Strand Lane "Roman" Baths: London's fake Roman bath

A few steps from the bustle of the Strand, slipping into Surrey Street and heading down towards the Victoria Embankment, Strand Lane opens up: a narrow, sloping alley that most Londoners walk through without noticing a thing. At number 5, behind a street-level window, there is a rectangular brick bath full of greenish water. For nearly two centuries it has been called a "Roman bath". It never was one.

The true story

The truth is more interesting than the legend. The structure was built in 1612 as a cistern, to feed a fountain in the gardens of the old Somerset House, then a royal residence. After decades of neglect, in the 1770s the bath was adapted into a public cold-water plunge bath, a practice considered healthy at the time. The myth of Roman origins is an invention of the 1830s: it served to draw in customers and the curious, and it worked so well that the name has stayed attached to this day. Charles Dickens mentions it in "David Copperfield", where the protagonist takes a cold plunge in a bath on the Strand: a detail that helped cement the fame of the place.

What you see

What you really see is a chamber roofed with a vault of brick and stone. The bath is built with wide, low Tudor bricks, with patches added after 1750; at the eastern end there is a settling tank added in the 1920s. Along the entrance corridor there survive white and blue "Dutch" tiles around doors and hatches, slabs of stone and marble, and a damaged plaque declaring the bath "nearly 2000 years old" and dating from the time of "Titus or Vespasian": material proof, by now, not of a Roman past but of the nineteenth-century hoax. Walled-up doors at each end suggest the complex was once larger.

Visits and hours

The site belongs to the National Trust and is managed by Westminster City Council. The most curious part is that you do not necessarily need to pay or book: from the window on the alley you can peer in for free at the interior of the bath, lit up, at any time. To actually go in, however, visits are arranged only by appointment, Monday to Friday, by writing in advance to Westminster Council (lhandley@westminster.gov.uk) with at least a week's notice. Indicative visiting hours run from noon to 4 pm from April to September, and from noon to 3 pm from October to March.

Getting there

To get there, the handiest metro stop is Temple (Circle and District lines), a couple of minutes' walk away; alternatively Charing Cross. Strand Lane is reached from Surrey Street, a turning off the Strand almost opposite the campus of King's College London. It is a five-minute detour that is worth making precisely because it tells a double story: that of a seventeenth-century cistern recycled, and that of a tourist hoax so well executed that it has survived nearly two centuries.

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