History

Spring Common has a long and interesting history which dates back to pre 1750. The Common has always been a hive of activity with families walking, children playing and people playing golf. Sheep and pigs were kept here, and the ridge and furrow appearance of the grassland also shows that Spring Common has been ploughed in the past with an ox-drawn plough. Many of the paths you can see today at the Common are the same paths people used hundreds of years ago.

Until 1938 there was a nine-hole golf course on Spring Common. Big gates at the end of a track (which is now Ambury Road) marked the entrance and two groundsmen kept the golf course in very good condition. One Huntingdon resident remembers it looking like a bowling green.

The Spring

It is the natural spring running through the middle of the site which gives the Common its name. It has always been an important feature on Spring Common and, at one time, there was a cast iron front in the shape of a lion’s head where the water came out of the pipe. A cup hanging next to it on a chain was for people to drink from.

Local people collected the spring water in bottles to drink and to wash their hair because it was much cleaner than tap water. They also picked watercress for their cooking. One lady, known as ‘Mrs Huntingdon’ because she lived in Huntingdon all of her life, remembers coming to Spring Common as a child. Walking with her family she would run straight to the spring as soon as they got to the Common. She had tea parties here with her friends and washed their doll's dresses in the spring water before hanging them out to dry on the railings around the spring head.

Spring House

Spring House on Spring Common is the big white house near Huntingdon Leisure Centre swimming pool. It was once a Pest House (an isolation hospital) where patients with cholera and smallpox were taken. The upstairs rooms were divided up into compartments to try and keep the diseases from spreading. Today the house is a residential property.