Lamb's Conduit Fields

Lamb's Conduit Street, or Lamb's Conduit Fields, north of High Holborn, from Red Lion Street, to the Foundling Hospital.

William Lamb, gentleman and clothworker, in the year 1577 built a Water Conduit at Oldborne [Holborn] Cross to his charges of fifteen hundred pounds, and did many other charitable acts as in my Summary.—Stow, pp. 44, 118.

And as his [Lamb's] charity extended itself thus liberally abroad in the country, so did the city of London likewise taste thereof not sparingly. For near unto Holborn he founded a fair Conduit and a standard with a cock at Holborn Bridge to convey thence the waste. These were begun the 26th day of March 1577, and the water carried along in pipes of lead more than 2000 yards, all at his own cost and charges, amounting to the sum of £1500: and the work was fully finished the 24th of August in the same year. Moreover he gave to poor women, such as were willing to take pains, 120 pails therewith to carry and serve water.—Stow's Summary, 4to, 1579.

The fields around Lamb's Conduit formed a favourite promenade on a summer's evening for the inhabitants of St. Andrew's, Holborn, and St. Giles-in-the-Fields. Wycherley alludes to them in his Love in a Wood, or St. James's Park, 4to, 1672. D'Urfey speaks of them as a place for duels.

"Let him that boasts of too much strength,
Appoint the place and send his rapier's length.
*     *     *     *     *    
Let him that on that basis honour builds,
Meet me to-morrow in Lamb's Conduit Fields."
D'Urfey's Epilogue to Madam Fickle, 4to, 1677; and see his Fool turned Critic, p. 26.

In 1719 the Men of Kent played the Men of London at cricket in these fields for £60 a side.¹ The fields were first curtailed in 1714, by the formation of a new burying-ground for the parish of St. George's, Bloomsbury, and again in 1739, by the erection of the Foundling Hospital. The conduit was taken down in 1746.

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1. Mist's Journal, May 16, 1719.