Peerless Pool.
———The sprightly youth
Speeds to the well-known Pool. Awhile he stands
Gazing th’ inverted landscape, half afraid
To meditate the blue profound below;
Then plunges headlong down the circling flood.
His ebon tresses, and his rosy cheek,
Instant emerge; and thro’ th’ obedient wave,
At each short breathing by his lip repell’d,
With arms and legs according well, he makes,
As humour leads, an easy winding path;
While, from his polish’d sides, a dewy light
Effuses on the pleas’d spectators round.
Thomson.
Coming from the city, on the left-hand side of the City-road, just beyond Old-street, and immediately at the back of St. Luke’s hospital, Peerless Pool
———flows unseen,
And wastes its waters in the silver Thames.
It is a pleasure-bath in the open air, a hundred and seventy feet long, and upwards of a hundred feet wide, nearly surrounded by trees, with an arcade divided off into boxes for privately dressing and undressing; and is therefore, both in magnitude and convenience, the greatest bathing-place in the metropolis. Here the lover of cleanliness, or of a “cool dip” in a hot day, may at all times, for a shilling, enjoy the refreshment he desires, without the offensive publicity, and without the risk of life, attendant on river-bathing; while there is “ample room and verge enough” for all the sports and delights which “swimmers only know.” It is no where so deep as five feet, and on one side only three; the experienced and the inexperienced are alike safe. There is likewise a capacious cold-bath in an adjacent building, for the use of those who prefer a temperature below that of the atmosphere.
Peerless Pool is distinguished for having been one of the ancient springs that supplied the metropolis with water, when our ancestors drew that essential element from public conduits; that is to say, before the “old” water-works at London-bridge “commenced to be,” or the “New River” had been brought to London by sir Hugh Myddelton. The streams of this “pool” at that time were conveyed, for the convenience of the inhabitants near Lothbury, through pipes terminating “close to the south-west corner of the church.”[214] Stow speaks of it as a “cleere water, called Perilous Pond, because,” says our chronicler, “divers youths, by swimming therein, have been drowned.”[215] “Upon Saterday the 19 of January, 1633, sixe pretty young lads, going to sport themselves upon the frozen Ducking-pond, neere to Clearkenwell, the ice too weake to support them, fell into the water, concluding their pastime with the lamentable losse of their lives: to the great griefe of many that saw them dying, many more that afterward saw them dead, with the in-expressible griefe of their parents.”[216] In consequence of such accidents, and the worthy inhabitants of Lothbury having obtained their water from other sources, Perilous Pond was entirely filled up, and rendered useless, till Mr. William Kemp, “an eminent jeweller and citizen of London,” “after ten years’ experience of the temperature” of this water, and “the happy success of getting clear of a violent pain of the head by bathing in it, to which he had for many years been subject, was generously led for public benefit” to open the spring in the year 1743, and “to form the completest swimming-bath in the whole world;” and “in reference to the improvements he had made on the ruins of that once Perilous Pond,” and by a very natural transition, he changed that disagreeable appellation of Perilous, “that is,” says Maitland, “dangerous, or hazardous, to the more agreeable name of Peerless Pool, that is, Matchless Bath, a name which carries its own reason with it.”
Maitland says, that Kemp “spared no expense nor contrivance to render it quite private and retired from public inspection, decent in its regulation, and as genteel in its furniture as such a place could be made.” He added a cold-bath, “generally allowed,” says Maitland, “to be the largest in England, being forty feet long, and twenty feet broad; this bath is supplied by a remarkably cold spring, with a convenient room for dressing.” The present cold-bath, faced with marble and paved with stone, was executed by sir William Staines, when he was a journeyman mason. He was afterwards lord mayor of London, and often boasted of this, while he smoked his pipe at the Jacob’s-well in Barbican, as amongst his “best work.”
Kemp’s improvements provided an entrance to it across a bowling-green on the south side, through a neat marble pavilion or saloon, thirty feet long, with a large gilt sconce over a marble table. Contiguous to this saloon were the dressing apartments, some of which were open, others were private with doors. There was also a green bower on each side of the bath, divided into other apartments for dressing. At the upper end was a circus-bench, capable of accommodating forty persons, under the cover of a wall twelve feet high, surmounted on one side by a lofty bank with shrubs, and encircled by a terrace-walk planted with lime-trees at the top. The descent to the bath was by four pair of marble stairs, as it still is, to a fine gravel-bottom, through which the springs gently bubbled and supplied, as they do at this time, the entire basin with the crystal fluid. Hither many a “lover and preserver” of health and long life, and many an admirer of calm retreat, resorted “ever and anon:”—