Leftwich, a pioneering ice-merchant and
confectioner, to store high quality ice
imported from Norway and supply it to the
Georgian elite of London. By that time it was
extremely fashionable to serve all manner of
frozen delights at lavish banquets. Marie-
Antoine Carême, the world’s first celebrity
chef, included iced and chilled dishes among
the 32 desserts served at a feast celebrating
the visit of Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia
(later Tsar Nicholas I) to George IV at
Brighton Pavilion in 1817.
David Sorapure, head of standing
buildings at Museum of London
Archaeology (MOLA), said: “Standing
inside the cavernous and beautifully
constructed icehouse at Regent’s Crescent, it
is fascinating to think that it would once have
been filled with tonnes of blocks of ice that
had travelled across the North Sea and along
the Regent’s Canal to get there. The structure
demonstrates the extraordinary lengths gone
to at this time to serve up luxury fashionable
frozen treats and furnish food traders and
retailers with ice.”
The history of icehouses dates back a lot
further than the late 18th century – millennia,
in fact: a cuneiform tablet from about
1780BC records the construction of an ice
house by Zimri-Lim, a Mesopotamian king;
Chinese archaeologists have found remains
of ice pits from the 7th century BC; and the
Romans stored mountain-harvested snow in
straw-covered pits and sold it in “snow shops”
in the 3rd century AD. The earliest recorded
purpose-built “snow well” in England dates
from 1619. Built in Greenwich Park for
James 1, it was apparently designed as an
industrial-scale chiller for the king’s wine. It
is likely, however, that the Roman occupation
led to the first such structures being built in
Britain, although no traces remain.
Most of the icehouses – also known as
ice (or snow) wells, ice pits or ice mounds- that survive in the British Isles date from
the 18th and 19th centuries; it is estimated
that about 3,000 were built in Britain, most
of them between 1750 and 1875. As wealthy
travellers returned from their grand tours,
bringing tales of the icehouses of Europe –
they were particularly prevalent in Italy, the
country that popularised iced desserts – it
became fashionable for them to improve their
country estate in this way. By the mid-19th
century almost every large country house in
Britain probably had some kind of ice well to