London Under (4 page)

Coffins stacked in niches in the West Norwood catacombs
(illustration credit Ill.6)

The architecture of the “death place,” the journey under the ground, was conceived in pagan or classical terms. Some of the catacombs adopt the pediments and avenues and obelisks of the Egyptian necropolis, while the statues and pillars and temples of Highgate are borrowed from Roman originals. In the chapel of
Kensal Green Cemetery is a catafalque, a hydraulic device that lowers the dead into the catacombs below. The gateway to the underworld is seen as part antiquity and part theatre. Welcome to the lower depths.

Some of them have been in place for thousands of years. In 1841 repairs were being made to the
public baths in Tabernacle Street in
Finsbury; the name itself is suggestive. In the course of the work a spring was found at a depth of 14 feet, and the stream issuing from it ran through an aqueduct furnished with
Roman tiles. It had been constantly in use. The date of 1502 was scratched upon the aqueduct as a sign of Tudor repairs. Tabernacle Street was blessed. In 1774 many vases and sepulchral urns from the period of Romanised Britain were found in Well Walk,
Hampstead; one of these urns was large enough to hold 10 or 12 gallons of water. It is likely that pots were placed as part of a religious ceremony, after the well had been freshly cut, in order to induce the flow.

Many springs once rose in London, coming up from the gravel beds beneath the surface. Londoners therefore preferred to dwell on gravel rather than on clay; that is why the gravel beds of Chelsea and Islington and Hackney were populated much sooner than the clay districts of Notting Hill or Camden Town or St. John’s Wood. The river Fleet, in the vicinity of Smithfield, became known as “the river of wells.” In the thirteenth century, according to the antiquary John Stow, “they had in every street and lane of the city divers fair wells and fresh springs.” The Great Fire damaged or choked many of them, while in the course of the rapid growth of the city others were built upon and forgotten; the construction of the sewers marked their quietus.

Many wells were once deemed to be holy, continuing a tradition of water worship that goes back to the very beginning of human history. In the Anglo-Saxon period curses were imposed “if any man vow or bring his offerings to any well” or “if one holds vigils at any well.” In the course of archaeological excavation, or of building work,
coins and vessels are found buried beside wells; one of the most common finds is that of the lachrymatory, or vessel for tears. Coins are still thrown into wells as a harbinger of good luck. Wishing wells, and “wakes of the well,” were ubiquitous.

In the crypt of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, after recent excavation, were uncovered a well together with a place of interment that can be dated to the fourth century AD; the well itself may be a remnant of pagan worship. So the church has been hiding its origin for more than 1,500 years. It has concealed its source, all the more numinous for being buried. That is another property of the underworld. Another well was found beneath the crypt of
Southwark Cathedral. A well dedicated to St. Chad, the patron saint of medicinal springs, was situated close to
King’s Cross in what is now St. Chad’s Place. It was so popular that on 20 April 1772, it was reported that “last week upwards of a thousand persons drank the waters.” They cost a shilling a gallon, or threepence per quart. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the site had become a dilapidated pleasure garden, supervised by an old woman who was known as “the lady of the well.”
She would call out to passers-by, “Come in and be made whole!” In the pump room, where the water was drawn into a large cauldron and heated, was a portrait in oils of a chubby man with a red face; he wore a cloak with a red nightcap, and was supposed to represent St. Chad himself. The whole enterprise has now gone under the earth.

Close by, on the site of the present
St. Pancras Station, stood Pancras Wells, where cows were “kept to accommodate ladies and gentlemen with new milk and cream and syllabubs in the greatest perfection.” But these spas slowly acquired a reputation for being “low,” the haunts of ruffians and ladies of the town. So the taint of the underworld still spread, with the people using the underground water eventually dismissed as a “rabble” and “scandalous company.”

The presence of holy water induced various forms of theatre and ritual in its vicinity, perhaps in memory of earlier water cults and ceremonies. The Clerks’ Well and the Skinners’ Well close to one another in
Clerkenwell, for example, were the site of the London
mystery plays in the late medieval period. The well of the clerks can still be seen, behind a glass window at the turning of
Farringdon Lane into
Clerkenwell Green. Some broken stone steps lead down to the well, from which many generations of pilgrims or travellers drank. “The water,” in the words of an eighteenth-century antiquarian, “spins through the old wall. I was there and tasted the water, and found it excellent, clear and well tasted.” Close by
was a spring known as
Black Mary’s Hole, the name believed to be a degeneration of Blessed Mary’s Well; the whole process of naming is an apt token of the darkening fate of London’s springs. Other derivations have been suggested. The well may have belonged to the convent of St. Mary’s, Clerkenwell, where the Benedictine nuns wore their familiar black habits. It may have been the property of a woman, Mary, who owned a black cow or alternatively by a black woman of the same name. It may have been dedicated to the “black Madonna,” the Virgin depicted in the early medieval period with dark skin. The names of London are mixed and mingled, compounded by folklore and superstition. Black Mary’s Hole was believed to be buried for ever, but in 1826 its wood covering disintegrated and a large hole appeared in the footpath. The neighbourhood of
Islington, of which Clerkenwell is a part, was the site of many such wells. Hence the verse of a confirmed invalid who had tried the waters of various
spas:

St. Clement’s Well was known as Holy Well, giving its name to Holywell Street, where pornographic literature was sold in the nineteenth century. “It is yet faire and curbed square with hard stone,”
John Stow wrote, “and is always kept cleane for common use. It is always
full and never wanteth water.” Holywell Street was demolished in 1901, as a result of the “improvements” that led to the building of
Kingsway, but the site of the well can still be located. It lies on the spot just north of the Strand beside
Clement’s Inn. On Holy Thursday or Maundy Thursday newly baptised converts, wearing white robes, would congregate about the well. Another holy well lies close by, now in the basement of
Australia House on Aldwych, that may have confused the pilgrims.

St. Bride’s Church, in
Fleet Street, rises above the site of St. Bride’s Well; the name of
Bridewell of course derives from the same source. It was once one of the great spiritual centres of London, but was diminished to secular use by the end of the sixteenth century. It met its end on the occasion of the coronation of
George IV, in the summer of 1821, when thirsty visitors are said to have drained it. A plane tree by the south-east corner of the church marks the spot. A holy well was located in Hyde Park,
St. Agnes’s Well, where sick children were immersed. A square metal panel, in front of the pavilion of the Italian Gardens, is its only memorial.

Sadler’s Wells was originally a well serving the monks of St. John’s Priory, Clerkenwell, but its name derives from a more recent date.
John Sadler had in 1683 employed some workmen to dig for gravel in his garden, when one of their spades struck a flat stone supported by four oaken posts; beneath it was a large well
of stone arched over and “curiously carved.” Here was found an apparently endless supply of mild
chalybeate water—water rich in iron—that until recent times could be purchased in the
Sadler’s Wells Theatre. It was also employed in the theatre’s air-cooling system. The well itself survives. It is of some interest that the theatre or “musick house” was established at the beginning of the eighteenth century and has continued its life ever since. In the nineteenth century it was described as the “Aquatic Theatre” and was known for the “real water
effects” upon the stage. Other entertainments were on offer. One performer would eat a live cock, complete with feathers and innards, washed down with half a pint of brandy.

The “musick house” at Sadler’s
Wells, in 1813 (illustration credit Ill.7)

Much of the London water springing to the surface was impregnated with various minerals imparted by the gravel and the clay, and so as a result innumerable
spas or “spaws” were established in the eighteenth century to cure certain common ailments. A good mixture of water with iron, or magnesium sulphate, or sodium sulphate, “strengthens the Stomach, makes gross and fat bodies lean and lean bodies fleshy.” In the words of another contemporary pamphleteer, “this water taken internally would prevent or cure Obstructions and Tumours of the Liver, Spleen … also Flatus Hypochondriacus, Black and Yellow Jaundice, Scurvy and Cholerick Passion.”
Chalybeate water, in particular, was a sovereign curative for those with skin
diseases or diseases of the eye. Eyes and water have an affinity. That is the significance of the lachrymatory. In the nineteenth century the water was more commonly applied to mangy dogs.

An eighteenth-century street cry of London rang out with “any fresh and fair spring water here!” Something in the atmosphere of the wells encourages the ministrations of what has become the medical profession. The houses of fashionable doctors, in
Devonshire Place and
Upper Wimpole Street, lie directly above the wells and gardens of
Marylebone Spa. But the waters all went back
into the ground. The only uncontaminated water from a London spring, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was being drawn from
Streatham Well. That also has now been buried.

The names remain as a token of past time.
Spa Fields, opposite Sadler’s
Wells, is now the site of a tower block. A public house in the immediate vicinity, the London Spa at the corner of
Rosoman Street and
Exmouth Market, was opened on 14 July 1685 by
Robert Boyle. The eminent scientist might not have anticipated that, on the same site, a public house with the same name would stand at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the winter of 1851 an ancient well was found beneath the yard of the Lamb public house in Lamb’s Conduit Street; the well has gone but the public house survives.

Wells and springs are places of transition, where the underworld rises out of the ground. They encourage song and dance; they are the site of ritual. The plethora of London names such as Spring Gardens, Well Walk and Wells Street testifies to the extent and variety of these waters. We also have
Shadwell and
Stockwell and
Camberwell. It would be weary work to enumerate all the buried wells of London. It is enough to know that they once existed.

The Westbourne rises in
Hampstead and makes its way to the Thames at
Chelsea. On its route it passes through
Kilburn and gathers strength before flowing southwards through
Paddington towards Hyde Park. It once replenished
the Serpentine, and that body of water still rests in the valley it created. The knight’s bridge was over the Chelsea reach of
the Westbourne, giving its name to the neighbourhood. The area of
Bayswater was also named after the river. Kilburn, or
cyne-berna
(royal stream), is another beneficiary.