Hampstead Invented Wellness

London Calling. London Walks connecting.

This is London. This is London Walks.

Streets Ahead.

And today, Hampstead is going back to the future.

Hot sauna.

Cold plunge.

Hot sauna.

Cold plunge.

Sixteen faintly pink people standing around in towels, telling one another they’ve never felt more alive

Yes, wellness could be coming to Kenwood House.

The Ham & High has just broken the story.

Two planning applications have gone in for a temporary sauna and cold-water immersion facility in the historic grounds of Kenwood.

Two timber saunas.

Three cold-plunge baths.

Two bell tents for changing.

A reception hut.

An outdoor shower.

Willow screening.

All on a patch of lawn beside the Kenwood car park.

Advance booking only. A maximum of 16 customers at a time. No wood burning. No amplified music. No alcohol.

In other words, no smoke, no rave and no prosecco-fuelled conga line snaking past the Rembrandts.

It would be electrically heated. It would operate during Kenwood’s normal opening hours. And, if Camden Council gives it the nod, it would be there for 12 months.

The firm behind it is called Sauna and Soul.

Very 2026.

Except it isn’t.

Hampstead went in for wellness 325 years before wellness was invented.

Because if there is one corner of London where a wellness centre makes historical sense, it is Hampstead.

Hampstead was doing health and wellness when the rest of London was doing gin, smallpox and open sewers.

And that brings us to today’s word.

It’s a beauty.

Chalybeate.

Pronounced kuh-LIB-ee-ut.

Chalybeate means containing iron salts.

Iron-rich.

A chalybeate spring is a spring whose water contains iron.

The word comes to us through Latin from the Greek word Chalybes.

The Chalybes were an ancient people who lived near the Black Sea. They were famous for working iron.

So the word carries its history inside it.

Chalybes.

Iron workers.

Chalybeate.

Iron water.

Rust in a glass.

And Hampstead had it.

Water percolated down through the sand and gravel at the top of Hampstead Hill.

Then it met the great impermeable slab of London clay underneath.

It could go no farther down, so it travelled sideways and burst out of the hillside as springs.

And one of those springs contained iron.

That was enough.

This was the age when mineral water was medicine.

If it came out of the ground tasting peculiar, it was probably doing you good.

And the more peculiar it tasted, the more good it was probably doing you.

In 1698, the infant Earl of Gainsborough and his mother, the Countess of Gainsborough, gave six acres around the Hampstead wells for the benefit of the local poor.

A generous gift.

Though boggy ground and iron-flavoured water may not, at first glance, look like the most promising charitable endowment in history.

But the trustees saw the possibilities.

In 1700, they advertised Hampstead’s chalybeate water as being every bit as good as the famous water at Tunbridge Wells.

And you didn’t even have to struggle up Hampstead Hill to get it.

The water was put into flasks and carried into London every morning.

You could collect your flask from an apothecary at the Eagle and Child in Fleet Street for threepence.

For another penny, they’d bring it to your house.

Hampstead wellness.

Home delivery.

Three centuries before Deliveroo.

They were worried about imitations, of course.

Counterfeit Hampstead water.

Some rascal filling flasks from an ordinary well, fastening in the cork and passing the stuff off as the genuine medicinal article.

So every authentic consignment came with a sealed ticket bearing a wolf rampant and seven crosslets.

No wolf, no wellness.

And those flasks of mineral water gave us a Hampstead name that is still with us today.

Flask Walk.

The waters were bottled close to where The Flask pub now stands.

But people didn’t only drink the Hampstead water at home.

They came up the hill to take it at source.

And once you’ve persuaded wealthy Londoners to come to Hampstead for their health, you had better give them something to do when they get there.

Up went a pump room.

Then a Great Room, also known as the Long Room.

Then assembly rooms, a tavern, shops, formal gardens, a chapel and a bowling green.

There were concerts.

Dancing.

Card playing.

Flirting.

Gossip.

Drinking.

The Long Room could apparently hold 500 people.

In September 1701, an advertisement promised a concert of vocal and instrumental music by “the best Masters”, followed by dancing in the afternoon.

So much for the quiet wellness retreat.

The Hampstead spa was a health resort, a pleasure ground and a social theatre.

You came to improve your constitution.

You stayed to inspect everybody else’s clothes, exchange gossip, dance until your feet hurt and perhaps make a spectacularly unhealthy romantic decision.

And the spa helped change Hampstead.

It brought visitors.

Visitors needed somewhere to eat, drink and sleep.

Houses went up.

Inns multiplied.

Hampstead acquired a reputation as a healthy retreat above the smoke and filth of London.

The air was cleaner.

The views were magnificent.

The water tasted of iron.

What more could an eighteenth-century invalid want?

Well, possibly water that didn’t taste of iron.

The great Hampstead spa boom didn’t last.

Fashion moved on.

There was competition from other spas.

The original establishment acquired a somewhat raffish reputation.

The grand buildings disappeared.

But the spa is still written into the neighbourhood.

Well Walk.

Well Road.

Well Passage.

The Wells Tavern.

Flask Walk.

The Flask.

Hampstead is practically wearing its spa history on its street signs.

And now we go back across the Heath to Kenwood.

Because there’s another lovely historical twist in this new proposal.

The electrical supply for the saunas would come from Kenwood’s eighteenth-century dairy buildings.

The dairy was designed by George Saunders for Louisa, Countess of Mansfield, and built in the 1790s.

It was picturesque, fashionable and functional.

This was the aristocratic lady playing at dairymaid, but it was also a working part of the Kenwood estate.

The cows provided milk.

The dairy produced butter and cream.

Ice gathered from the ponds in winter was stored in the ice house underneath.

And there it is.

Hot and cold.

An electrically heated sauna supplied from an eighteenth-century dairy with an ice house underneath it.

You couldn’t make it up.

Lady Mansfield’s dairy once turned milk into butter.

Sauna and Soul hopes to turn Hampstead residents into steam.

Then plunge them into cold water.

It feels startlingly modern.

Scandinavian.

Instagrammable.

The sort of thing that requires a beautifully designed water bottle and a vocabulary containing the words reset, journey and transformative.

But really, Hampstead has seen it all before.

Three centuries ago, people climbed the hill, drank strange-tasting water and assured one another it was doing wonders for their health.

Now they may climb the hill, sit in a very hot wooden box, jump into a very cold bath and assure one another it is doing wonders for their health.

The technology changes.

The towels improve.

The human animal remains exactly the same.

The planning applications are now before Camden Council.

According to the Ham & High, comments can be made until September 9.

If permission is granted, the facility could be ready by January 1, 2027.

So watch this space.

Or, more precisely, watch that patch of lawn beside the Kenwood car park.

Hampstead spa may be coming back.

Not with an iron-rich drink served in a flask bearing a wolf rampant and seven crosslets.

With two saunas, three plunge baths and sixteen Hampstead people discovering that cold water is extremely cold.

And on that bracing note…

You’ve been listening to the London Walks podcast.

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We’re the gold-standard walking-tour company.

And you can join us every day of the year.

Rain or shine.

Hot or cold.

Though normally we let you keep your clothes on.

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