Today we take fresh, clean drinking water for granted, but it wasn’t always so. Camden’s memorial fountains and wells are reminders of a time when safe water was precious, and when local people created public amenities not just for beauty, but for health, dignity and the common good.
This week Camden Guide, Paul Guest’s blog takes us on a walk through Hampstead to explore its special relationship with water – its fountains, wells, and the stories behind them – as well as the remarkable writers and thinkers who once lived just steps away.
© Paul Guest 2025
“Every one that thirsteth come to the waters Isaiah 55:1”. These words are inscribed near the top of the memorial designed to stand over a drinking fountain on the island at South End Green. The fountain was donated in 1880 by Miss Ann Crump of Hereford House, 12 Pond Street, around the present site of the Royal Free Hospital. Neo-Gothic in style and designed by J H Evins (not Evans), the memorial is a handsome octagonal granite structure.
Ann Crump shared the house with her uncle, James Bradley Chamberlain (an optician), and his step-son William Warburton Pearce (an art dealer). She was also their housekeeper. She dedicated the fountain to Pearce, who died on 1 March 1872.
The fountain was renovated in 2007, producing water for the first time in 20 years. It was turned off, however, in 2014 as Camden Council decided that maintenance was too expensive. The South End Green Association has since sought volunteers to help maintain it.
A larger context
The inscription on the memorial helps to place the fountain in a historical context. The words “Every one … come …” are highly significant in terms of the Bank Holidays Act 1871, designating four bank holidays in England, Wales and Ireland plus five in Scotland.
Hampstead must have attracted many day trippers by 1880, who also benefited from the Hampstead Heath Act 1871 which granted the Heath protected status and banned building on it. South End in fact means the southern side of the Heath.
The phrase “come to the waters” is directly relevant to Hampstead’s plentiful supply of water. As a spa between the early 18th century and 1882, it became a fashionable and healthy place to visit. The name Well Walk is particularly significant. As stated on the well, now dry, which stands there, “On the 20th December 1698 the [3rd] Earl of Gainsborough [Baptist Hicks] and his guardian and mother, the Countess of Gainsborough [the Hon. Susanna Noel], gave six acres of land in the region of the Chalybeate Well, to be used to help/benefit the poor of Hampstead.” This donation ultimately gave rise to the Hampstead Wells and Campden Trust, a charity devoted to the relief and prevention of poverty, and to relieving physical and financial disadvantage, in north Camden.
Baptist Hicks, later 1st Viscount Campden, paid for the construction of the main courthouse, known as Hicks’s Hall, in Clerkenwell – an area linked to water too.
Another “watery” Hampstead street is Flask Walk, off Well Walk. Its name derives from flasks for water produced at Hampstead Wells. “The Flask” pub stands near its Hampstead High Street end. It shares its name with one in Highgate.
Drinking to their own health
Chris Gunns / Chalybeate Well in Well Walk / CC BY-SA 2.0
The term “chalybeate” (“calibiut”), in the Well Walk inscription, is highly noteworthy. It refers to water rich in iron, as also at Tunbridge Wells. Men would visit the Long Room, on the other side of Well Walk, to drink it as their diet lacked iron. Only one source of chalybeate water remains in Hampstead: the Goodison Fountain (1929), on the Kenwood House side of the Heath. It commemorates Henry Edmund Goodison, who campaigned to save Kenwood from being sold. In the most far-reaching terms, literally and figuratively, the lost Fleet River – a subject in itself – rises from springs on the Heath.
Six of Hampstead’s best
Around the memorial’s base there is a stone circle bearing wise words about life from six famous figures once resident in Hampstead: the politician Herbert Henry Asquith (who lived on Maresfield Gardens), Agatha Christie (Lawn Road), John Keats (Albion Grove, renamed Keats Grove), D H Lawrence (Well Walk and other addresses), George Orwell (South End Road and one other), Robert Louis Stevenson (Mount Vernon). These figures can be set out here like stops on a walk, though farther apart than normal.
Agatha Christie lived from 1941 to 1947 with her husband, Max Mallowan, in the modernist Isokon Building (1934), also known as Lawn Road Flats. In that time she wrote seven novels and two works for radio. The building’s name, incidentally, derives from Isometric Unit Construction.
She vividly described her first impressions of the building: “Coming up the street the flats looked just like a giant liner which ought to have had a couple of funnels, and then you went up the stairs and through the door of one’s flat and there were the trees tapping on the window.” Liner-like architecture was quite common in the 1930s.
Her words in the circle: “If one sticks too rigidly to one’s principles, one would hardly see anybody.”
ceridwen / George Orwell in Hampstead / CC BY-SA 2.0
George Orwell was the memorial’s closest neighbour. From 1934 to 1936 he worked at Booklovers’ Corner, 1 South End Road opposite the island, and lodged above the shop; the flat’s address was 3 Warwick Mansions, 37 Pond Street. His experiences at that time are recorded in an essay, Bookshop Memories (1936), which is often quite scathing – it even reveals that they led him to hate books. His novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (also 1936) reflects them in the same spirit. It also describes the bookshop’s location with striking accuracy as “a sort of shapeless square where four streets converge”. His description makes it clear that a pub stood there; the building still stands at the corner of Fleet Road. He left Warwick Mansions in March 1935 and moved to 77 Parliament Hill.
His words: “All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others.” – from Animal Farm.
ceridwen / Keats’ House, Hampstead / CC BY-SA 2.0
The great poet Keats lived on Albion Grove from 1818 to 1820. Keats House, built 1814-1815 and a museum since 9 May 1925, was originally called Wentworth Place and formed two semi-detached houses. Keats shared one of them with his friend Charles Brown. Then he met Fanny Brawne, whose family occupied the other house; they fell passionately in love and he called her his “bright star”.
According to Charles Brown, the poet composed his Ode to a Nightingale under a plum tree in the garden of Wentworth Place after hearing the bird build a nest nearby. The garden is a lovely haven of peace.
His words: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,―that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” – from Ode on a Grecian Urn.
By 1918 D H Lawrence and his wife Frieda were living at 32 Well Walk; she was divorced from her first husband, Ernest Weekley. In 1912 she had left her two daughters when joining Lawrence to travel to Germany.
The Lawrences lived at three other addresses in Hampstead: 1 Byron Villas, Vale of Health (1915), 110 Heath Street (1923), 30 Willoughby Road (1926, before leaving this country for good). He also set a short story, The Last Laugh, in the area.
Lawrence’s words: “The living moment is everything.” His conception of “life” is central to his thinking as reflected in his writings.
Far from Edinburgh by Anthony O’Neil, CC BY-SA 2.0
In 1874, Robert Louis Stevenson lodged at Abernethy House, 7 Mount Vernon (also given as 7 Holly Walk), between 3 June and 11 July, with his friend Sidney Colvin. Having already visited the house in 1873, he wrote “I wish someone could explain the climate of Hampstead … it is so quiet, healthful and beautiful.” His friend’s extensive literary connections enabled him to meet, among others, Leslie Stephen (Sir Leslie as from 1902), man of letters and father of the famous Bloomsbury residents Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.
Abernethy, incidentally, is the name both of a Scottish village and an English surgeon, John Abernethy (1764-1831).
RLS’s words: “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.” This is proverbial.
Herbert Henry Asquith, Prime Minister 1908-1916, lived at 27 Maresfield Gardens; he moved there as a newly elected (Liberal) MP in 1888. When his future wife Margot appeared in his life in 1891, his domestic life in Hampstead was described as “Pooterish”; this adjective, deriving from Mr Pooter in the 19th-century novel The Diary of a Nobody, is said to mean “bourgeois, genteel and self-important”.
It is recorded, rather charmingly, that he played cricket with his sons in the garden of Keats House.
His words: “Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life.” How true.
Keats, Lawrence, Orwell and Stevenson all died, sadly early, of tuberculosis or something similar. Perhaps, though, they found Hampstead, to use Stevenson’s word, “healthful”?
Cutting the green
South End Green was originally an actual village green and about twice as large as now. With the coming of trams in 1885, it was sliced in half. It can still boast an importance out of proportion to its size.
Hampstead has a wealth of people, places and stories waiting to be explored, and Camden Guides love bringing this history to life. Sign up to our newsletter to hear about upcoming walks or get in touch if you’d like to commission a bespoke tour.
Sources
https://www.londonremembers.com/memorials/south-end-green-fountain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_Walk
https://knowyourlondon.wordpress.com/2020/05/15/hampstead-wells/
https://orwell.ru/library/articles/bookshop/english/e_shop
https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/attractions-museums-entertainment/keats-house
https://catherinebrown.org/lawrences-hampstead-a-walking-tour
https://www.heathandhampstead.org.uk/hhs_plaques/robert-louis-stevenson
https://spartacus-educational.com/PRasquith.htm
https://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/26th-november-1937/34/moments-of-memory-by-herbert-asquith