Spa Field

Spa Field, more commonly Spa Fields, which gained fame shortly after the Napoleonic Wars as the site of great assemblies in support of universal suffrage. That was on the eve of its development. In modern terms, the rallying-ground of 1816 was the area north of Exmouth Market, but the term Spa Fields also applied to the area between there and Bowling Green Lane, which had been extensively built up many years earlier and included the London Spaw or Spa from which the name derived. The whole of the ground comprised the western of the two Clerkenwell estates owned by the Earls, later Marquesses, of Northampton between the seventeenth century and the mid-twentieth century. (The other, Woods Close, is described in volume xlvi of the Survey of London.) Rosebery Avenue, which cut through the estate in the 1890s, is taken as the southern boundary here. ...

The northern portion, something above sixteen acres in extent, was bisected diagonally by footpaths and also crossed by water pipes from New River Head. It was systematically built on from 1817 into the 1830s, the better houses around Wilmington Square giving way to lesser buildings in small streets and courts on the peripheries (Ill. 316).