A brick built entrance to an underground water tunnel system in Greenwich Park, London.

Reference:
29824i
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Credit

A brick built entrance to an underground water tunnel system in Greenwich Park, London. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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About this work

Also known as

Previous title, replaced May 2025: A ruined gateway, with weeds growing out of the top of the piers, labelled in a blind central window: "Greenwich Hospital". Pen drawing with wash.

Description

The drawing shows an early 18th-century water conduit head in Greenwich Park, part of the supply system for Greenwich Hospital (the Royal Hospital for Seamen, now Old Royal Naval College). The brick building has a central wooden door, above which is a stone slab inscribed "Greenwich Hospital".

Physical description

1 drawing : pen and ink, with grey wash, on wove paper ; image 17.1 x 12.8 cm

Lettering

Greenwich ; Hospital

Notes

The conduit is likely to be one on the western or Croom's Hill side of Greenwich Park, near the surviving 18th- century Standard Reservoir conduit house. All but one, at the base of One Tree Hill, were demolished before 1900. The stone slab inscribed 'GREENWICH HOSPITAL' may be the one reused as the base for the western side of the Chesterfield Gate in the south-west corner of the park.
The location was previously identified as possibly being: "the southern gateway to Trinity Hospital, Greenwich. At present (1996) there is a similar doorway, perhaps rebuilt in the twentieth century, with a lintel stone incribed with the date 1792"
The Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, holds a drawing by Samuel Hieronymus Grimm of a similar conduit head in Greenwich Park.

Reference

Wellcome Collection 29824i

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