The Gourmet's Guide to London

by Lieut.-Col. Newnham-Davis

"Drink tea on summer afternoons
At Bagginnage Wells with china and gilt spoons."

Sadler's Wells was a tea-garden with a music-room before Rosoman pulled down the building to put up a theatre. White Conduit House used to take fifty pounds on a Sunday afternoon for sixpenny tea tickets, and its white bread was considered a great luxury. The bowling alleys of Marylebone Gardens were famous; and there were tea-gardens and a bowling-green at the Yorkshire Stingo, opposite Lisson Grove. Kilburn Wells advertised that its gardens and great room were adapted to the use of "the politest companies," and at Jenny's Whim there was a great garden, in different parts of which were recesses, and in a large piece of water facing the tea alcoves big fish and mermaids showed themselves above the surface. The Apollo Gardens in the Westminster Road, and Cuper's Gardens opposite Somerset House, were amongst these old places of amusement, most of which are now only names. There is, however, at the present time a tavern with tea-gardens of the old-fashioned kind quite close to London, which, besides its picturesqueness, has other recommendations which give it a right to inclusion in a "Gourmet's Guide."

The Bull and Bush at North End, Hampstead, which is the tavern to which I refer, has no very long history behind it. It was a farmhouse when Jack Straw's Castle and the Spaniards were inns with tea-gardens attached, the gardens of the latter house being laid out in the formal Dutch style, which became fashionable after the Revolution. Tradition has it that the Bull and Bush was at one time Hogarth's house, and Mr Austin Dobson, who garnered information from all quarters into his book on Hogarth, admits the claim of the house to this distinction, but thinks that it was a house to which Hogarth went for "a visit." There are long periods in Hogarth's life, before his father-in-law, Sir John Thornhill, forgave him for his elopement with his daughter and took the young pair to live with him in the family house in Covent Garden, of which no record has been kept, and I should like to imagine that the blue-eyed, bold young artist carried away the girl he loved to the farmhouse on the breezy common to spend their honeymoon there, and that he and she together planted the ring of fir-trees in the garden which are still called "Hogarth's firs." The house ceased to be a farm, and became a place of refreshment in later days, and W. H. Pyne (Ephraim Hardcastle), in his collection of essays, "Wine and Walnuts," tells of an imaginary excursion made to the Bull and Bush by a party which included Sir Joshua Reynolds, Gainsborough, Sterne and Garrick, and puts in Gainsborough's mouth praise of the creamy milk and the fine Dutch damask to be found at the little inn.

And the great Victorian painters and writers followed the example of their predecessors in going on jaunts to the Bull and Bush, for when Harry Humphries, a great favourite with all men of the pen and brush, was the host of the house, Dickens used to frequent it, and George Augustus Sala, Clement Scott and E. L. Blanchard, and those two great Punch artists, George du Maurier and Charles Keene, and many more of a like kidney.

There is no difficulty in finding the old inn to-day, for at the flagstaff and the pond which mark the western end of the long, bare backbone of the common (from which London can be seen below to the south in its veil of smoke, and on clear days the Surrey hills beyond, while to the north are the hills and fields of the great landscape that stretches from Harrow round to Hainault) the North End road plunges down, with common land, furze and undergrowth and big trees and grassy knolls to one side, and on the other old oaken park palings and big trees.

Just where the road first dips a blind fiddler stands, and all day long he plays one air, and that air is Kate Carney's song, "Down by the old Bull and Bush." The inn itself is almost in the shadow of a big mansion, Pitt House it is called, to which the great Lord Chatham retired when he suffered from his nerve storms, refused to see any of his fellow-ministers and could not even bear the presence of a servant, his food being passed in to him through a panel in the door. In the road to one side of the inn a peripatetic photographer generally establishes his studio. The Bull and Bush is a white-faced building with a slated roof, standing a little back from the highway, and behind it and on both sides of it are many trees. It is an old house with a big window to its large room on the first floor and nice old-fashioned bow-windows with small panes to the two bar-rooms on the ground floor. One of these bar-rooms is a real snuggery adorned with sketches by some of the artists who have made themselves at home in the inn. Various large boards set forth that lunches, dinners and teas are obtainable; that the name of the host is Mr Fred Vinall; that there are private dining-rooms, a coffee-room and billiards; and that a two-shilling ordinary is ready every Sunday from two to three o'clock. This "ordinary," which I believe is a very noble feast for the money charged, is held in the big room upstairs.

The gardens are at the back of the inn, and though summer is the real time to enjoy the attractions of the arbours at the Bull and Bush, it is quite pleasant when the new leaves are covering, in the spring, the trees with the lightest green, or on a still, autumn day when the tints around the lawn are all russet and copper, to drink tea on the little terrace behind the house in the centre of which is a great stone vase for flowers and at which little tables with red and white and yellow and white covers are set for the tea-drinkers. The tea is excellent, and though the slices of bread and butter are thick they are of fine bread and the freshest of butter. When spring merges into summer the green bowling lawn, with turf as thick and level as a carpet, also has its quota of cane chairs and little tables, and the rustic arbours all around it, on the roofs of which are boxes of flowers, are also all occupied. The waiters are kept busy carrying cakes and bread and butter and tea and stronger beverages all through a summer day to the little family parties who take their ease in the garden of their inn.

As a neighbour to the bowling-green is the platform which serves as an out-of-door dancing floor when Cinderellas are held on summer evenings, and as the flooring on which the chairs are put when a concert is given on a little stage which is to one side of this planked space. In the middle of this dancing and theatre floor is the circle of firs which bears Hogarth's name. There are electric lights on the terrace and amidst the trees and round the lawn and dancing floor. Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays are the days on which the concerts or the dances are generally held in summer.

Mr Fred Vinall, short in stature, genial in manner, with close-clipped grey beard and moustache, has just as distinguished friends amongst players and artists and men of the pen as any of his predecessors. He has revived the old pleasures of the tea-gardens of a hundred years ago, and to see the gardens of the Bull and Bush on a warm summer evening is to learn that Londoners can take their evening pleasures out of doors with cheerful mirth and with sobriety as well.

And now at last I come to the reason why the Bull and Bush should be recommended to gourmets not only as a place where Londoners can be seen amusing themselves sanely, but as a place of excellent eating. Mrs Vinall, wife of the host of the old inn, Belgian by birth, has all the talent of a Cordon Bleu, and if warning is telegraphed or written to the inn of the coming of a party of gourmets, a lunch or a dinner, admirably cooked under Mrs Vinall's supervision, will be ready for the gastronomers, the table set in the open air, and they will, I am sure, eating in the invigorating air of Hampstead Heath food admirably cooked, thank me for having told them of a lunching and dining place clear of the London smoke.