From about this period (1816–1830) Copenhagen House was a favourite Sunday tea-garden with the middle-classes[166] who flocked there, especially in the summer-time during the hay harvest in the fields around.[167] Although the builders were making their way up to Copenhagen House from London on the south, it still commanded an extensive view of the metropolis and western suburbs, with the heights of Hampstead and Highgate, “and the rich intervening meadows.” In 1841[168] the tavern and tea-gardens were still in existence, and the space between them and Highgate was still open fields. Attached to the house at that time was a well known cricket ground.[169]
About 1852 the Corporation of London purchased Copenhagen House with its grounds and adjacent fields to the extent of about seventy-five acres, and began to build there the present Metropolitan Cattle Market, between the York and Caledonian Roads, which was opened in 1855. The old tavern (pulled down in 1853[170]) and tea-gardens were thus swept away, and their site is approximately marked by the Great Clock Tower in the market.[171]
[Hone’s Every Day Book, i. 858, ff.; Nelson’s Islington; Lewis’s Islington; Larwood and Hotten, Signboards, 435, 436; Walford, ii. 275, 276, 283; v. 374; Tomlins’s Perambulation of Islington, 204, 205.]
VIEWS.
1. Copenhagen House, Islington, as it appeared in 1737, sepia drawing by Bernard Lens. Crace, Cat. p. 604, No. 191.
2. South-east view of Copenhagen House, printed for R. Sayer and J. Bennett, 20 March, 1783 (W. Coll.); the woodcut in Lewis’s Islington, p. 283, is derived from this.
3. Copenhagen House, Islington. J. Swaine del. 1793; J. Swaine, sculp. 1854. Woodcut (W. Coll.).
4. There are several views of Copenhagen House in the nineteenth century, see e.g. Hone’s Every Day Book, i. 858; Cromwell’s Islington, p. 204; Crace, Cat. p. 605, Nos. 194, 196 (views of 1853).
5. “The Grand Meeting of the Metropolitan Trades’ Unions in the Copenhagen Fields on Monday, April 21, 1834.” Coloured engraving by Geo. Dorrington (W. Coll.). This shows Copenhagen House and an enormous concourse in the fields.