COPENHAGEN HOUSE
Copenhagen House stood alone on an eminence in the fields, on the right-hand side of Maiden Lane, the old way leading from Battle Bridge to Highgate, being about midway between those places.[159]
It is known to have been a house of public entertainment in 1725[160] and was probably one much earlier, seeing that the oldest part of the building was in the style of the seventeenth century. “Coopen-hagen” is marked in a map of 1695.[161]
There are various accounts of the origin of the the name. A Danish Prince or a Danish Ambassador is said to have resided in the house during the Great Plague. Or, again, an enterprising Dane is said to have built the inn for the accommodation of his countrymen who had come to London in the train of the King of Denmark on his visit to James I. in 1606.[162] In the early part of the eighteenth century Copenhagen House is not often mentioned, though the curious Highbury Society[163] used to assemble here previous to the year 1740, when it began to meet at Highbury.
South East View of Copenhagen House.
London: Printed for R. Sayer and J. Bennett, Map and Printsellers, No. 53 Fleet Street, as the Act directs, 20th March, 1783
In 1780 a brutal robbery[164] of which the landlady, Mrs. Harrington, was the victim, attracted attention to the place. A subscription was opened for her benefit, and visitors came in such numbers that Mr. Leader, the owner of the House, pulled down the old wooden building attached to its western end, and built in its stead a long room for tea-drinking parties, with a large parlour below for drinking and smoking. There were gardens attached, with the usual accommodation for skittles and Dutch-pin playing.
Under Mrs. Harrington’s management, Copenhagen House first became celebrated for its Fives Courts. A young Shropshire woman (afterwards Mrs. Tomes) who assisted Mrs. Harrington, gave Hone an interesting little account of the introduction of the game:—“I made the first fives ball (she said) that was ever thrown up against Copenhagen House. One Hickman, a butcher at Highgate, a countryman of mine, used the house, and seeing me ‘country,’ we talked about our country sports, and amongst the rest, fives: I told him we’d have a game some day. I laid down the stone in the ground myself, and against he came again, made a ball. I struck the ball the first blow, and he gave it the second, and so we played; and as there was company they liked the sport, and it got talked of. This was the beginning of the fives-play, which has since become so famous at Copenhagen House.”
John Cavanagh (d. 1819), the famous Irish fives player, had many matches at Copenhagen House for wagers and dinners. The wall against which the combatants played was (says Hone) the same that supported the kitchen chimney, and when the wall resounded louder than usual, the cook exclaimed, “Those are the Irishman’s balls,” and the joints trembled on the spit. Hazlitt, in a pleasant memoir of Cavanagh,[165] says that he had no equal in the game or second. He had no affectation in his playing. He was the best up-hill player in the world, and never gave away a game through laziness or conceit. His “service” was tremendous, but a peculiarity of his play was that he never volleyed, though if the ball rose but an inch from the ground he never missed it. “His eye,” adds Hazlitt, “was certain, his hand fatal, his presence of mind complete.”
In 1795 the house was kept by Robert Orchard, notorious for his connexion with the London Corresponding Society, which at that time held tumultuous meetings in the adjoining Copenhagen Fields. Orchard was succeeded by a man named Tooth, who gained custom by encouraging brutal sports. At this time, “on a Sunday morning, the fives ground was filled by bull-dogs and ruffians, who lounged and drank to intoxication: so many as fifty or sixty bull-dogs have been seen tied up to the benches at once, while their masters boozed and made match after match, and went out and fought their dogs before the house, amid the uproar of idlers attracted to the ‘bad eminence’ by its infamy.”
There was also a common field, east of the house, wherein bulls were baited, and this was called the bull-field. At last the magistrates interfered, and in 1816 Tooth lost his license. The next landlord, a Mr. Bath, conducted the house respectably, and refused admittance to the bull-dogs. The bull-field was afterwards used for the harmless purpose of cow-keeping.
From about this period (1816–1830) Copenhagen House was a favourite Sunday tea-garden with the middle-classes[166] who flocked there, especially in the summer-time during the hay harvest in the fields around.[167] Although the builders were making their way up to Copenhagen House from London on the south, it still commanded an extensive view of the metropolis and western suburbs, with the heights of Hampstead and Highgate, “and the rich intervening meadows.” In 1841[168] the tavern and tea-gardens were still in existence, and the space between them and Highgate was still open fields. Attached to the house at that time was a well known cricket ground.[169]
About 1852 the Corporation of London purchased Copenhagen House with its grounds and adjacent fields to the extent of about seventy-five acres, and began to build there the present Metropolitan Cattle Market, between the York and Caledonian Roads, which was opened in 1855. The old tavern (pulled down in 1853[170]) and tea-gardens were thus swept away, and their site is approximately marked by the Great Clock Tower in the market.[171]
[Hone’s Every Day Book, i. 858, ff.; Nelson’s Islington; Lewis’s Islington; Larwood and Hotten, Signboards, 435, 436; Walford, ii. 275, 276, 283; v. 374; Tomlins’s Perambulation of Islington, 204, 205.]
VIEWS.
1. Copenhagen House, Islington, as it appeared in 1737, sepia drawing by Bernard Lens. Crace, Cat. p. 604, No. 191.
2. South-east view of Copenhagen House, printed for R. Sayer and J. Bennett, 20 March, 1783 (W. Coll.); the woodcut in Lewis’s Islington, p. 283, is derived from this.
3. Copenhagen House, Islington. J. Swaine del. 1793; J. Swaine, sculp. 1854. Woodcut (W. Coll.).
4. There are several views of Copenhagen House in the nineteenth century, see e.g. Hone’s Every Day Book, i. 858; Cromwell’s Islington, p. 204; Crace, Cat. p. 605, Nos. 194, 196 (views of 1853).
5. “The Grand Meeting of the Metropolitan Trades’ Unions in the Copenhagen Fields on Monday, April 21, 1834.” Coloured engraving by Geo. Dorrington (W. Coll.). This shows Copenhagen House and an enormous concourse in the fields.