The London pleasure gardens of the eighteenth century

by Warwick William Wroth; Arthur Edgar Wroth

The Spa Fields Pantheon stood on the south side of the present Exmouth Street, and occupied the site of the Ducking Pond House,[26] a wayside inn, with a pond in the rear used for the sport of duck-hunting.

The Ducking Pond premises having been acquired by Rosoman of Sadler’s Wells, were by him sub-let to William Craven, a publican, who, at a cost of £6,000, laid out a garden and erected on the site of the old inn a great tea-house called the Pantheon, or sometimes the Little Pantheon, when it was necessary to distinguish it from “the stately Pantheon” in Oxford Street, built in 1770–1771, and first opened in January 1772.[27]

The Spa Fields Pantheon was opened to the public early in 1770, and consisted of a large Rotunda, with two galleries running round the whole of the interior, and a large stove in the centre.

The place was principally resorted to by apprentices and small tradesmen, and on the afternoon and evening of Sunday, the day when it was chiefly frequented, hundreds of gaily-dressed people were to be found in the Rotunda, listening to the organ,[28] and regaling themselves with tea, coffee and negus, or with supplies of punch and red port. A nearer examination of this crowded assembly showed that it consisted of journeymen tailors, hairdressers, milliners and servant maids, whose behaviour, though boisterous, may have been sufficiently harmless.

The proprietor endeavoured to secure the strict maintenance of order by selling nothing after ten o’clock in the evening. But his efforts, it would seem, were not entirely successful. “Speculator,” a correspondent of the St. James’s Chronicle, who visited the place in May 1772, “after coming from church,” looked down from his vantage-ground in one of the galleries upon what he describes as a dissipated scene. To his observation the ladies constituted by far the greater part of the assembly, and he was shocked more than once by the request, “Pray, Sir, will you treat me with a dish of tea?”

A tavern with tea-rooms for more select parties stood on the east of the Rotunda. Behind the buildings was a pretty garden, with walks, shrubs and fruit trees. There was a pond or canal stocked with fish, and near it neat boxes and alcoves for the tea-drinkers. Seats were dispersed about the garden, the attractions of which were completed by a summer-house up a handsome flight of stone steps, and a statue of Hercules, with his club, on a high pedestal. The extent of the garden was about four acres.

A writer in the Town and Country Magazine for April 1770 (p. 195), speaks contemptuously of the canal “as about the size of a butcher’s tray, where citizens of quality and their spouses come on Sunday to view the amorous flutterings of a duck and drake.” This, however, is the opinion of a fashionable gentleman who goes alternately to Almack’s and Cornelys’s, while Ranelagh (he says) “affords me great relief.”

The career of the Pantheon was brief; for in March 1774 the building and its grounds were announced for sale on account of Craven’s bankruptcy. According to the statement of the auctioneer the place was then in full trade, and the returns almost incredible, upwards of one thousand persons having sometimes been accommodated in the Rotunda. It is uncertain if another proprietor tried his hand, if so he was probably unsuccessful, for the Pantheon was certainly closed as a place of amusement in 1776.

In July 1777 the Rotunda, after having been used for a time as a depot for the sale of carriages, was opened for services of the Church of England under the name of Northampton Chapel. One of the preachers, moralising on the profane antecedents of the place, adopted the text, “And he called the name of that place Bethel, but the name of that city was called Luz at the first.”

The building was afterwards purchased by the Countess of Huntingdon, and opened in March 1779 under the name of Spa Fields Chapel as a place of worship in her connexion. Various alterations were at that time, and subsequently, made in the building, and a statue of Fame, sounding a trumpet, which had stood outside the Pantheon on the lantern surmounting the cupola was removed. The tavern belonging to the Pantheon, on the east side of the Rotunda, was occupied by Lady Huntingdon as her residence. It was a large house partly covered by branches of jessamine.