Roman Baths, Strand Lane

The Strand Lane Baths stand beside a narrow lane in the City of Westminster. The building is a single-storey brick structure with a stone vault. It sits at the back of a small courtyard reached through a doorway in Strand Lane. The entrance corridor leads to a larger bath chamber, both covered by different styles of brick vault. Traces of older finishes remain on the walls and around the doorway. The baths have been linked to Roman Britain since the 1830s. In fact they were built in 1612 as part of a cistern for a grand fountain at Somerset House. The idea of Roman origins was an advertising trick that took hold in guidebooks and novels. Before that, in the 1770s, the space became a public cold plunge bath run by Mr James Smith. Later owners turned it into the ‘Old Roman Spring Baths’ to attract visitors. Inside, the main bath is lined with Tudor bricks and has one square and one rounded end. A smaller settling tank was added in the 1920s at the eastern end. The corridor walls still show blue and white Dutch tiles from the Georgian period. Blocked doorways suggest the surviving rooms once belonged to a larger water system. Water now enters through the settling tank, though its source has never been clearly identified.