Emanuela Aru next to Black Mary’s Hole’s location in the circular flower bed [Angela Cobbinah]

A FAINT winter’s sun followed us as we trudged up King’s Cross Road to reach an attractive block of redbrick flats in Clerkenwell whose name, Spring House, said it all.

In the middle of the forecourt, a few metres down, lay the purpose of our visit, Black Mary’s Hole, a 17th-century well popular among Londoners for its curative waters.

Why it was so called has been subject to much speculation but Emanuela Aru, my companion, has spent the past year trying to establish the truth of the claim that it was run by an early black Briton called Mary Woolaston.

“Mary Woolaston crops up in the archives several times as a black woman who ran the well,” she began, standing a few feet away from where it once was. “But there are other stories, for example that it was named after a woman who owned a black cow or black-veiled nuns from St Mary’s Priory who originally owned the land.

“To be honest, this is down to an unwillingness of white patriarchal society to accept that there could be such a thing as a black woman in the 1600s who was not a slave and who lived independently.

“My research has revealed that there were four black women living just five minutes down the road from here by the end of the 16th century, so she was not a one-off.”

Emanuela is part of an exciting new project based at the Calthorpe Community Garden, located a few minutes away across the borough boundary in Gray’s Inn Road, King’s Cross, whose aim is to give Black Mary her rightful place in history through a series of public events that began last spring.

These will culminate in the unveiling later this year of a life-size statue commemorating Woolaston, reimagined by sculptor Marcia Bennett-Male and set within a garden and water feature designed by Chelsea Flower Show award-winner Juliet Sargeant.

“In a highly urbanised, commercialised environment, the Calthorpe is a very rare community-led green-space offering all a place to rest among the healing properties of nature, beautifully performing the functions of a contemporary healing well,” explained Emanuela.

“The Mary Woolaston Healing Garden will offer a space for reflection, respite and communion for everyone who visits.”

Marcia Bennett-Male’s maquette of Black Mary [The Space To Come]

Originally from Italy and living locally, she jumped at the chance of researching into Black Mary when approached by the project organisers, arts group The Space To Come, as a member of the Calthorpe, having studied history at university but drifted into the bland world of retail management.

“I have always loved history, especially history made by everyday people, and this has completely changed my life,” she enthused.
Black Mary’s Hole was part of a network of wells that sprang up along the banks of the River Fleet, which once meandered its way down from Hampstead Heath to the Thames via Kentish Town, King’s Cross and finally Farringdon. It was referred to as a “hole” because at the time there was a distinct dip in the land, Emanuela told me as we stepped out of the estate and into Margery Street, near to where building works were in progress.

Amid the noise and charmless new builds, it was hard to imagine that 400 years ago this was once a bucolic spot where sheep grazed on rolling meadows, and that later, in 1760, a public spa and gardens known as Bagnigge Wells opened close by as a fashionable meeting place.
With the help of an archaeologist from Historic England, Emanuela has been able to verify Black Mary’s Hole’s exact location.

Woolaston is said to have rented it from the new landowner Robert Harvey and, according to one source, customers for her chalybeate – iron-rich – waters included soldiers encamped in trenches during the English Civil War. Remains of the defences stretch beneath the boarded-up Children’s Society offices facing us due for demolition, giving Historic England the opportunity to excavate the site and review their position, so providing more context for the Black Mary story.

Towards the end of the 17th century, the well was enclosed in a conduit, then turned into a cesspit for Spring Place, a new street of houses.

By the time Spring House was built in the 1930s as part of the old Borough of Finsbury’s Margery Street Estate, it had gone the way of the River Fleet, “lost” under a load of bricks.

But the local folklore was reinforced by a fountain that once stood within a circular garden on the site of the well.

According to official records, there were an estimated 200 Africans living in England around 1600 (out of a population of around four million).

The slave trade had not got fully under way and they worked in a variety of occupations, several with a back story to their name. Woolaston is not one of them.

Beyond tantalising glimpses of her in Georgian and Victorian annals, which nevertheless contain competing facts, nothing is known about her origins or circumstances, save that she lived alone in a hut near the well.

“Unfortunately, finding 100 per cent proof that Mary existed is doubtful,” Emanuela acknowledged.

“At that time, a lot of poor people, especially women, did not enter the records; alternatively, the records might have disappeared over the centuries.

“On the other hand, why has the story of Black Mary been told for hundreds of years, and why are we still speaking about her today?”

As she continues to pore over the archives, Emanuela has now successfully registered the spot as a place of historical importance.

Her hope is that one day the well will be unearthed just as the mediaeval Clerken Well, which gave the area its name, was during building works exactly a century ago.