A good representative series of the principal early views of Ranelagh is in the Crace Collection (Catal. p. 164; pp. 312–314). The site is well marked in Horwood’s Plan A, 1794.
STROMBOLO HOUSE AND GARDENS, CHELSEA
Strombolo House[241] was a minor place of entertainment, dating from 1762, or earlier, with tea-gardens and “a fine fountain”[242] attached to it. The gardens[243] are said to have been most frequented about 1788. They were open chiefly in the afternoons of week-days and Sundays for tea-drinking during the summer season. The house, opposite the famous Royal Bun House, Chelsea, in Jew’s Row (now Pimlico Road), was still standing in 1829, when Faulkner’s Chelsea (second edition) was published, but it appears to have been disused as a place of amusement long before that date.
The ground was afterwards occupied by the Orange Tavern and tea-gardens to which was attached the Orange Theatre, a small private playhouse, where local geniuses performed (1831–32). St. Barnabas Church, Pimlico, built 1848–1850, standing off the south side of Pimlico Road (entrance in Church Street) is now nearly on the site.
[O’Keefe’s Recollections, i. p. 88; Faulkner’s Chelsea, ii. p. 357; Davis’s Knightsbridge (1859), p. 263; Wheatley’s London P. and P. s.v. “Strombello”; Timbs’s Club Life (1866), ii. p. 260.]
STAR AND GARTER TAVERN AND GARDENS, CHELSEA
In the grounds attached to the Star and Garter Tavern in the Five Fields between Chelsea and Pimlico,[244] displays of fireworks and horsemanship took place in 1762 (July-September) to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Wales, and the visit of the chiefs of the Cherokee Indians[245] who were duly exploited by the proprietor. Carlo Genovini, an Italian artificer, exhibited stars and moving suns, a guilloche of a varied coloured rose, reprises of water cascades and many pyrotechnic devices, together with the Temple of Liberty, a machine thirty-two feet long and forty high “painted in a theatrical manner” with Britannia triumphant over the portico. The fireworks began at eight or nine and the tickets were usually half-a-crown.
On other evenings at seven o’clock Thomas Johnson, the well-known equestrian, performed feats with two and three horses similar to those undertaken by him at the Three Hats, Islington. The admission was one shilling. The proprietor of the Star and Garter also kept the neighbouring Dwarf’s Tavern, with Coan, “the jovial Pigmy,” as Major Domo,[246] and to this place visitors were invited to adjourn after the fireworks, there to sup on “a most excellent ham, some collared eels, potted beef, etc., with plenty of sound old bright wine and punch like nectar.”[247]
[Faulkner’s Chelsea, ii. 354–356, where further details of the fireworks and horsemanship may be found; Davis’s Knightsbridge, p. 264.]