Roman Baths, Strand Lane

The Strand Lane Baths, at 5 Strand Lane, London WC2R 2NA, have been reputed since the 1830s to be a Roman survival. They are in fact the remaining portion of a cistern built in 1612 to feed a fountain in the gardens of the old Somerset House, then a royal place. After a long period of neglect and decay, following the demolition of the fountain, they were brought back into use in the 1770s as a public cold plunge bath, attached to No. 33 Surrey Street. The idea that they were Roman probably began some fifty years later as an advertising gimmick, and has aroused both enthusiasm and scepticism ever since.^{[citation needed]}

The Bath building now consists of two elements: the bath chamber proper and a longer and narrower entrance corridor running alongside it, with steps up to a door out into Strand Lane. The bath chamber is covered by a full brick and/or stone vault, and measures 6.8 x 3.9 x 4m; it contains the bath (4.8 x 2.1 x 1.3m, with one square and one rounded end) and, at the eastern end, a settling tank built in the 1920s. The corridor is 9.1m long x 1.9m wide at its widest point, and is covered by a half-vault (2.8m high at its lower and 3.5m at its higher point). Access from corridor to bath chamber is via a doorway level with the midpoint of the bath; there is also a hatch just inside the entrance from Strand Lane. The floor of the corridor is 1.2m below the level of the Lane, and that of the bath chamber another 0.4m lower. The bath is made of shallow, wide Tudor bricks, measuring 235/240 x 115/120 x 40/47mm (Museum of London fabric 3033), with sides 400/480mm thick (= up to two bricks wide) and a floor of the same materials, broken and patched towards the western end; the edges have been patched with frogged bricks of post-1750 date. The brick-/stone-work of the walls and vaults has not been dated, but most probably belongs to the eighteenth century.

There are clear signs that these surviving elements were once part of a larger complex, the history of which will be explained below: there are blocked doorways at the ends of both the bath chamber and the entrance corridor, and a third in the south wall of the corridor, just inside the entrance from Strand Lane. Traces of older decorative schemes remain in the blue and white ‘Dutch’ tiles on the corridor wall and the door and hatch surrounds, and in the stone and marble slabs now resting on and around the settling tank; also in the damaged wall-plaque, identifying the bath as ‘nearly 2000 years old’ and a relic of the days of ‘Titus or Vespasian’.

The source of the water coming into the Bath has never been properly established, and may have varied over time. In the mid-nineteenth century it bubbled up through a hole in the floor, where patching to the brickwork can still be seen. In the early 1920s it entered at the north-east corner, but could also be seen seeping through the adjacent sides of the bath. Since the mid-1920s it has entered via the settling tank at the east end. The supply has been interrupted several times in the twentieth century, for instance in the 1940s when the bath was derelict and blocked, and again in the 1970s thanks to building work on Surrey Street. Talk in nineteenth- and twentieth-century sources of the holy well of Holywell Street, the holy well of St Clement, or underground streams descending from Highgate or Hampstead is speculative and unsubstantiated. When tested in 1981, samples were found to have ‘the basic characteristics of ground water, but containing high levels of nitrate and phosphate.’

In 1609–1613 James I had the first version of the old Somerset House lavishly enlarged and refurbished for his queen, Anne of Denmark. The refurbishment included the reorganization of the gardens and the building of an immense grotto-fountain showing the Muses and Pegasus on Mount Helicon, designed by the brilliant French engineer, Salomon de Caus. Contemporary documents establish that the cistern supplying this fountain was ‘over the Strand Lane’ and was fed by pump from the grounds of Somerset House. Further evidence from the early eighteenth century places the by-then derelict cistern-house level with what is now No 33 Surrey Street and next to the Old Watch House. It is thus clear that the Strand Lane Bath is exactly where the cistern-house is attested to have been. Expert dating of the brickwork of the bath to the range 1550–1650 then leaves it overwhelmingly probable that the ‘bath’ is in fact some part of the cistern structure. What part exactly is more mysterious: the full structure will have had to be considerably larger and taller than what now survives in order to power the fountain properly. It may be that the surviving fabric was part of the support for a water-tank (note the very thick sides) rather than a water-holder itself.

The redevelopment of the remains of the derelict cistern structure as a cold bath seems to have been the work of a Mr James Smith, who moved into No 33 Surrey Street in the mid-1770s. By November 1776, he was advertising the opening of ‘the cold bath at No. 33, Surry-street, in the Strand … for the Reception of Ladies and Gentlemen, supplied with Water from a Spring, which continually runs through it.’ Two years later he enlarged his offering by adding a second, freshly constructed bath next to the first, lined with marble and surrounded by a stone-flagged floor and tiled walls. This is the so-called ‘Essex Bath’ which still survives, minus its cladding, under the floor of the back-basement of the Norfolk Hotel. Smith's enlargement also involved the provision of two entrances to the complex: for ladies in Surrey Street and for gentlemen in Strand Lane.

Smith himself died in 1782, but his baths, still attached to No. 33 Surrey Street, continued to operate in the configuration he had given them for over a century. Their early history was colourful, largely thanks to the very mixed nature of the surrounding area. A newspaper report of 1777 has a would-be fare dodger, pursued by his angry cabbie, trying to hide in the bath, falling in, and having to be rescued from drowning. Others, from 1797, tell of a gang of fraudsters, operating from another house in Surrey Street, escaping through the Bath when raided by the police (the ‘Bow Street Light Infantry’). Most spectacularly of all, the MP and collector of ancient sculpture, William Weddell, died of a seizure in the bath on a hot day in the spring of 1792 (though it is not clear whether it was in the ‘Roman’ or the ‘Essex’ bath that this happened).

As time went on, with various changes of ownership, arrangements altered in some significant ways. The complex came to be run not from 33 Surrey Street but from No. 5 Strand Lane—which at this time was the now demolished building over the ‘Essex’ bath, not the present No. 5—and bathing came to be confined to the newer and better appointed of the two basins, with the other one being used as a reservoir to feed it, and for domestic purposes. It seems also that the Bath had begun to lose its attractiveness to potential patrons, and it was this that was probably responsible for its conversion into an alleged Roman relic. At any rate, it is in 1838, without any prior warning, that the establishment suddenly appears in a trade directory as the ‘Old Roman Spring Baths’, under the proprietorship of a Mr Charles Scott. Within barely more than a decade, the story of Roman origins had been taken up and publicised in two highly influential publications: vol. II of Charles Knight’s historical guidebook London (1842) and chs. 35 and 36 of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. From there (and particularly from Knight) it found its way into an enormous range of guidebooks, popular antiquarian writing, journals and newspapers, in such a way that, although sceptical voices were occasionally raised, it became the general orthodoxy for the rest of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth.