South view of the Sir John Oldcastle in Lempriere’s Set of Views, 1731. ST. CHAD’S WELL, BATTLE BRIDGE. The site of St. Chad’s Well, a mineral spring and garden at Battle Bridge, is now partly occupied by St. Chad’s Place, a small street turning out of the Gray’s Inn Road (east side) and lying between the King’s Cross Station (Metropolitan Railway) and the Home and Colonial Schools. About the middle of the eighteenth century the Well was in considerable repute, at least in the neighbourhood, and is said to have been visited in the morning by hundreds of people who paid threepence for the privilege of drinking. A hamper of two dozen bottles could be bought for £1. At that time the gardens attached to the Well were very extensive, and abounded with fruit trees, shrubs, and flowers. During the last ten or twenty years of the eighteenth century few visitors frequented the Well;[63] though we hear of it again about 1809, as being much resorted to by the lower classes of tradesmen on Sundays. In the early part of the nineteenth century it had a few visitors of note. Sir Allan Chambré, the judge, used to visit the Well, and Munden, the comedian, when living at Kentish Town, drank the water three times a week. Mr. Mensall, the master of the Gordon House Academy at Kentish Town, used to march his young gentlemen to St. Chad’s once a week in order to save in doctor’s bills. John Abernethy, the surgeon, was also a visitor. When Hone visited the place in 1825, the Spring of St. Chad was once more almost deserted. Hone found a faded inscription “St. Chad’s Well,” placed over a pair of wooden gates, one of which (to quote his description) “opens on a scene which the unaccustomed eye may take for the pleasure-ground of Giant Despair. Trees stand as if made not to vegetate, clipped hedges seem willing to decline, and nameless weeds straggle weakly upon unlimited borders.” “On pacing the garden alleys, and peeping at the places of retirement, you imagine the whole may have been improved and beautified for the last time by some countryman of William III.” “If you look upwards you perceive painted on an octagon board ‘Health Restored and Preserved.’ Further on, towards the left stands a low, old-fashioned, comfortable-looking large-windowed dwelling, and ten to one but there also stands at the open door an ancient, ailing female in a black bonnet, a clean coloured cotton gown, and a check apron; ... this is the Lady of the Well.”