THE FAMOUS BEULAH SPA by Colin Evans The area just beyond the trees on the south side of Ravensroost was once a place of national fame, The Royal Beulah Spa and Gardens. It was tremendously popular with Londoners for many years, not just because of its delightful setting among the trees and its nearness to town, but particularly because of the saline spring which was supposed to have health-giving properties. Actually, the spring was known a hundred or more years before Beulah Spa became popular. The Norwood locals and gypsies had long been taking the waters from the spring which lay a few yards to the east of Leather Bottle Lane, since re-named Spa Hill. It was not really until the development of Norwood as a residential area at the turn of the nineteenth century that Beulah Spa became well known. However, the development was slow to start, and a map of 1846 shows that the land on which Ravensroost now stands was covered entirely with trees. Trees, of course, were no newcomers to Norwood. The name itself is a contraction of North Wood, or more precisely, The Great North Wood, as it was known in Anglo-Saxon times, to distinguish it from the Great South Wood which lay over the Weald of Kent and Surrey. It was to the clean air of Norwood that fugitives from the great plague of London fled in 1665, and it is rumoured that the field which lies at the foot of Gypsy Hill where seven roads meet, was actually the plague pit. The woods, by all accounts, were large, stretching all the way to Tooting, and although during the reign of Henry VIII it was a valuable forest of oaks, it was not a place for the unwary traveller. The nearness to London and the denseness of the forest made it an ideal refuge for fugitives. For many years, Norwood’s rural remoteness persisted, and not until 1800 could Norwood be described as 'a hamlet with a score of farm houses and cottages scattered about the lakes which intersected the woods.' The only means of communication with the outside world was by cart, which started off each day from the tiny village that had begun to grow up in the area now known as the Triangle. It was here that the first public house was established, ‘The Woodman', which made its appearance on Westow Hill, its front windows looking out over London. Gradually, Norwood became popular with London day-trippers, and tea gardens had started to spring up everywhere. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, spas and gardens were a popular feature of social life in London and in the following years, Beulah Spa was rapidly developed. It was opened with due festivity on 1st August 1831 but by this time the land just beyond the trees had been transformed. There was an octagon-shaped building with arcades on either side, housing the refreshment room, the reading room and a place at which sweets could be bought. It was a thatched building, and immediately opposite stood a building known as the orchestra, in which a military band played daily. For the amusement of the many visitors that came to the Spa was a maze, a camera obscura, an upper and lower lake, woodland walks, a circus ring, a dancing platform and an archery ground. Then there was the Spa itself, shrouded in a curious building that looked like an Indian wigwam. The first advertisement of the Spa, which appeared in 1831 said that........... "Visitors to this fashionable place of summer resort, which is now open every day, will find every convenience there for the enjoyment of a variety of cheerful, elegant, and healthful recreation and amusement amid landscape scenery of the most splendid description. The gardens contain a most superb variety of floricultural specimens. A new archery ground is in every way to the convenience and enjoyment of this fashionable and healthful recreation. Bows and arrows are provided for the use of visitors. Picnic and gypsy parties are catered for. A brass and quadrille band is in daily attendance. The Beulah Saline Water is forwarded to all parts of the kingdom at two shillings a gallon." The saline water, incidentally, was even analysed by Professor Faraday, and the Spa evidently took great pleasure in advertising the health giving properties of its ingredients. However, all this pales into insignificance compared with the various other goings on at the Spa: military bands and orchestras were playing every day; there were firework displays, balloon ascents, demonstrations of horse riding, performances of plays and endless fetes. In July 1834 the summer fete attracted over 3,000 visitors. Had Ravensroost been there at that time, it wouldn't have been a particularly peaceful place in which to live. Walking through the area today, it is difficult to imagine what it must have been like, for virtually nothing remains of the Spa. The spring has long since been covered up, and the elegant Sylvan Road which ran along the upper part of the Spa grounds has nowadays become a rather overgrown track which has lost something of its former glory. You can still walk the track that used to be Sylvan Road: it's the lane that runs parallel with the fence at the bottom of the Ravensroost gardens. On the corner of Spa Hill and Beulah Hill, opposite the pub stands another rather forlorn reminder of the Beulah Spa. It used to be called the Rustic Lodge (later the Tivoli Lodge), and was a combination of Gothic and Elizabethan styles of cottage architecture. Although the building is now a private house, it originally had a thatched roof and commanded the entrance to the Spa and Gardens. What happened to the Spa? It turned out that the frothy existence of Beulah Spa was to be rather short-lived, though no one could have possibly foreseen its fate. By 1845, the Spa had faded considerably, and it gradually waxed and waned in popularity and finally became extinct in 1856, only 25 years since it had been officially opened. Under the circumstances, this was hardly surprising, for less than a couple of miles away something far more exciting and sophisticated had caught the public imagination. Something that would draw the crowds away from Beulah Spa for ever. On 10 June 1854 with due pomp and ceremony and with thousands of spectators in attendance, the Crystal Palace was opened. Beulah in 1843 by James Johnson MD The Norwood of yesterday by Ben Murray
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