Bromley Civic society has produced a family treasure hunt in the town centre! It’s reported that even adults enjoy it – you might find that there’s more to see above the shops than you had previously noticed. Both routes are suitable for push-chairs.
Here is the walk – it’s a .pdf file, so you can do online, or print it out and fill in:
This is the shorter version of the trail, should take about half an hour. It goes from the Glades around Market square and the lower High Street – see this map:
There is a longer route, which should take about an hour. It starts from the Library, takes you up to Bromley North Station, back down the upper High Street, and to the Parish Church.
The ice-house features on our Bromley Town Centre Parks trail, as stop 5, here.
The Icehouse in 2019, the pan-tiles have slipped. You can see the ornate brickwork at the top.
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.
Figurative diagram of the ice well, dug into the slope by the Moat.
Ice-wells were usually dug into the sides of hills, or next to the insulating effects of a lake.
1800s moulded ice cream from a popular book by Agnes B Marshall.
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.
The former icehouse with the pit filled in and fitted to store boats, before the roof was allowed to collapse in 2020.
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.
See also the entry for The Bromley Town Centre Park Trail, for the well, here.
St Blaise’s well was rediscovered in 1754 (by the Bishop’s domestic chaplain, a Rev Mr Hardwick); a worker showed him a spring, seeping into the moat (emptied of water, like all fishponds to be de-silted), which he identified as a chalybeate spring. It had buried ancient oak steps.
The spring is called “Chalybeate” because the water contains minerals, usually iron. There was a fashion for ‘Spa’ cures from about 1600AD onwards, so towns like Bath and Tunbridge Wells, were built around them, catering to the rich fashion of ‘taking the waters’. The Pulham Rock site says that St Blaise’s well was supposed to possess healing properties capable of curing almost everything, including:
‘ . . . the colic, the melancholy, and the vapours. It made the lean fat, the fat lean; it killed flat worms in the belly, loosened the clammy humours of the body, and dried the over-moist brain.’
In 1754 it was roofed with thatch over 6 pillars – replaced with tile roof by the Lord of the Manor, Coles-Child, but this has not survived into modern times. The spring is chalybeate, and from a perched water table that also seeps out by Churchill Theatre and along the base of Martin’s Hill (it is why there is such a steep slope on that side of the valley).
The six-columned roof over the well in the 1928, from E.L.Horsburgh’s book, replacing a thatched roof blown off during a snow storm in the 1890s.
St Blaise was the patron saint of wool carding (he was the Bishop of Sebaste in Armenia with a gruesome death) and quite popular in medieval times, when a brutal martyrdom was often popular.
“The Bishops built a well a few hundred yards from the chalybeate spring, and marked it with oak trees. It was about 16 inches in diameter, and the canopy had a roof of thatch, thus heightening the picturesque appearance of the scene, as shown on the left of Fig 2. The water rose so slowly, however, that it took nearly four hours to yield a gallon of water. There was an orifice in the side of the retaining wall that enabled surplus water to trickle over into the adjacent moat – or small lake – that borders the grounds of the palace. It eventually became a place of pilgrimage, and an oratory in honour of St Blaise, the patron saint of the wool trade, was built close by.
After the Reformation, however, the oratory fell into ruin, and the well into disuse, although it is not clear whether they ran out of pilgrims because they died of the colic, melancholy, the vapours or old age while they were waiting for their cups to be filled with chalybeate water, or as a result of drinking it. “
Diagram of the perched water table under Bromley town centre, coming out as spring lines above Shortlands and at St Blaise’s Well. After Paul Rainey, 2012.
St Blaise’s well marks the site of a chalybete spring, and the water comes from a perched water table that also seeps out by Churchill Theatre and along the base of Martin’s Hill (it is why there is such a steep slope on that side of the valley). There is no visible spring nowadays, as the water table is lower (the water is pumped at Shortlands pumping station, among several local locations). The nearest place to see iron-stained waters, is the ‘hidden’ springs along the break of slope in Martins Hill. When the water table is high, iron stained water can also be found in the ditches around Norman Park.
Some photographs, old and new, of the well:
When the fountain worked at St Blaise’s Well, Palace Park, 2019St Blaise’s Well, Palace Park in 2019St Blaise’s Well, Palace Park
The page on the whole of Bromley Palace Park is here.
The Folly is also a stop on our Bromley Town Centre Park Trail, see here.
The Folly in 2019 when the ivy (and the statuette’s head) were removed.
This Folly is one of the ‘installations’ added by James Pulham & Sons, as part of the gardens for the Old Bishops Palace. The rights and titles of the Lord of the Manor of Bromley had recently been acquired by a coal merchant from Deptford, a Mr Charles Coles Esq., who had made his money supplying steam coal to the railways, shipping it down from the coal mines near Newcastle. It was very fashionable to have a Folly in your park or estate, and this one was placed next to the entrance, so anyone coming in from the south would not miss it.
The Folly cira 1940s
The Folly might have been inspired by the medieval arch and pillar found when dredging the Moat. These were originally incorporated, (see the 1940s photo) but the pillar has gone missing since then. However, the Folly had been a long-standing fashion since Capability Brown had been designing landscapes around wealthy homes. There’s many fine ones to be seen on hills up and down the country.
Figure of St Blaise on the folly.
The folly is decorated with a figure in a shield, thought to be St Blaise, whose well is at stop 1 of the Bromley Town Centre trail. St Blaise was a popular saint in Bromley and Kent, as he is associated with wool combing. His saints day is the 3rd February.
Unfortunately, when Historic England required the council to remove the very overgrown ivy from the Folly, the head of the saint was lost.
Shortly after James Pulham & Son built this Folly, they constructed another at Sydenham Hill Wood. This is thought of as the ‘twin’ to our Folly, it looks very similar, and under the undergrowth there are scattered rocks around our Folly, artfully strewn, in the same style.
The twin to the Folly in the Bromley Palace Park – this one is at Sydenham Hill Wood. Tour of the Palace Park in July 2022The arch in our FollyKing Alfred’s Tower, the extravagant folly for the Stourhead estate.
The page of all the historic features in the Bromley Palace Park is here.
In 1897 the lord of the manor, Charles Cole-Childs, gave the field known as White Hart Field, to the people. This became Queens Gardens. Before the Glades was built it stretched between Market Square and the Bishops Palace (the Bishops of Rochester were the Lord of the Manor) – the palace is now the Civic Centre.
On the Widmore road side of the park was Phillips Homeopathy hospital, and old photos of the gardens have these buildings in the background. The park was used by patients convalescing.
The London Gardens Trust informs us “The original main entrance to the gardens in the north west corner was at the apex of a triangle adjacent to Market Square where there were fine ornamental iron gates, donated by Lord Kinnaird (George William Fox Kinnaird 9th Lord Kinnaird 1807 – 1878), a close friend of Coles Child. The gates, which Kinnaird had purchased at auction, date from the 1850s and had stood in front of his residence, Plaistow Lodge, on London Lane. In 1990, when The Glades Shopping Centre was constructed, the gates were moved to their present position in the southern part of the gardens.”* These gates had decorated the end of a long and winding driveway to Plaistow Lodge. Plaistow Lodge became Quernmore School, then in the 1990s, it housed Parish Primary school, when it’s listed buildings were demolished, to re-house the Methodist church, whose site was used for the Glades.
The current Queens Gardens is between the Glades and the Kentish Way bypass.
from the Friend’s page about this park: “Queen’s Garden represents the last remnant of the countryside hugging the old Market Square on the east side of town. It was part of the farmland belonging to Bromley Palace (now the Civic Centre) stretching from the White Hart Inn in the High Street all the way to Widmore Green. By the l8th century it was known as White Hart Field and it was here that the coaching horses could graze and where the town held their cricket matches. Despite its accustomed use by the townsfolk the field remained in the possession of the Lord of the Manor until donated to the town in 1897 on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee and on condition it was laid out as a public garden.”
A large section of it was sold to the developer’s of the Glades. They gave some exchange land, but as this lacked the protection of public park land, this was then claimed back in 2015 and the restaurant terrace built on it.
When it was White Hart Field, it was the town’s cricket ground, and the scene of the live changing event for the famous author HG Wells, when in 1894, he says:
The agent of good fortune was “young Sutton,” the grown-up son of the landlord of the Bell. I was playing outside the scoring tent in the cricket field and in all friendliness he picked me up and tossed me in the air. “Whose little kid are you?” he said, and I wriggled, he missed his hold on me and I snapped my tibia across a tent peg. A great fuss of being carried home; a painful setting — for they just set and strapped a broken leg tightly between splints in those days, and the knee and ankle swelled dreadfully — and then for some weeks I found myself enthroned on the sofa in the parlour as the most important thing in the house, consuming unheard-of jellies, fruits, brawn and chicken sent with endless apologies on behalf of her son by Mrs. Sutton, and I could demand and have a fair chance of getting anything that came into my head, books, paper, pencils, and toys — and particularly books.
I had just taken to reading. I had just discovered the art of leaving my body to sit impassive in a crumpled up attitude in a chair or sofa, while I wandered over the hills and far away in novel company and new scenes. And now my father went round nearly every day to the Literary Institute in Market Square and got one or two books for me, and Mrs. Sutton sent some books, and there was always a fresh book to read… I cannot recall now many of the titles of the books I read, I devoured them so fast…
Some pictures of Queens Gardens, past and present:
(1) From An Experiment in Autobiography by H. G. Wells, 1934, Chapter 2.
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Built in 1908 this building housed the offices of Bromley Electric Light Company. Behind was the coal-fired ‘power station’ whose tall chimney dominates old photos of the town centre. It was there for over 30 years.
The architectural style is ‘Queen Anne’ – ‘Streaky Bacon’.
The tattooist (No. 217), and the next door shop, occupy an 18th century house, worthy of mention as it was the premises of two Bromley notable historians and printers, each producing from this shop an invaluable histories of Bromley – Thomas Wilson in 1797 and John Dunkin in 1815.
The row of 5 windows is distinctive in old photos of the High Street.
Browse our old photos, in 
from being dominated by tower blocks: Look here and email our ward councillors about:
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