Sadler's Wells Theatre

Sadler's Wells began as a seventeenth-century spa built over a forgotten monastic spring. A local surveyor named Richard Sadler discovered the iron-rich water while digging for gravel in his garden in sixteen eighty-three and promptly marketed it as a cure for everything from jaundice to virgin's fever. To keep his wealthy, health-seeking visitors amused while they drank the waters, he opened a music house on the property that featured jugglers, rope dancers, and musicians.