last time by some countryman of William III.” “If you look upwards you perceive painted on an octagon board ‘Health Restored and Preserved.’ Further on, towards the left stands a low, old-fashioned, comfortable-looking large-windowed dwelling, and ten to one but there also stands at the open door an ancient, ailing female in a black bonnet, a clean coloured cotton gown, and a check apron; ... this is the Lady of the Well.”
In September 1837 the dwelling-house, spring and garden were put up to auction by their proprietor, a Mr. Salter. The next proprietor, William Lucas, finding that the celebrity of the waters had for a number of years past been confined chiefly to the neighbourhood, issued in 1840 a pamphlet and hand-bills in which the water was described as perfectly clear when fresh drawn, with a slightly bitter taste. It was composed of sulphate of soda and magnesia in large quantities, and of a little iron held in solution by carbonic acid. The waters were recommended as a universal medicine, being “actively purgative, mildly tonic and powerfully diuretic.” The Pump-room was opened at 5 a.m., and the price of admission was threepence, or one guinea a year. By this time the old garden had been considerably curtailed by the formation of St. Chad’s Place, and by letting out (1830) a portion as a timber yard. But it was more carefully kept, and a new and larger pump-room had been built in 1832. A fore-court adjoined the Gray’s Inn Road, and next to it were the dwelling-house and pump-room. Beyond them was the garden which on the north was joined by the backs of the houses in Cumberland Row, and on the south by the timber-yard.
The pump-room was still in existence in 1860,[64] but was removed about that time during the operations for the new Metropolitan Railway.
[Pinks’s Clerkenwell, pp. 504–506; Kearsley’s Strangers’ Guide s.v. “Battlebridge”; Lysons’s Environs, iii. (1795), p. 381; Lambert’s London, iv. 295; Hughson’s London, vi. p. 366; Gent. Mag. 1813, pt. 2, p. 557; Cromwell’s Islington, p. 156, ff.; Hone’s Every Day Book, i. 322, ff.; E. Roffe’s Perambulating Survey of St. Pancras, p. 13; Palmer’s St. Pancras, p. 75; Clinch’s Marylebone, and St. Pancras; Ashton’s The Fleet, p. 49.]
VIEWS.
1. St. Chad’s Well, a view from the garden. Water colour drawing by T. H. Shepherd, 1850. Crace, Cat. 583, No. 81.
2. Plan annexed to the auctioneer’s particulars and conditions of sale of St. Chad’s Well, 1837 (see Pinks, p. 506).