[Thomas Brown’s Amusements Serious and Comical, Part ii. “The Thames”; Wheatley’s London Past and Present, “Folly”; E. Hatton’s New View of London, 1708, ii. 785; Wilkinson’s Londina, vol. i. No. 88; also vol. ii. “Cuper’s Gardens”; Walford, iii. 290; Larwood and Hotten, History of Signboards, 509; manuscript notes, &c. in “Public Gardens” collection in Guildhall Library, London.]
VIEWS.
1. A view of Whitehall from the water, showing the Folly Musick House on the Thames. Engraved in Wilkinson’s Londina Illustrata, vol. i. No. 88, from a drawing taken about the time of James II. “in the possession of Thomas Griffiths, Esq.”
2. The Southern Front of Somerset House with its extensive Gardens, &c., showing the Folly. A drawing by L. Knyff, about 1720, engraved by Sawyer Junior, and published (1808) in J. T. Smith’s sixty additional plates to his Antiquities of Westminster. This is copied, with a short account of the Folly, in E. W. Brayley’s Londiniana (1829), vol. iii. 130, 300. It is substantially the same as the view on a larger scale engraved by Kip in Strype’s Stow, 1720, ii. bk. 4, p. 105. Cp. also an engraving (W. Coll.) “Somerset House, La Maison de Somerset.” L. Knyff del. I. Kip sc. undated, before 1720?
BELVEDERE HOUSE AND GARDENS, LAMBETH
Belvedere House and Gardens were near Cuper’s Gardens,[289] but a little higher up the river (south side). They were opposite York Buildings in the Strand, and extended from the present Belvedere Road (then called Narrow Wall) to the water’s edge. Some modern writers speak of the gardens as a place of public entertainment in the reign of Queen Anne, but there seems no evidence of this, and in 1719 or 1720 the premises were in the possession of a Mr. English (or England), who at that time sold them to the Theobald family. In 1757, Belvedere House was the private residence of Mr. James Theobald.
In the early part of 1781, “the house called Belvedere” was taken by one Charles Bascom, who opened it as an inn, with the added attractions of “pleasant gardens and variety of fish-ponds.” He professed in his advertisements, to accommodate his guests with choice wines and with eating of every kind in season, after the best manner, especially with “the choicest river-fish which they may have the delight to see taken.”
The gardens could not have been open later than 1785, for in that year part of the ground was turned into the Belvedere (timber) Wharf, and part was occupied by the machinery of the Lambeth water-works.
[Advertisement in The Freethinker for April 28, 1781, quoted in Wilkinson’s Londina, vol. ii. “Cuper’s Gardens,” notes, and in Nichols’s Lambeth, Nichols’s Bibl. Top. Brit. ii. Appendix, 158; map in Strype’s Stow (1720), vol. ii. book 6, p. 83, Appendix; Manning and Bray, Surrey, iii. 467; Brayley and Mantell, Surrey, iii. 393; Howard’s Historical Anecdotes of some of the Howard Family, 106; Wheatley’s London P. and P. s.v. “Belvedere Road.”]