Overlooked Britain

Before the South Sea Bubble burst, Sir John Fellowes splurged his fortune on Carshalton House Water Tower and its plunge pool

It’s a ravishing rarity: the ‘bagno’, an 18th-century marble plunge bath, decorated with blue and white Delft tiles, in the water tower/house/pavilion at Carshalton House in south London.

With an exterior that looks like a gracefully pinnacled church, and with its multitude of fanciful uses, this garden building was unique in all the land.

It was conceived for Sir John Fellowes, a big-noise City financier and Turkey merchant, who had amassed a fortune in white gold and sugar from the Caribbean, whipping up trade deals in the coffeehouse culture of London. The deals were to burst with the South Sea Bubble in 1720. That’s when John Aubrey, author of Brief Lives, recorded that Fellowes was creating ‘a hansom seat’ at Carshalton.

So it most endearingly was and still is: a fine house, surrounded by pleasure grounds and follies, including a sevenarched hermitage, built of Reigate greensand and Portland stone. The floor was made from flags of limestone from Öland – the Swedish island that also yielded stone for Sir Christopher Wren to pave St Paul’s Cathedral.

Another building for the gardener’s delight is the powerfully-formed sham bridge of flint, brick and stone, designed by Charles Bridgeman, pioneer of naturalistic design. He invented the ha-ha, which created, with an invisible drop in the land, the illusion that the garden and parkland were one.

With Bridgeman’s schemes at Carshalton, the eyes were swept seamlessly forth down a canal to the considerable oddity of the red- and yellow-brick water tower on the edge of the park.

With its arches, buttresses, pilasters, ‘flaming’ stone urns and the great tower – on which battlements and slender, split-stone obelisks topped with stone

balls conceal a 1,000-gallon water tank – this is undoubtedly the queen of the show. Aubrey described ‘its Bathing roome lined with galley tyles paved with marble’ – and it is widely thought to have been designed by no less a figure than Vanbrugh.

This was a palace devoted to pleasure, with a particularly splendid orangery; praised again by Aubrey as ‘a fine orangery where are several orange trees transplanted from the warmer Breezes of Italian air into our inclement climate’. Gorgeous Georgian: Water Tower, by Sir John Vanbrugh, and plunge pool

This building was unique in Britain. It was as fine an architectural eye-catcher as you could wish for, concealing a complexity of technical devices enabling the hydraulic management of water.

With its main purpose being to supply ‘soft spring water’ pumped by a waterpowered engine from the nearby River Wandle, as well as from various ponds, springs and a lake, then to be coursed by gravity down to the mansion, it was a real luxury for its day.

There was a whopping great cistern atop the tower, as well as a sump room, sluices, culverts and a pump chamber with a water wheel. All is artfully concealed with urns, arches, pillars, cresting and pinnacles, interwoven throughout by a wealth of pipes.

Beating it all, though, is the decorative plunge bath, which is as enchanting as its role was rare. Such plunge pools were built to serve grand, 18th-century houses, depending on the water sources nearby – one at Antony in Cornwall was filled by the sea – but they were few and far between and rarely decorated.

Even the flamboyant Lord Clive of India had a severe, grey, marble set-up for his deep and ice-cold ablutions in the 1770s at Claremont in Surrey.

In 1792, at Wimpole in Cambridgeshire, Philip Yorke, inspired by the baths he had seen in Pompeii, commissioned the great architect Sir John Soane to design an architecturally charmful plunge bath with hot and cold running water.

At Carshalton, on the other hand, the waters were icy, although hugely enhanced by the exquisite decorative tiles. Of blue manganese and glazed white tin, they are laid in architectural contours and detailed with five different Dutch and Chinese vases, each filled with native flowers. Dutch terracottas show off tulips, fuchsias and ranunculus, while the Chinese ‘single and double gourd’ vases display prunus blossom, chrysanthemums and peonies.

If you think that these revelations are fantastical enough, spare a thought for the illuminati who besported themselves in this sublime spot.

Sir John Fellowes would have been wallowing in his creation, no doubt suffering as the South Sea Bubble burst about his person. Then there was Sir Philip Yorke, considered one of the handsomest men of his time. He lived here in the early 1730s, when he was instrumental in changing the calendar by moving the New Year for business contracts from Lady Day, 25th March, to 1st January, as we have it today. He also, blow me down, made it illegal for a clergyman to marry a couple without banns or a licence to perform the ceremony.

In the 1740s, Carshalton was leased by Admiral Anson, First Lord of the Admiralty, who between times was circumnavigating the globe. Plundering many millions of pieces of eight, most particularly in China, he was eventually hailed as a national hero.

A proud man, he must have made a somewhat sombre contribution to the atmosphere of the bathhouse. He was so reserved, it was said, that ‘he might have been round the world but was never in it’.

Not to be left out of these bathing parties was Horace Walpole, during his undoubtedly relished visits in the 1770s, when his cousin Thomas lived here from the 1760s to the 1780s.

Carshalton is an oasis of tranquillity amid chock-a-block urban congestion. Horace Walpole was surprised to find it ‘as rural a village as if in Northumberland, much watered by the clearest streams’; and so, most curiously, can the same still be said of its centre in the 21st century.

There’s a village green, a pub and an assembly of 18th-century buildings, as well as the great Carshalton House itself – now a convent school, loved, lauded, regularly restored and still standing in its walled park.

The excellent Carshalton Water Tower and Historic Garden Trust has recently published a book reconfirming that one of Britain’s greatest rarities is to be found in this suburb of London.