Visit
page one, two,
three, four,
five, six,
seven, eight,
nine, ten,
eleven
Finally
Brompton had its Florida Gardens just west of Gloucester Road,
on the south side of the present Cromwell road, a rural retreat
with clipped hedges, terraces, and shady walks, "well adapted
for gallantry and intrigue," where Mr. Hiem grew cherries,
strawberries, and flowers, supplied "fresh fruit every
hour in the day, ice creams, wine, cyder, tea and coffee,"
also "Berne Veckley, an elegant succedaneum for bread and
butter, and eat by the noblesse of Switzerland."
It
was among the delights of such places as these which we have
endeavoured to visit in the spirit that former generations of
Londoners took their modest pleasures and the life of a couple
of centuries of London displayed itself. As a conclusion to
our inquiry it may be of interest to speculate for a moment
on the causes of their decline. It would be easy to account
for the disappearance of the old London pleasure gardens by
pointing to the necessities in the matter of building sites
of a town which, since the first vogue of the alfresco entertainment,
has grown into a province - a province of bricks and mortar.
But
such a proposition would be merely plausible, because it is
certain that the London tea garden was moribund before cheap
corn created a vast population, and easy communications distributed
it in very unequal patches over a country where most interests
of beauty or enjoyment have been sacrificed to the exigencies
of an industrial commercialism. The decline of the London al
fresco, we believe, followed a change in the taste of the people
themselves, that taste itself an inevitable consequence of an
increasing population and an increasing prosperity. The simple
pleasures which satisfied the London of Charles the Second left
the London of George the Third unmoved, and the pleasure-seeking
citizen of the London of William the Fourth had a soul altogether
above the placid joys of the London of George the Third. If
you seek conviction on the point, read Pepys and Horace Walpole,
Harry Angelo, Pierce Egan and Captain Gronow, and compare the
different accounts of the pleasures of the town by each of those
recording angels.
It
is quite easy to trace this change of taste in the records of
any of the old places of amusement we have been considering.
There was always the increasing splendour of Vauxhall to be
reckoned with by the managers of them all, a sort of bull amongst
tea gardens, against which every frog as time went on found
it necessary to distend itself, and usually burst in the process.
And so we find the harmless dissipations of the teapot and muffin
gradually supplanted by fare of a headier character, and the
simple pleasures of the organ in the Long Room, the ballad-singer,
and the prim decorum of the promenade yielding to joys of a
fiercer kind and forgathering of a different character, a change
which led often to presentations by grand juries and contests
with magistrates, and a change invariably ominous of the end.
At Bagnigge Wells the Long Room became a concert-room, where
serio-comics gave" turns" much as they do at the Pavilion
to-day, and balloon ascents in the garden became necessary to
tickle the jaded palates of spectators surfeited by promenades
among clipped hedges and fountains.
For
years before White Conduit House had closed its gates, forgotten
and unregretted, it had run through the whole changes of a variety
entertainment and the amusements of a country fair. The fish-pond
had been drained and filled in to make room for a dancing saloon
dedicated to Apollo, the healthy joys of the early place, with
its cricket and white bread, had been exchanged for cheap fireworks,
tight ropes, and conjurers like Mr. Chabert, who swallowed arsenic,
oxalic acid, boiling oil and molten lead, and "entered
a large heated oven supported on four pillars and there cooked
a leg of lamb and a rump steak," which he obligingly divided
among the spectators.
Grand
galas there and elsewhere rendered necessary the attendance
of vigilant officers to prevent the entry of "persons in
dishabille." At the delightful and decorous Marylebone,
conjurers' entertainments and" Forges of Vulcan" in
pasteboard and red-fire took the place of Acis and Galatea and
"Where the bee sucks," and fetes champetres, "which
consisted of nothing more than a few tawdry festoons and extra
lamps," only moved more sophisticated audiences to resent
the extra charge of five shillings by breaking the lamps and
demolishing the scenery. The careers of the less famous gardens
of the south and the west were almost invariably concluded in
even less reputable circumstances, where the conduct of the
raffish audiences attracted by their debased pleasures brought
upon them the interference of the authorities.
There
were others, of course, which were merely absorbed by the advancing
wilderness of London, which planted gasometers in their pleasant
parterres and dried up their springs for ever. Of these the
elegists are topographers and antiquarians like Mr. Hone and
Mr. J. T. Smith, who witnessed and regretted their departed
glories. There is an almost touching description, for instance,
by Mr. Smith of his visit to Bermondsey Spa in the days of its
decline: Smith himself the only visitor, with his solemn banter
of the artist proprietor's pictures of savoy cabbages and knuckles
of veal, and the prima donna in silks and rouge singing her
solo according to contract and bowing her thanks for the applause
of the audience of one.
Hone
will tell you of the forlorn aspect of St. Chad's Wells when
its waters remained undrunk and its patrons had sought their
pleasure elsewhere; of the "scene which the unaccustomed
eye might take for the pleasure-ground of Giant Despair;"
of "trees standing as if not meant to vegetate, and nameless
weeds straggling weakly upon unweeded borders." Such, however,
were only the lamentations on the short period of the decline
of a phase of social life which had fulfilled a purpose and
had amused a large proportion of the inhabitants of London for
two hundred years. It is pleasant sometimes to think about the
London al fresco in its prime, and the delight and enthusiasm
of Londoners in the simple pleasures it afforded, an enthusiasm
which surely inspired the poet who sang the beauties of the
New River in those haunting lines:
"Farewell, sweet vale, how much thou dost excel
Arno or Andalusia."
It is pleasant at times, as we say, to call their forgotten
pleasures to mind, to trace their forgotten boundaries, and
to hope perhaps for their resurrection in a translated form.
We may remember, if we choose, that London has received and
is receiving, in exchange, parks and open spaces on a splendid
scale, generously, and even royally administered in every respect
except that of provision for its hunger and thirst. Mr. Pepys
we feel convinced, could he revisit his beloved town, would
not be enthusiastic about the buns and ginger-beer of, say,
Regent's Park, or think that he had made in those viands a good
exchange for Shere's Spanish olio at the Mulberry Garden. There
are signs, however, that the taste for the alfresco amongst
Londoners is not extinct; the success of such enterprises as
the concerts at the Imperial Institute, at Earl's Court and
elsewhere, the breakfasting in Battersea Park connected with
the fashionable cycling of a few years ago, even the much abused
Summer Club of Kensington Gardens, may be taken as signs of
the times.
