St. Ann's Well Gardens - The Chalybeate

By Steve Myall

An article in the Brighton Gazette, June 17th 1824, recommends the Chalybeate, (now St. Ann's Well Gardens) the curative mineral spring beside Kemp's home, The Temple, on Montpelier Road:

"Surrounded on the northern and western sides by a plantation of firs, and open on the east and south, (this area) commands a beautiful view of cornfields, meadows etc., to the ocean, and is unquestionably one of the most pleasant and rural situations in the vicinity of Brighton".   

It was certainly a lovely location for Kemp to build his Temple in 1819, and the neighbouring Chalybeate waters became a favourite venue of Queen Adelaide. They were claimed to cure most ailments, and in the early nineteenth century the gardens became one of the principal places of rendezvous for the popular rustic fetes and public breakfasts that were much in vogue in fashionable society.

It was Dr. Richard Russell, who died in 1759 and was said to be the founder of fashionable Brighton, who "discovered" the Chalybeate Spring, making use of it for treating his rich patients. The waters were already much in favour with local sheep farmers.

Lithograph published by Mason and Ackermann, c1835. This cottage stood at the southern entrance to the Chalybeate grounds, where visitors would leave their servants and horses.  In Saunders’ 1837 Directory visitors to Brighton were told ‘A Commodious and elegant building (seen middle distance to the right) comprising a reading room and other conveniences, has been recently erected, together with a pretty rustic cottage’.  

Dr. Russell built the first more modest twin-gabled house around the spring itself in the early 1750s, (first illustration below) and this was replaced by a classical building in about 1830 (second illustration below). The latter was demolished in 1934.      

 

 

Watercolour of  the first building over the Chalybeate spring, c.1790,  inscribed top right  ‘At Wick, near Brighton, Sussex’ and depicting the plantation of firs described in the Brighton Gazette article mentioned above.      

Lithograph c1836 published in Wallis’s Royal Edition ‘Brighton As It Is’, showing the replacement building over the spring, where the brick well cover stands today.