When you turn from Worcester Road (A449), Malvern Link, into Spring Lane, past the Focus store, the spout is about half of the way down on the opposite side, in a gap between the houses, at the back of a small grassy area.
Although the water still flows from a small bronze lions head at the back of a white tiled trough and surround, it is sadly now too polluted to drink. The spout is fed from a stream and tank by the Bowling Green in Victoria Park, but the spring stream originates from Earl Beauchamp’s Spout in Cowleigh Road, North Malvern.
Having drunk the spring water here every day, the present spout was built in the 19th century by Lord Sandys of Ombersley and was known as the Sandys’s Spring. The water was sometimes bottled and sold and for four years at the end of the century the site was leased to the Pure Water Beverage Company for commercial bottling. Local inhabitants were then denied access to the water and when the resulting legal dispute proved they had been using this spring supply for many years, the Company was made to allow public access and soon became bankrupt. Today this site belongs to the Madresfield Estate and the waters still feed the moat at Madresfield Court.
In the 1990’s the prompt actions of Bruce Osborne and Cora Weaver saved the site from enclosure into an adjacent garden. Supported by the present Lord Sandys, in 2005 Rose Garrard of the Malvern Spa Association created the design for the restoration of this neglected site as part of the Malvern Heritage Project. This proposal includes building two brick pillars at the entrance to the site to make it easier to find, with a York stone pathway leading to the spout itself. Work to be completed by 2008.
(RG 2007)