Free Lost London by Richard Guard Page B

travell’d the globe,
    Consulted whole tribes of the physical robe;
    Drank the waters of Tunbridge, Bath, Harrogate, Dulwich,
    Spa, Epsom (and all by advice of the College);
    But in vain, till to Islington waters I came,
    To try if my cure would add to their fame.
    In less than six weeks they produc’d a belief
    This would be the place of my long-sought relief;
    Before six weeks more had finished their course,
    Full of spirits and strength, I mounted my horse,
    Gave praise to my God, and rode cheerfully home,
    Overjoy’d with the thoughts of sweet hours to come.
    May Thou, great Jehovah give equal success
    To all who resort to this place for redress!
    To maximize his profits, Sadler put on entertainments – clowns, acrobats, musicians, dancers and the like – before future owners added new facilities in order to expand the scale
    of performances. The site has provided a home for the arts ever since and today you will find the Sadler’s Wells Theatre here. As for the well, it was enshrined in a flint-and-seashell
    grotto around 1811 but by 1826 the coffee house constructed next to it had been demolished and the gardens were built over by 1840. The humble surrounding cottages were destroyed during the
    Second World War and the Spa Green Estate was built in their place, being completed in 1949.

Jacob’s Island

    Bermondsey
    S OME YEARS AFTER THE INITIAL SERIALIZATION of Oliver Twist in 1837, Dickens was attacked over his portrayal of the site of Bill Sikes’s
death, Jacob’s Island.
    Politicians refused to believe that such an awful place existed in their city. In a preface to a new edition of the book, Dickens wrote: ‘In the year 1850 it was publicly
declared by an amazed alderman that Jacob’s Island did not exist and had never existed. Jacob’s Island continues to exist (like an ill-bred place as it is) in the year
1867...’
    Standing between the horribly polluted Neckinger River and a man-made ditch built as a mill-run for the medieval Bermondsey Abbey, Jacob’s Island was a south London rookery similar in
character to those at St Giles and Summertown. With a population of 7,286 people according to a survey of 1849, it was described in The Morning Chronicle thus:
    On entering the precincts of the pest island, the air has literally the smell of a graveyard, and a feeling of nausea and heaviness comes over any one unaccustomed to imbibe the musty
atmosphere. It is not only the nose, but the stomach, that tells how heavily the air is loaded with sulphuretted hydrogen; and as soon as you cross one of the crazy and rotting bridges over the
reeking ditch, you know, as surely as if you had chemically tested it, by the black colour of what was once the white-lead paint upon the door-posts and window-sills, that the air is thickly
charged with this deadly gas. The inhabitants themselves show in their faces the poisonous influence of the mephitic air they breathe. Either their skins are white, like parchment, telling of the
impaired digestion, the languid circulation, and the coldness of the skin peculiar to persons suffering from chronic poisoning, or else their cheeks are flushed hectically, and their eyes are
glassy, showing the wasting fever and general decline of the bodily functions.

    The ditches were filled in during the 1850s and many of the buildings were destroyed in a fire that raged for two weeks in 1861.
Jenny’s Whim

    Pimlico
    A RED - BRICK AND LATTICE - WORK PUBLIC HOUSE near Ebury Bridge, Pimlico, famed as the haunt of
lovers.
    Named after either the original landlady and her fanciful gardens – replete with arbors and alcoves within which the amorous could exchange sweet nothings – or,
alternatively, after a famous pyrotechnician from the reign of George I , Jenny’s Whim provided much the same as other pleasure gardens did but with a few added
surprises. In Henry Angelo’s Reminiscences , the author recorded that it was ... much frequented from its novelty, being an inducement to