Ice-well and Summer-house and Boat-store.

The ice-house features on our Bromley Town Centre Parks trail, as stop 5, here.

This elegant Arts & Crafts porch was the Victorian ‘pimping-up’ of the existing, and functioning, ice-well. Before there were refrigerators, there was still a fashion for iced desserts, sorbets, ice cream and such, especially in Georgian Society in the 1700s. This Icehouse was built at that time, and it would store ice, insulated in layers of straw.

Ice-wells were usually dug into the sides of hills, or next to the insulating effects of a lake.

It became a skilled art to create iced deserts, epitomised by a book by Agnes Marshall, from which these illustrations come. Chefs had to crush the ice, then mix, beat and whip the icy mixtures to mound them into these elaborate shapes. There were specialist suppliers of the moulds.

Ice was harvested from ponds and lakes, like the Moat above, but as the supply was of poorer quality than the blocks that could be obtained from frozen lakes in the US or Norway, there was a trade to import the ice blocks. Ice Wharf off the Regent’s canal in London had two enormous ice wells that could store the ice blocks into the summer to be sold at premium prices.

When the palace was part of Stockwell College, the ice house was used to store canoes – they cut a square hole in the wall (on the lake side) to push the boats in. You can see the racks where the canoes were placed. Unfortunately, neglect has meant that the roof has now collapsed and is covered in a blue tarpaulin.

The photo was taken during a tour, of the Palace and the grounds, conducted by the Civic Society in 2018.

The main page on the Bromley Palace Park is here.