FINCH’S GROTTO GARDENS
Finch’s Grotto Gardens situated on the western side of St. George’s Street, Southwark, near St. George’s Fields,[265] derived their name from Thomas Finch, a Herald Painter, who, having inherited from a relation a house and garden, opened both for the entertainment of the public in the spring of 1760. The garden possessed some lofty trees, and was planted with evergreens and shrubs. In the centre was a medicinal spring over which Finch constructed a grotto, wherein a fountain played over artificial embankments and formed “a natural and beautiful cascade.” The spring enjoyed some local celebrity, and was recommended to his patients by a doctor named Townshend, who resided in the Haymarket and afterwards in St. George’s Fields. In our own time Dr. Rendle has described the water as “merely the filtered soakage of a supersaturated soil,” which could be obtained almost anywhere in Southwark.
A subscription ticket of a guinea entitled the holder to such benefits, as Finch’s spring conferred and gave admission to the evening entertainments that were introduced from about 1764. The ordinary admission was a shilling, raised on special nights to two shillings. The gardens were open on Sunday when sixpence was charged, though the visitor was entitled for his money to tea, half a pint of wine, cakes, jelly or cyder.
ADMISSION TICKET, FINCH’S GROTTO.
An orchestra containing an organ by Pike, of Bloomsbury, stood in the garden, and there was another orchestra attached to a large octagonal music-room decorated with paintings and festoons of flowers. This Octagon Room was used for occasional balls and for the promenade and concert on wet evenings.
The place appears to have been respectably conducted, but there is little evidence that it was ever a modish resort, in spite of the assertion of the country-bred Mrs. Hardcastle[266] that no one could “have a manner that has never seen the Pantheon, the Grotto Gardens, the Borough and such places where the nobility chiefly resort.”[267]
The vocal and instrumental concerts which took place every evening in the season (May-September) were of a creditable though not very ambitious character. About fifteen hundred persons are said to have been present on some of the Freemasons’ nights and on the benefit nights of the performers.
Mrs. Baddely.
Numerous singers and instrumentalists were engaged,[268] of whom the best known are Robert Hudson the organist, Miss Snow and Thomas Lowe. Sophia Snow, the daughter of Valentine Snow, sergeant trumpeter to the King, married Robert Baddeley the comedian, who introduced her to the stage at Drury Lane in 1765. As Mrs. Baddeley, she became notorious for her beauty and intrigues. She had some powers as an actress in genteel comedy and her melodious voice made her popular at Ranelagh (from 1770) and Vauxhall.
Lowe was the well-known tenor singer of Vauxhall and lessee of Marylebone Gardens from 1763 to 1768. Becoming bankrupt in 1768, he was glad to accept engagements at the humbler Finch’s Grotto. He was announced to sing in August 1769, and appeared under the designation of Brother Lowe at one of the Freemasons’ Concerts at the Grotto.
Finch died on October 23, 1770, and his successor, a Mr. Williams, advertised the place as Williams’s Grotto Gardens. The concerts were continued and among the musical entertainments were Bates’s “The Gamester” (1771) and Barnshaw’s “Linco’s Travels.”[269]
The programmes of entertainments under Finch and Williams included concertos on the organ, pieces for horns and clarionets, Handel’s Coronation Anthem, an Ode to Summer with music by Brewster, and songs, such as “Thro’ the Wood, Laddie”; “Water parted from the Sea”; “Oh what a charming thing is a Battle”; “British Wives”; “O’er Mountains and Moorlands”; “Cupid’s Recruiting Sergeant” (with drum and fife accompaniment); “Swift Wing’d Vengeance,” from Bates’s Pharnaces; “Shepherds cease your soft complainings;” a satirical song on Garrick’s Stratford Jubilee; “Hark, hark, the joy inspiring horn”; “The Season of Love,” sung by Mr. Dearle, (1765):—
Bright Sol is return’d and the Winter is o’er,
O come then, Philander, with Sylvia away.[270]
Fireworks were occasionally displayed, and when a ball was given, the place was illuminated at a cost of about five pounds, and horns and clarionets played till twelve in the garden. In 1771 and 1772 a grand transparent painting forty feet wide and thirty high, with illuminations, was displayed. Over the centre arch of this masterpiece was a medallion of Neptune supported by Tritons: on each side were two fountains “with serpents jetting water, representing different coloured crystal.” On one wing was Neptune drawn by sea-horses; on the other, Venus rising from the sea; and the back arches showed a distant prospect of the sea. In June 1771 a representation was given “of the famous Fall of Water call’d Pystill Rhiader near the seat of Sir Watkin Williams Wynne, Bart., in Denbighshire.”
Apparently these entertainments failed to pay the proprietor and in 1773 (?) he pulled down the grotto over the spring and rooted up the shrubs to form a skittle ground in connection with the tavern, which still continued to be carried on.
About 1777 the “messuages and lands known as the Grotto Gardens” were purchased for the parish of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, part of the ground being used for the erection of a workhouse and part for a Burial Ground (consecrated in 1780). In 1799 the Workhouse was sold to Mr. John Harris, hat manufacturer, and M.P. for Southwark in 1830, who used it as his manufactory and residence. Some relics of the old Grotto were to be found many years after the closing of the Gardens, notably the Octagon Room, which was converted into a mill and at one time used as the armoury of the Southwark Volunteers.
In 1824 “a very large and old mulberry tree” was standing at the end of a long range of wooden tea-rooms formerly belonging to the gardens and converted into inferior cottages. Behind the cottages was a water-course derived from Loman’s Pond dividing them from a field, once part of the gardens, though only occupied at that time by dust and rubbish.
The tavern attached to the Gardens continued to be carried on under the sign of the Grotto till 28 May, 1795, when it was destroyed by fire. The new tavern erected in its place bore the sign of The Goldsmith’s Arms, and afterwards of the “Old Grotto new reviv’d.”
In the front of this house was inserted a stone bearing the inscription:—
Here Herbs did grow
And Flowers sweet,
But now ’tis call’d
Saint George’s Street.[271]
This building was removed for the formation of the present Southwark Bridge Road in 1825 and a public house named The Goldsmith’s Arms—still standing—was built on the western side of the new road, more upon the site of the old Grotto Gardens. The main site of the gardens is now occupied by the large red-brick building, which forms the headquarters of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade.
[Wilkinson’s Londina Illustrata, vol. ii., “Finch’s Grotto Gardens”; Manning and Bray’s Surrey, iii. 591; Brayley and Mantell’s Surrey, v. 371; Rendle and Norman’s Inns of Old Southwark, 360–364; Walford, vi. 64; newspaper cuttings, W. Coll.]
VIEWS.
The only view is one of the second tavern published in Wilkinson’s Londina Illustrata, 1825:—
“South-east view of the Grotto, now the Goldsmith’s Arms in the Parish of St. George’s, Southwark.” This shows the inscription: “Here Herbs did grow.”