Cremorne and the later London gardens

by Warwick William Wroth

In the first thirty years of the nineteenth century the place had considerable local reputation as a tea-garden, and was noted for its maze. It did not become extinct till the end of the fifties.

In 1828 one of the attractions by day and by candle-light was the waxworks booth of the Messrs. Ewing, ‘consisting of 129 public characters, large as life.’ In this collection, omitting minor celebrities, were to be seen George IV. in his chair of state; the lamented Princess Charlotte; Guy Fawkes, who attempted to blow up the Parliament House; the Archbishop of York; Wallace, the hero of Scotland; ‘the unfortunate John Bellingham’; and Daniel Dancer, ‘the miserable miser,’ with his sister and servant. There was, moreover, a likeness of the celebrated living skeleton, ‘procured at enormous expense and difficulty’ (presumably to the skeleton). ‘Those who delight,’ said the bills, ‘in the wonders of the Creator will no doubt be highly gratified, without enduring that unpleasantness which some have complained of when viewing the being himself [i.e., the skeleton].’ [82]

The gardens were to the west of the present Walworth Road, a little to the south-west of Princes Street. The Montpelier tavern and Walworth Palace of Varieties (No. 18, Montpelier Street) is on part of the site.

[Bills and newspaper notices; Picture of London, 1802–1830; W. W. Read’s Annals of Cricket.]

THE SURREY ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS

A view here reproduced represents these once famous gardens as they appeared in the early thirties. They were in existence, somewhat transformed, as late as 1877, but it is now difficult to imagine that they were situated in a populous region between the Kennington and Walworth Roads.

The ‘Zoo’ which found a home in a beautiful garden in the south of London was for some time no mean rival to the Zoo par excellence in Regent’s Park, while, as a place of public entertainment, the Surrey Gardens had something of the popularity of Cremorne, with which they were, in fact, nearly coeval. But here the resemblance ends, for the Surrey Zoo had no dancing-platform, [83] no alcoholic drinks for more than thirteen years, and rarely furnished to the police-court reporter any copy worthy of his notice. The gardens were generally closed at 10 p.m., and the addition in 1846 of two new constables to the permanent staff was advertised as an effective terror to evil-doers. The gardens were by no means solely frequented by South Londoners, though they were far from the luxurious west, and on the wrong side of the Thames. Fireworks, promenade concerts and ballooning were a bait for the shillings of the sightseer, but for more than twenty years at least these attractions never quite sophisticated the simple recreation afforded by the Zoological Garden.

The founder, and for many years the proprietor, of these gardens was Edward Cross, whose menagerie at Exeter Change was once a London sight and the abode of the famous elephant Chunee. But Exeter Change, as old views of London clearly show, projected itself in an obstructive way across the pavement of the Strand, and in 1829 was removed for the formation of Burleigh Street. Mr. Cross then moved his animals to a temporary home in the King’s Mews (the site of Trafalgar Square). In the autumn of 1831 the menagerie found itself in South London. The Manor-House, Walworth, had attached to it a fine garden of fifteen acres and a lake of three acres, [84] which was not only a picturesque feature, but, as we shall afterwards see, a valuable theatrical asset as ‘real water.’ The owner of the Manor-House had already spent several thousands on his grounds, and it was not difficult for Cross to make the necessary alterations. The gardens were remodelled or laid out anew by Henry Phillips, author of Sylva Florifera, with flower-beds, walks, and undulating lawns, and an early guidebook to the gardens gives a list of its two hundred varieties of hardy trees. Aviaries were soon put up for the singing birds, and swings and cages for the parrots. The water-birds readily took to the little ponds, and the swans and herons were soon at home in the Great Lake, where they found an island haven overhung by drooping willows. The lions and tigers were caged in a great circular conservatory of glass (something like the palm-house at Kew), 300 feet long, and constructed nearly in the centre of the grounds. A still larger octagon building with enclosed paddocks was erected for the zebras, emus, and kangaroos.

The Companion to the gardens, issued in 1835, duly sets forth the catalogue of the animals and birds, and many numbers of the Mirror magazine give neat woodcuts of the ‘latest additions,’ at that time apparently rare or curious, though now sufficiently familiar. The greatest popular successes were the three giraffes—the first ever seen in England—brought over in 1836 from Alexandria; the orang-outang; the Indian one-horned rhinoceros (1834); Nero, the lion who cost £800, and was stated to be twenty years old; and a gigantic tortoise, which small children used to ride.