Best known nowadays as a leading venue for international and UK dance theatre, Sadler’s Wells is not only one of London’s oldest (and sometimes most disreputable) theatres, but one with water running through its history, literally in many cases.
In 1683, one Thomas Sadler, among other things a Surveyor of the Highways, was digging for gravel on his property when he discovered a well. The canny Sadler did not argue when this was believed to be the well of the medieval Priory of Clerkenwell, associated with miraculous healing powers in the Middle Ages, and built himself an enclosed gardens and pleasure resort, including a wooden music house with a platform serving as a stage, where a fashionable audience came to partake of the allegedly therapeutic waters at – Sadler’s Wells.
