London's
Tea Gardens
An essay by William B Boulton
Visit
page two, three,
four, five,
six, seven,
eight, nine,
ten, eleven
LONDON
has always shown a disposition to make the best of a short
summer and a fickle climate. You may turn to the letters,
or diaries, or news-sheets of any period since that of the
Stuarts, and find continuous record of a public ever ready
to support an entertainment which included among its attractions
the consumption of victuals in the open air. The peg upon
which this attraction was hung has never been a matter of
great moment. Highly-born people flocked to Spring Gardens
in the days of Charles the First without intending to play
bowls. The Mulberry Garden of the same times was only an
attractive title for an open-air restaurant. Music and the
promenade were the excuses for eating suppers at Vauxhall.
The waters of Bagnigge Wells were little drunk by the humbler
people who flocked there, except in the form of tea. And
coming to more recent times, the fireworks and the twenty
thousand additional lamps of the Vauxhall and Cremorne of
the first half of the [twentieth] century had less to do
with the success of those famous institutions than the bad
food and worse liquor, which Londoners are ever ready to
pay for at exorbitant rates if only served out of doors.
There
is, in fact, an unbroken tradition of al fresco entertainment
in London over a period of two centuries at least. From
the days of Charles the First there is continuous record
of junketings in one part of the town or another. Let us
turn to the accounts of these old merrymakings, scattered
in newspapers and magazines; preserved in advertisements,
often of an almost touching quaintness; in letters and memoirs,
and chance phrases of the diaries of generations long since
asleep; in the records also, it must be confessed, of police
courts and hostile licensing authorities. The draughtsmen
and the engravers of a century were often busy with the
doings at these places, and will give us much help in repeopling
their forgotten shades and arbours, and in recalling a phase
of social life which provided one of the chief relaxations
of numbers of our citizen ancestors.
We
know little or nothing of the al fresco entertain-ment in
London before the days of Charles the First, and its vogue
may be said to have come to an end with the extinction of
Cremorne within the memory of those not yet past middle
age: just as the need of open air relaxation in London was
growing sorest, as it would seem. That, as we say, gives
a period of over two centuries during which the alfresco
entertainment flourished, a space of time in which London
and the needs of its inhabitants have been totally transformed.
It is important to remember this fact, and to think of the
London of all but the present century as a great centre
of population indeed, but compared with its present huge
bulk, as a relatively small town. Take any old map, for
example, of the middle years of the period we have marked
out as that of the London al fresco, 1750 to 1760, the palmy
days of its vogue, and trace the boundaries of London upon
it.
When
George the Third came to the throne, London, including Westminster,
was bounded by Oxford Street and Holborn on the north, by
the river on the south, by the outer boundary of the city
on the east, and by Hyde Park, Arlington Street, and St.
James' Street on the west. All the rest of modern London
was suburban merely, or open and pleasant country interspersed
with wild heaths, and dotted with ancient villages. That
country stretched out fingers and touched the city wall
itself at Finsbury and the Tower. The fashionable dwellers
in the Savoy and t he lawyers of the Temple looked across
the river to t he hills of Surrey and Kent; and there is
room for reflection in the fact that the Zoological Gardens,
which were not opened till 1828, had for years to be fenced
against the hares and rabbits which nibbled the hark off
their shrubs and dug up their bulbs.
It
was in and about a town of such dimensions then, and with
such surroundings, that the al fresco entertainment took
origin and developed, a town thickly populated and stuffy,
it is true, the bulk of whose inhabitants lived and died
within the limits of their own streets, but still a town
whose innermost slum was within easy walk of a delightful
country, and whose suburbs were without the distressing
squalor, and vulgarity of architecture which make for some
of us the oldest part of London to-day its most cheerful
part.
It
was the citizens of such a town, sober merchants and shopkeepers,
apprentices, sempstresses, and artisans who worked continuously,
but leisurely and without much stress, during the week and
spread themselves over an area of many square miles on Sundays,
who formed the chief patrons of the al fresco entertainment.
The lawyers and military men who filled the chief of the
few recognised professions of the last century, supplied
their quota of course, and the aristocracy came to most
of the alfresco entertainments at one time or another, but
merely as incidental visitors.
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