St Chad’s Well at Battle Bridge

At the bottom of Gray’s Inn Lane, near Battle Bridge, was a spring named after St Chad whose water was drunk as a purge, and crowds of the bilious once came to take it. By 1825, when Hone visited, the gardens were faded and an elderly woman, the Lady of the Well, sold warm glasses of it at sixpence a visit or a guinea a year. An old man of ninety-four showed visitors an oil portrait he believed to be St Chad, though Hone thought it looked like a well-fed butcher of Queen Anne’s day.