A holy well?

Brighton has two noted sites, although the second strictly speaking should not be on the website and the first is rather confused. The most famed being that of St. Anne’s Well. Its waters were noted as Clifford Musgrave in his 1970 Life in Brighton, From the Earliest Times to the Present notes:

“The waters of the well had some reputation for promoting fruitfulness, local shepherds having observed the remarkable fecundity of the sheep that drank from it, but Dr .Relhan was somewhat sceptical about it having a similar effect with human beings.”

The site is recorded in having a long history, but there does not appear to be any substantial history. As Musgrave (1970) again notes:

“A chalybeate spring known as St Anne’s Well, at the Wick, half a mile west of St. Nicholas’s Church, and now in Hove. Dr Russell is said to have made this primitive little spa more impressive and convenient by having the spring ‘enclosed within a bason.’”

However, this may be a back derived story to support its latter existence as Spa, certainly it was operating in the 1700s but it was until the 1760s that improvements were made and by 1800 a pump room was built over it and a pump house was constructed at the top of the hill in the park. The pump room was improved by a Reverend Thomas Scutt adding a colonnade.

At first the spa was popular a ‘Mrs. Fitzherbert’ visiting in 1830 wrote that:

 “….the waters have wonderfully improved my health and strength.”  

Indeed a favourable 1882 review in the Brighton Gazette wrote it was:

“one of the finest springs in Europe”.

Sadly, despite these good reviews, the attraction of the sea and the spas distance from it was one of the factors which lead to its decline and closure. The pump house went through several uses and was finally demolished in 1935 as the spring had slowed down. A mock well head considered but finally a circular brick well was constructed upon a circular plinth. The spring or rather some water flows from it, it does not appear to be a chalybeate in nature.

A fake spa!

The other site was the German Spa. This was however, an artificial mineral water spa to capitalise on the fact that St. Ann’s was too far away but there was still a demand. Subsequently, a Frederick Struve, a research chemist from Saxony, invented a machine that reproduced the characteristics of natural mineral water using chemicals. Bizarrely at the Spa, it was claimed that the waters of Karlsbad, Kesselbrunnen in Bad Ems, Marienbad, Bad Pyrmont amongst other continental spas could be obtained. In 1825 Struve opened the pump room of his ‘German Spa’. A building was constructed, which the Brighton Gazette’s Fashionable Chronicle described as:

“The building consists of a large handsome room fifty or sixty feet in length, and of proportionate breadth and height. A fine flight of steps lead to the noble saloon, on which are placed Ionic columns, supporting a portico in the purest Grecian taste. On the side of the Saloon opposite the entrance runs a counter, behind which are ranged cocks that supply different kinds of waters.”                                                                                   

The enterprise was successful, and it had 333 subscribers in the first season, which ran from May to November, and after ten years even King William IV became a patron and such it was renamed Royal German Spa. However, by 1850 the pump room was closed by mineral water was still being made on site from water extracted from a 150 foot well. The company in 1963 moved to a larger building and the spa building became derelict and was largely demolished in the mid-1970s but the neo-classical colonnade of the spa building survives.