(Private Collection)
New River Head takes its name from the reservoir at the mouth of the New River – a channel cut in 1604-13 to supply London with water from springs in Hertfordshire. The river is a civil engineering achievement vital to the development of the metropolis. From here, high in the fields of rural Clerkenwell, a network of wooden mains conveyed water to the cisterns of London. To begin with the New River Head consisted merely of a reservoir, the Round Pond, and a single building known as the Water House. In time it became a comparatively sophisticated complex with outer ponds and associated structures covering seven acres – a roughly trapezoidal site, bounded latterly by Rosebery Avenue and Amwell Street on the east and west, Myddelton Passage and Hardwick Street on the north and south.
The ‘New River-Head’ was described in A New Description of Lancashire, Leicestershire … London and Middlexex … (1749) as a ‘Reservoir that receives that River, after it has ran many miles from its Head, or Spring. The Water-Works here supply above 30,000 Houses in London with Water, and the Shares in the Company are of Value, tho’ the first Projector, Sir Hugh Myddelton, was ruined by the Undertaking.’