In 1791 this hospital wanted extensive repairs, which would need an outlay of about £800; and the trustees, not willing to incur this expense, built another on the site of the Inoculating Hospital at Islington; and thither, when it was finished, all the patients were removed from Cold Bath Fields. But their new home was wanted for the Great Northern Railway, and another place was built, and still is, on Highgate Hill. The old building in Cold Bath Fields was first of all used as a distillery, and afterwards subdivided.
Quoting again from Noorthouck: "Eastward from the Small Pox Hospital, on the south side of the Spawfield, is an humble imitation of the Pantheon in Oxford Road; calculated for the amusement of a suitable class of company; here apprentices, journeymen, and clerks dressed to ridiculous extremes, entertain their ladies on Sundays; and to the utmost of their power, if not beyond their proper power, affect the dissipated manners of their superiors. Bagnigge Wells and the White Conduit House, two other receptacles of the same kind, with gardens laid out in miniature taste, are to be found within the compass of two or three fields, together with Sadler's Wells, a small theatre for the summer exhibition of tumbling, rope-dancing, and other drolls, in vulgar stile. The tendency of these cheap, enticing places of pleasure just at the skirts of this vast town is too obvious to need further explanation; they swarm with loose women, and with boys, whose morals are thus depraved, and their constitution ruined, before they arrive at manhood; indeed, the licentious resort to the tea-drinking gardens was carried to such excess every night, that the magistrates lately thought proper to suppress the organs in their public rooms."
There is no doubt but that some of these tea-gardens needed reform; so much so, that the grand jury of Middlesex, in May, 1744, made a presentment of several places which, in their opinion, were not conducive to the public morality; and these were two gaming-houses near Covent Garden, kept by the ladies Mordington and Castle; _Sadler's Wells near the New River head_, the New Wells in Goodman's Fields, the New Wells near the London Spaw in Clerkenwell; and a place called Hallam's Theatre in Mayfair.