Soon after their death (before 1800?) the house was pulled down and the proprietor expended £10,000 in improvements and in erecting the roomy brick building known as Hornsey Wood Tavern. The tea-gardens were enlarged and a lake formed, for the benefit of those who wished for a little angling or boating. To effect these improvements, a romantic part of the wood was destroyed, but the remaining portion still continued an attraction. About 1835 the “lower order of citizens” as T. Cromwell (Islington, p. 138) calls them, used to go “palming” to the wood on Palm Sunday. All through the present century Hornsey Wood House (or Tavern) was a favourite Sunday resort of Londoners.
In 1866 at the time of the formation of Finsbury Park, the house was pulled down and its site and that of the gardens and the Wood must be looked for in the Park, which was opened as a public recreation ground in 1869.
[The Idler, No. 15, July 1758; Dodsley’s London, 1761; Low Life (1764), p. 46; Sunday Ramble, 1776 and 1797; Kearsley’s Strangers’ Guide; Lambert’s London, iv. 274; Picture of London, eds. 1802, 1823 and 1829; Hone’s Every Day Book, i. 759, ff.; Lewis’s Islington, pp. 190, 282; J. F. Murray’s World of London, 1845, ii. p. 82, ff.; Walford, v. 430, ff.; Illustrated London News, 14 August, 1869; J. H. Lloyd’s Highgate, 1888.]
VIEWS.
1. An engraving of old Hornsey Wood House &c., in Lewis’s Islington, p. 282.
2. There are many views of the later Hornsey Wood House (or Tavern), e.g. one engraved in Walford, v. 426, and there assigned to the year 1800. This is substantially the same as one (undated) in Hone’s Every Day Book, i. 759. Hone, ib. 761, also gives a woodcut of the Lake. There is an engraving of the house of 1809, published by J. Cundee (W. Coll.), and there are views of it of a later date; e.g. an engraving in Cromwell’s Islington, p. 138.
THE SPRING GARDEN, STOKE NEWINGTON.
This Spring Garden is marked in Warner’s Survey of Islington, 1735, rather to the south of Newington Green. About 1753 the tavern connected with the garden was taken by W. Bristow, who advertised the place as an afternoon tea-garden, appending to his advertisement the note “beans in perfection for any companies.”[184]
It is mentioned in Low Life, 1764 as resorted to on Whit-Sunday evening by Londoners of the lower classes. Cromwell in his Islington (p. 199) published in 1835, speaks of the tavern and tea-gardens as existing “within memory.”