WARWICK WROTH, F.S.A.
OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM
ASSISTED BY
ARTHUR EDGAR WROTH
WITH SIXTY-TWO ILLUSTRATIONS
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd.
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO.
1896
The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved
“A great deal of company, and the weather and garden pleasant and it is very cheap and pleasant going thither.... But to hear the nightingale and the birds, and here fiddles and there a harp, and here a Jew’s trump, and here laughing and there fine people walking is mighty divertising.”—Samuel Pepys.
PREFACE
In the following pages an attempt has been made to write, for the first time, a history of the London pleasure gardens of the last century. Scattered notices of these gardens are to be found in many histories of the London parishes and in other less accessible sources, and merely to collect this information in a single volume would not, perhaps, have been a useless task. It is one, however, that could not have been undertaken with much satisfaction unless there was a prospect of making some substantial additions—especially in the case of the less known gardens—to the accounts already existing. A good deal of such new material it has here been possible to furnish from a collection of newspapers, prints, songs, &c., that I have been forming for several years to illustrate the history of the London Gardens.[1]