Qualla: Roman Baths, Strand Lane

Roman Baths, Strand Lane: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Julian Osley, CC BY-SA 2.0. The plaque is still there, set into damaged wall plaster, identifying the brick basin as nearly two thousand years old, a relic of the days of Titus or Vespasian. It is, almost completely, a lie. The Strand Lane Baths are not Roman. They never were. The shallow Tudor bricks lining the pool were laid sometime between 1550 and 1650, the vaults overhead in the eighteenth century, and the Roman story itself only appeared in a London trade directory in 1838 under the proprietorship of a Mr Charles Scott, who needed a way to attract paying customers to a cold plunge bath that had begun to lose its appeal. Charles Dickens fell for it. He sent David Copperfield to bathe here in the novel's thirty-fifth chapter, and a hundred and eighty years of guidebooks, antiquarian writers, and credulous tourists fell in afterwards.

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Image: Julian Osley | CC BY-SA 2.0

Roman Baths, Strand Lane: The Queen's Fountain

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Trapp, CC BY-SA 4.0. The real story begins in 1609, when James I commissioned an extravagant refurbishment of the old Somerset House for his queen, Anne of Denmark. Part of the redesign called for a fountain in the gardens, and a fountain needs water under pressure. A cistern house was built over Str...

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Image: Michael Trapp | CC BY-SA 4.0

Roman Baths, Strand Lane: Mr Smith's Cold Plunge

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kbthompson at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. In the mid-1770s, a Mr James Smith moved into No. 33 Surrey Street and saw potential in the derelict brick chamber out the back. By November 1776 he was advertising the cold bath at No. 33 for the reception of ladies and gentlemen, supplied with water from a spring that continual...

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Image: Kbthompson at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Roman Baths, Strand Lane: Becoming Roman

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Trapp, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the 1830s the baths had begun to lose patrons. Then, suddenly, in 1838 a trade directory listed them as the Old Roman Spring Baths. There was no archaeology, no scholarly claim, no excavation. Just a new proprietor, a new name, and the marketing genius of presenting cold water...

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Image: Michael Trapp | CC BY-SA 4.0

Roman Baths, Strand Lane: The Last True Believer

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Trapp, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1922 the Rector of St Clement Danes, the Reverend William Pennington Bickford, bought the bath for five hundred pounds. Pennington Bickford was the last of the great believers. He stripped off the late-Victorian decorative scheme to find the real Roman fabric underneath. There...

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Image: Michael Trapp | CC BY-SA 4.0

Roman Baths, Strand Lane: Peering Through the Glass

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DAVID HOLT from London, England, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1951 the LCC published a new information leaflet acknowledging that the bath was almost certainly not Roman but worth preserving as a historical curiosity. Those conclusions are still on the noticeboard outside. The bath itself is harder to see than its mythology suggests. A c...

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Image: DAVID HOLT from London, England | CC BY-SA 2.0