Welcome to Clerkenwell Part 1
After spending much of its history in Holborn and Westminster, the RCVS are RCVS Knowledge are moving to Clerkenwell, to our exciting new home at 1 Hardwick Street. To mark the occasion, here’s an introduction to the history of Hardwick Street and its surroundings. Prepare for tales of clustering clerics, rowdy day-trippers and aquatic innovation.
Rural Clerkenwell
The name Clerkenwell derives from a drinking well built around a spring in what is now Farringdon Lane. In the medieval period parish clergy (or Clerc) would gather here to read from the bible, and the well soon became known as Clerks’ Well. The well belonged to the nunnery of St Mary’s, one of several religious houses set up in the area outside the old city walls of London. These included the priory of the Knights of St John, established in 1144 and Charterhouse priory, founded in 1371. The original Clerk’s Well still exists, in the basement of a building known as Well Court, a short walk from Farringdon Station.
The Coin Laundry pub on Exmouth Market. In the seventeenth century this was the London Spaw, one of many Clerkenwell establishments selling medicinal waters.
Clerkenwell and the fields north of London were dotted with wells and springs. These included New Tunbridge Wells (a little to the east of Hardwick Street, where Lloyds Road now stands), where a spring was discovered around 1684. There was also Sadler’s Wells where iron-rich (chalybeate) water was found in the 1680s and near which its namesake theatre was later built. The discovery of these springs turned Clerkenwell into a centre for outdoor pleasures such as dancing, bowling and the visiting of open-air tea gardens. Clerkenwell’s proximity to urban London made it a perfect destination for a day-out. By the 1760s these establishments were becoming more elaborate – for example the English Grotto on modern day Rosomon Street featured ornate fountains. Similarly, the Spa Fields Pantheon opened in 1770 as a tea-drinking house come theatre, featuring a domed and galleried neo-classical rotunda. This ambitious development gained a reputation for rowdy behaviour and closed in 1776.
New River Head
The area immediately to the north of Hardwick Street was an important site in the development of London’s water supply. In the sixteenth century, as the population of London continued to grow, shortages in the supply of clean water became an increasing concern. The issue became more pressing in 1603, when a plague epidemic killed around 30,000 people in England. Something clearly had to be done.
The following year King James I granted a charter for proposals put forward by Captain Edmund Colthurst to create a channel which would carry water from two springs in Hertfordshire, at Amwell and Chadwell. Water would be carried directly to a new reservoir at Clerkenwell, and then through a system of pipes to the northern and western parts of the city. Although the direct distance from source to reservoir was only 21 miles, complaints from local landowners delayed the project by several years and required the channel to meander around these obstacles. As a consequence the overall length of the channel or ‘river’ became 40 miles.
The former windmill on Amwell Street. The tall building behind it is the old steam engine house.
The final stretch flowed down what is now Rosebury Avenue and into a newly created reservoir, known as the Round Pond on the north side of Hardwick Street. This new river first became operational at an opening ceremony held on 29th September 1613. Of the occasion Anthony Munday wrote in 1618 ‘…the flood-gates flew open, the streame ranne gallantly into the cisterne, drummes and trumpets sounding in a triumphall manner’.[1]
Soon afterwards the area around the pond became known as New River Head. A windmill was added to the site in around 1709 to pump water into the newly created Upper Pond. This innovation meant water could be supplied to higher-up areas such as Soho and Islington. The windmill also had a horse gin (whereby power was supplied by horses harnessed to a wheel) for those times when the wind was insufficient. Around the 1760s the windmill was replaced by a steam engine house. The base of the windmill is still visible from Amwell Street, and the former engine house is currently being renovated to house the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration.
In part 2 we’ll look at how Hardwick Street became more urbanised and look at the various incarnations of what would become 1 Hardwick Street.
[1] Anthony Munday, John Stow’s A Survay of London, 1618, p. 20
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