Place Name
This area was known as Cold Bath or Coldbath Fields in the 18th and early 19th centuries, it took its name from a cold spring discovered here in 1697. The land was owned by Walter Baynes (c. 1654 – 1745), a lawyer of the Middle Temple, who discovered the spring within a few months of purchasing a field beside the River Fleet. He decided to exploit it for its medicinal properties and within a few years erected a bath-house – a privately run hydropathic establishment, advertising the water as ‘famed for the curing of the most nerval disorders’. Coldbath Square was built during the early 18thCentury – appearing on John Rocque’s 1746 map of London – around the bath-house and spring, which both survived until about 1870.
