In the principal gardens, watchmen and “vigilant officers” were always supposed to be in attendance to keep order and to exclude undesirable visitors. Unsparing denunciation of the morals of the chief gardens, such as is found in the lofty pages of Noorthouck, must, I am inclined to think, be regarded as rhetorical, and to a great extent unwarranted. On the other hand, one can hardly accept without a smile the statement of a Vauxhall guide-book of 1753, that “even Bishops have been seen in this Recess without injuring their character,” for it cannot be denied that the vigilant officers had enough to do. There were sometimes scenes and affrays in the gardens, and Vauxhall and Cuper’s were favourite hunting-grounds of the London pickpocket. At the opening Ridotto at Vauxhall (1732) a man stole fifty guineas from a masquerader, but here the watchman was equal to the occasion, and “the rogue was taken in the fact.” At Cuper’s on a firework night a pickpocket or two might be caught, but it was ten to one that they would be rescued on their way to justice by their confederates in St. George’s Fields.
The dubious character of some of the female frequenters of the best known gardens has been necessarily indicated in our detailed accounts of these gardens, though always, it is hoped, in a way not likely to cause offence. The best surety for good conduct at a public garden was, after all, the character of the great mass of its frequenters, and it is obvious that they were decent people enough, however wanting in graces of good-breeding and refinement. Moreover, from the end of the year 1752, when the Act was passed requiring London gardens and other places where music and dancing took place to be under a license, it was generally the interest of the proprietor to preserve good order for fear of sharing the fate of Cuper’s, which was unable to obtain a renewal of its license after 1752, and had to be carried on as a mere tea-garden. The only places, perhaps, at which disreputable visitors were distinctly welcome were those garish evening haunts in St. George’s Fields, the Dog and Duck, the Temples of Flora and Apollo and the Flora Tea-Gardens. All these were suppressed or lost their license before the end of the eighteenth century.
Of the more important gardens, Marylebone and Cuper’s ceased to exist before the close of the last century. Ranelagh survived till 1803 and Vauxhall till 1859. Finch’s Grotto practically came to an end about 1773 and Bermondsey Spa about 1804. Many of the eighteenth-century tea-gardens lasted almost to our own time, but the original character of such places as Bagnigge Wells (closed 1841), White Conduit House (closed 1849), and Highbury Barn (closed 1871) was greatly altered.
During the first thirty or forty years of the nineteenth century numerous gardens, large and small, were flourishing in or near London. Some of these, like Bagnigge Wells, had been well-known gardens in the eighteenth century, while the origin of others, such as Chalk Farm, Camberwell Grove House, the Rosemary Branch Gardens at Islington, or rather Hoxton, the Mermaid Gardens, Hackney, and the Montpelier Gardens, Walworth, may be probably, or certainly, traced to the last century. These last-mentioned places, however, had little or no importance as public gardens till the nineteenth century, and have not been described in the present work.
Many new gardens came into existence, and of these the best known are the Surrey Zoological Gardens (1831–1856); Rosherville (established 1837); Cremorne (circ. 1843–1877); and the Eagle Tavern and Gardens (circ. 1825–1882), occupying the quiet domain of the old Shepherd and Shepherdess.
The sale of Vauxhall Gardens in August 1859, or perhaps the closing of Highbury Barn in 1871, may be held to mark the final disappearance of the London Pleasure Gardens of the eighteenth century. “St. George’s Fields are fields no more!” and hardly a tree or shrub recalls these vanished pleasances of our forefathers. The site of Ranelagh is still, indeed, a garden, and Hampstead has its spring and Well Walk. But the Sadler’s Wells of 1765 exists only in its theatre, and its gardens are gone, its spring forgotten, and its New River covered in. The public-house, which in London dies hard, has occupied the site, and preserved the name of several eighteenth-century gardens, including the London Spa, Bagnigge Wells, White Conduit House and the Adam and Eve, Tottenham Court, but the gardens themselves have been completely swept away.
Vauxhall, Belsize House, and the Spa Fields Pantheon, none of them in their day examples of austere morality, are now represented by three churches. From the Marylebone Gardens, the Marylebone Music Hall may be said to have been evolved. Pancras Wells are lost in the extended terminus of the Midland Railway, and the Waterloo Road runs over the centre of Cuper’s Gardens. Finch’s Grotto, after having been a burial ground and a workhouse, is now the headquarters of our London Fire Brigade. Copenhagen House with its fields is the great Metropolitan Cattle Market. The Three Hats is a bank; Dobney’s Bowling Green, a small court; the Temple of Apollo, an engineer’s factory, and the sign of the Dog and Duck is built into the walls of Bedlam.
PLAN
showing distribution of the