THE CASTLE INN AND TEA-GARDENS, COLEBROOKE ROW, ISLINGTON
The Castle Inn is mentioned in 1754 as a Sunday resort of the London “cit.,” who frequented it in the evening to smoke his pipe and obtain the light refreshment of cyder and heart-cakes. The house must have stood nearly alone till 1768, when the oldest portion of the street called Colebrooke Row was built. The Castle Inn, with its tea gardens, was then the last house but one at the northern end of the Row.[156] A pleasant nursery garden occupied, till about 1822, six acres of the ground in the rear of Colebrooke Row.
The inn and tea gardens were still in existence about 1772, but the house had ceased to be a place of public entertainment at the time when Nelson published his Islington, i.e. 1811.
[The Connoisseur, No. 26 (1754); Nelson’s Islington (1811), p. 385; Lewis’s Islington (1842), pp. 351, 352.]