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.
Current dimensions and layout
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’.
Water supply The source of the water coming into the Bath has never been properly established, and may have varied over time.M. Trapp, 'The Denmark House Helicon: iconography and surviving traces' 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.Strand Lane Bath, Statutory Planning File, London Metropolitan Archives, LMA/4441/01/0109. 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.’H. Colvin (ed.), History of the King’s Works, Vol. 4 (London: HMSO, 1982), p. 254–60GLC Scientific Branch report, 31 July 1981, in LMA/4441/01/0109.
History Anne of Denmark’s fountain and its cistern
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.R. Strong, The Renaissance Garden in England (London: Thames & Hudson, 1979), p. 87–91L. Morgan, Nature as Model: Salomon de Caus and Early Seventeenth-century Landscape Design (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 115–121 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.TNA E 351/3246 (Accounts, 1/10/1611 – 30/9/1620), cited by Colvin, History 4, 269; Strong, Renaissance Garden, 227 (n. 22): Trapp, ‘Helicon’, 242 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.M. Trapp, 'The Denmark House Helicon: iconography and surviving traces', p. 242. 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 1550–1650M. Trapp, 'The Denmark House Helicon: iconography and surviving traces', p. 241-2; Hayward, Building Material Report 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.
Georgian cold bath 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.M. Trapp, 'The Georgian history of the Strand Lane 'Roman' bath' 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.’The Daily Advertiser, 2 November 1776. 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.Gazetteer and New Daily Chronicle, 20 May 1778 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.The Public Advertiser, 12 November 1777. 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’).Lloyd’s Evening Post, 22 February 1797; The Oracle and Public Advertiser, 14 July 1797 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).The Times, 1 May 1792; The Gentleman’s Magazine, volume 62.5, p. 481
Becoming Roman As time went on, with various changes of ownership, arrangements altered in some significant ways.M. Trapp, 'A "fine specimen of Neronian brickwork" in Victorian London: how the Strand Lane cold bath became Roman' 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.Robson’s London Directory … for 1838, p. 314 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)Charles Knight (ed.), London, vol. II (London: Charles Knight, 1842), p. 165–80 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.
Bathing continued in the newer of the two basins, but increasingly visitors came out of antiquarian curiosity, seeking out this supposed survivor of ancient Roman times in its romantically out-of-the way corner off the bustling Strand, with the extra attraction of being able to see where Copperfield and presumably his creator Dickens too had bathed. The appearance of the Bath in 1841 can be seen in the engraving accompanying Knight’s chapter, and the watercolour from which it was made, now in the British Museum; its setting in the 1880s is captured in a photograph in the Look & Learn Historical Library and an engraving in Percy Fitzgerald’s Picturesque London.
Henry Glave and 1893 In 1893 the whole complex was bought outright by one of its few remaining users, the New Oxford Street draper, Henry Glave. Glave then proceeded to sell off the newer, ‘Essex’ bath, along with the building over it, the old No. 5 Strand Lane, to the proprietors of the Norfolk Hotel, which was then expanding backwards from Surrey Street to the Lane. At the same time, Glave refurbished the older basin for bathing by transferring the stone flooring, marble lining and wall tiles to it from its now decommissioned neighbour, along with some new partitioning, changing-stalls and decorative sculpture. The results, almost completely concealing the old brickwork, can be seen in photographs now in the London Metropolitan Archive and the Look & Learn History Picture Library. It was as part of the same process that the doorway from the corridor to the bath, originally positioned next to the entrance from the Strand, was relocated to half-way down the corridor and replaced by the present hatchway.
Copies of the information leaflet issued to advertise the refurbished Bath, as both a Roman relic and the last of central London's traditional cold baths, can be found in the Westminster Archives.Westminster City Archives: B138 Strand Lane (003) and (011) Glave, followed by his son Nolan and his daughters Blanche and Florence, continued to run the establishment as a combination of a subscribers club and a visitor attraction for another several decades until in 1922, as part of a larger reorganization of the family business, Blanche offered it for sale.
William Pennington Bickford