London's
Tea Gardens
An essay by William B Boulton
Visit
page one, two,
three, four,
five, six,
seven, eight, nine,
ten, eleven
Here,
by ordering a pint of wine, you could hear Mr. Blogg sing the
"Early Horn" or "Mad Tom" to a kettledrum
obligato; or gaze upon a "fine collection of large rattlesnakes,
one having nineteen rattles; a young crocodile imported from
Georgia, and a cat between the tyger and leopard, perfectly
tame." As time went on history was reflected in the entertainments
of the New Wells. Admiral Vernon captured Portobello again;
the Duke of Cumberland as "Courage" suppressed the
rebels of the" Forty-Five," and that surprising lady,
Hannah Snell, who served as a marine, by the name of James Grey,
at the siege of Pondicherry, and had been wounded more than
once, went through" her military exercises in her "
regimentals.
At
the Mulberry Gardens, again, in Clerkenwell, a place of generous
size, with a clear pond of water and a great mulberry tree with
seats to watch the skittle players, you could hear "honest
Jo Baker beat a trevally on his side drum the very same that
he beat before his Grace the Lord Duke of Marlborough after
the battle of Malplaquet." The Mulberry Gardens had their
John Bull proprietor with a genius for advertisement, who engaged
British musicians only, as holding that" the manly vigour
of our own native music is more suitable to the ear and heart
of a Briton than the effeminate softness of the Italian."
The
honest joys of the Mulberry Gardens in due season were blotted
out by the House of Detention, and now the present huge pile
of the quadrangle of the existing Clerkenwell School-board buildings
occupies the site of its once pleasant shades. At the Lord Cobham's
Head, off the present Farringdon Street, anglers might find
board and lodging on reasonable terms, a pleasant garden with
shady groves of trees, and "a fine canal stocked with very
good carp and tench fit to kill."
Farther
east, too, just off what is now Old Street, behind St. Luke's
Hospital, was Perilous or Parlous Pool, a place so named because
in Elizabethan times "divers youths by swimming therein
have been drowned." For a century and a half Perilous Pool
was a noted place for the joys of duck hunting, until in 1743
a man named Kemp changed its name to Peerless Pool and made
of it a resort for perspiring citizens for another century.
He embanked the pool, surrounded it with a grove of trees, provided
it with marble steps and a marble vestibule for dressing, with
a small library of light literature," made of it in fact
a fine open air swimming-bath of sixty yards by thirty, and
had his reward in a flourishing subscription and a body of patrons
who paid two shillings for a single bath.
Besides
the swimmers, he attracted the support of another class by constructing
a grand artificial canal stocked with carp, tench, and other
fish for cockney sportsmen. Baldwin Street occupies the site
of that canal to-day, and the name of the bathing place, which
remained open until the middle of the present century, still
lingers in that of "Peerless Row."
Roam,
indeed, where you will about those vast acres of brick and mortar
of the northern half of the great County of London, if you have
still heart for the enterprise, and you will find its most unlovely
holes and corners teeming with the memories of these well-nigh
forgotten places of pleasure. The present inferno of the Metropolitan
station at King's Cross is excavated from the once famous gardens
of St. Chad's Well, where a century and a half ago hundreds
drank its medicinal waters of a morning and its tea of an afternoon,
without the fear of typhoid before their eyes.
The
great surgeon Abernethy was often to be seen at St. Chad's Well,
and the local Dr. Blimber, "Mr. Measall, the master of
Gordon House Academy, Kentish Town, was used to march his young
gentlemen once a week to take the waters" and so save doctor's
bills. Stand amongst the railway arches and shunting grounds
at the back of St. Pancras Station and realise, if you can,
the pleasant gardens of Pancras Wells in the middle of hayfields,
with a view of the northern heights of Primrose Hill and Hampstead,
reckoned fine, the old church of St. Pancras on its borders,
and footpaths from Gray's Inn in full view of the gardens, whence
the proprietor could count his customers approaching and form
his estimate of their wants. Pancras Wells, too, had a competitor
at its gates in the Adam and Eve Tea Garden, where they kept
cows for the making of syllabubs, and men played trapball of
a summer evening and the children watched a little squadron
of toy frigates on the pond.
Eastward
again, in Penton ville, stood White Conduit House, in a space
bounded approximately to-day by the present Penton Street, Cloudesley
Road, Alton Street, and Denmark Road, another of the great tea
gardens in the north which vied with Bagnigge and Marylebone.
Here did generations of citizens partake of "hot loaves,
tea, coffee, and liquors in the greatest perfection, and milk
from cows which eat no grains, "enjoy the views from the
windows in the Long Room, from whence is the most copious prospects
and airy situation of any now in vogue," as the proprietor
was careful to point out.
White
Conduit House had its "pleasing walks prettily disposed,"
its" genteel boxes," with paintings in the Flemish
manner, its alcoves let into its clipped hedges, and its avenues
of shady trees, and was the delight of numbers of Londoners
for a century. It had also its own code of deportment. It was
reckoned the mode at White Conduit House to tread on the skirt
of the damsel whose acquaintance you wished to make, apologise
for your clumsiness, and suggest an adjournment to an arbour
for tea by way of amends.
Carry
on to page nine
