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