London parks and gardens

Nothing is more essentially characteristic of London than its squares. They have no exact counterpart in any foreign city. The iron railings, the enclosure of dusty bushes and lofty trees, with wood-pigeons and twittering sparrows, have little in common with, say for instance, the Place Vendôme in Paris, or the Grand’ Place in Brussels, or Madison Square, New York. The vicissitudes of some of the London Squares would fill a volume, but most of them have had much the same origin. They have been built with residential houses surrounding them, and though some have changed to shops, and in others the houses are dilapidated and forsaken by the wealthier classes, nearly every one has had its day of popularity.

In some of those now deserted by the world of fashion, the gardens have been opened to the public, but by far the greater number of squares are maintained by the residents in their neighbourhood, who have keys to the gardens. But even though they are kept outside the railings the rest of the public receive a benefit from these air spaces and oxygen-exhaling trees. Sometimes the public get more direct advantage, as in such cases as Eaton Square, where seats are placed down the centre on the pavement under the shade of the trees inside the rails, and are much frequented in hot weather; or in Lower Grosvenor Gardens, which are open for six weeks in the autumn, when most of the residents in the houses are absent.

Squares are dotted about nearly all over London, but they can, for the most part, be grouped together. There are the older ones, of different sizes, and varying in their modern conditions. Among such are Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Charterhouse, Soho, Golden, Leicester, and St. James’s Squares. Then there is the large Bloomsbury group, and further westward the chain of squares begins with Cavendish, Manchester, Portman, on the north, and Hanover and Grosvenor to the south of Oxford Street. Then follow the later continuations of the sequence—Bryanston, Montagu, and so on to Ladbroke Square, nearly to Shepherd’s Bush. To the south of the Park lies the Belgravia group, with more and more modern additions stretching westward till they join the old village of Kensington, with dignified squares of its own, or till their further multiplication is checked by the River.

To describe most of these squares would imply a vast amount of vain repetition. Few have anything original either in design or planting. The majority have elms and planes mixed with ailanthus, while aucubas, euonymous, and straggling privet form the staple product of the encircling borders, with a pleasant admixture of lilac and laburnum, and generally a good supply of iris facing the gravel pathway. A few annuals and bedding-out plants brighten the borders in summer, and some can boast of one or two ferns. Occasionally the luxury of a summer-house is indulged in, and here and there a weeping ash has been ventured upon by way of shelter; a secluded walk or seat is practically unknown. The older gardens have some large trees, and the turf in all of them is good, and when it is with “daisies pied” it forms the chief delight of the children who play there. It may be that the distance of Notting Hill Gate from the smoke of the East End has encouraged more enterprise in gardening; certainly the result of the planting in Ladbroke Square is satisfactory. Several healthy young oaks are growing up; and a fountain and small piece of formal gardening round it, on the highest point of the long, sloping lawn, is effective. In the older squares, such as Grosvenor Square, the bushes are high, and the openings so well arranged that the lawns in the centre are perfectly private, and hidden from the streets. In the less ancient ones, such as Eccleston and Warwick, Connaught and Montagu Squares, the long, narrow strip leaves little scope for variation.

An innovation of the usual square is to be seen in Duke Street, Grosvenor Square. This small square, which was laid out as a garden with sheltered seats, was made when the new red-brick dwellings replaced the smaller and more crowded houses. The middle is now the distributing centre of an electric power-station, but the roof is low and flat, and has been successfully transformed into a formal garden, with trees in tubs and boxes of flowers.

Some of the squares have finer trees than others, and in many a statue is a feature. Originally these statues formed the central object towards which the garden paths converged, but most of the central statues have been moved, though in a few, like St. James’s and Golden Squares, they are still in the middle. These statues were evidently a good deal thought of by Londoners, but they did not strike foreigners as very good. In one of Mirabeau’s letters he writes in 1784 from London: “The public monuments in honour of Sovereigns, reflect little honour on English Sculpture.... The Statues of the last Kings, which adorn the Squares in the new quarters of London, being cast in brass or copper, have nothing remarkable in them but their lustre; they are doubtless kept in repair, cleaned and rubbed with as much care as the larger knockers at gentlemen’s doors, which are of similar metal.” The usual plan now is to place the statue facing the street, where a background of green shows it off to the passer-by. Thus Lord George Bentinck is prominent in Cavendish Square, from which the equestrian central statue of the Duke of Cumberland has gone; and from Hanover Square, built about the same time as Cavendish (between 1717–20), Chantrey’s statue of Pitt gazes down towards St. George’s Church. In Grosvenor Square no statue has replaced the central one of George I. by Von Nost, which was placed there in 1726, and is described by Maitland as a “stately gilt equestrian statue.” This Square is older than the two last mentioned, having been built in 1695. In those days each of the spacious houses had its large garden at the back, with a view of the country away to Hampstead and Highgate. The garden was designed by Kent, but a plan of it about 1750 shows a considerable difference between the arrangements then and now, although some details are the same. The raised square of grass in the centre where the statue stood has now a large, octagonal, covered seat, apparently formed with the old pedestal. The walk round and the four wide paths to the centre are retained, but the smaller intersecting paths are replaced by lawns on which grow some fine old elms. The railings with stone piers and handsome gates, shown in the engraving, have given place to much less ornamental iron rails.

Manchester Square is of later date. It was an open space approached by shady lanes from Cavendish Square for some fifty years after that was built. The houses in Manchester Square were not begun till 1776—some ten years after the commencement of Portman Square. This district was all very semi-rural and unfinished until much later. Southey, in a letter, writes of Portman Square as “on the outskirts of the town,” and approached “on one side by a road, unlit, unpaved, and inaccessible by carriages.” The large corner house, now occupied by Lord Portman, was built for Mrs. Montagu, “Queen of the Blue Stockings,” and during her time “Montagu House” was the salon to which the literary celebrities of the day flocked. When Mrs. Montagu moved there from Hill Street she wrote to a friend, “My health has not been interrupted by the bad weather we have had; I believe Portman Square is the Montpellier of England.” In the centre of the Square garden was planted a “wilderness,” after the fashion of the day, and early in the nineteenth century, when the Turkish Ambassador resided in the Square, he erected a kiosk in this “wilderness,” where he used to smoke and imagine himself in a perfumed garden of the East. It is still one of the best kept-up of the squares.

Berkeley Square dates from nearly the same time as Grosvenor, having been begun in 1698, on the site of the extensive gardens of Berkeley House, which John Evelyn so much admired, and where flourished the holly hedges of which he advised the planting. The central statue here was one by Beaupré and Wilton of George III., which was removed in 1827, and the base of the statue made into a summer-house. In the place of the usual statesman, a drinking fountain, with a figure pouring the water—the gift of the Marquess of Lansdowne—has been placed outside the rails at the southern end. The plane trees are very fine, and were planted at the end of the eighteenth century, it is said, by Mr. Edward Bouverie in 1789. The plane has been so long grown in London these cannot be said with certainty to be the oldest, as is so often stated. Some in Lincoln’s Inn Fields are decidedly larger. In 1722 Fairchild writes in praise of the plane trees, about 40 feet high, in the churchyard of St. Dunstan-in-the-East. Loudon mentions one at the Physic Garden, planted by Philip Miller, which was 115 feet high in 1837 (a western Plane—not the great oriental Plane which fell down a few years ago). The western Plane (Platinus occidentalis) was introduced to this country many years after the eastern Plane (Platinus orientalis). The tree most common in town is a variety of eastern Plane called accrifolia, known as the “London Plane”: this must have been a good deal planted all through the eighteenth century, so it is difficult to assign to any actual tree the priority.

St. James’s Square is older than any of the squares already glanced at, having been built in the time of Charles II. It was known as Pall Mall Field or Close, originally part of St. James’s Fields, and the actual site of the Square was a meadow used by those attached to the Court as a sort of recreation ground. Henry Jermyn, Earl of St. Albans, leased it in 1665 from Charles II., and began to plan the Square or “Piazza,” as it was called at first. The deadly year of the Plague, followed by the Great Fire, delayed the building, and the houses were not finished and lived in till 1676. No. 6 in the Square, belonging to the Marquess of Bristol, has been in his family since that time. Every one of the fine old houses has its story of history and romance. Here Charles II. was frequently seen visiting Moll Davis, Sir Cyril Wyche, and the Earl of Ranelagh. The Earl of Romney, and the Duke of Ormond, and Count Tallard the French Ambassador, are names connected with the Square in William III.’s time, and Josiah Wedgwood lived at No. 7. But these and many other historical personages did not look from their windows on to a well-ordered garden, and the Court beauties did not wander with their admirers under the spreading trees. The centre of the Square was left open, and merely like a field. The chief use to which the space seems to have been put was for displays of fireworks. One of the great occasions for these was after the Peace of Ryswick, but unfortunately they were not always very successful. An eye-witness, writing to Sir Christopher Hatton, says of Sir Martin Beckman, who had the management of them, that he “hath got the curses of a good many and the praises of nobody.” The open space eventually became so untidy that the residents in 1726 petitioned Parliament to allow them to levy a special rate to “cleanse, adorn, and beautify the Square,” as “the ground hath for some years past lain, and doth now lie, rude and in great disorder, contrary to the design of King Charles II., who granted the soil for erecting capital buildings.” So badly used was it that even a coach-builder had erected a shed in the middle of it, in which to store his timber. Strong measures were taken, and any one “annoying the Square” after May 1, 1726, was to be fined 20s., and any one encroaching on it, £50. No hackney coach was allowed to ply there, and unless a coachman, after setting down his fare, immediately drove out of the Square, he was to be fined 10s. The whole place was levelled and paved, and a round basin of water, which was intended to have a fountain in it, and never did, was dug in the centre. Round it ran an octagon railing with stone obelisks, surmounted with lamps at each angle. A road of flat paving-stones with posts went round the Square in front of the houses; the rest was paved with cobble stones. As early as 1697 it was proposed to place a statue of William III., and figures emblematical of his victories, in the Square, but nothing was done. In 1721 the Chevalier de David tried to get up a subscription for a sum of £2500 for a statute of George I. to be done by himself and set up, but, as he only collected £100 towards it, that scheme also fell through. Once more an effort was made which bore tardy fruit, for in 1724 Samuel Travers bequeathed a sum of money by will “to purchase and erect an equestrian statue in brass to the glorious memory of my master, King William III.” Somehow this was not carried out at the time, but in 1806 the money appeared in a list of unclaimed dividends, and John Bacon the younger was given the commission to model the statue, which was cast in bronze at the artist’s own studio in Newman Street, and put up in the centre of the pond. Thus it remained until towards the middle of last century the stagnant pool was drained. In the 1780 riots the mob carried off the keys of Newgate and flung them into this basin, where years afterwards they were found. It was 150 feet in diameter, and 6 or 7 feet deep. When the pond was drained, the garden was planted in the form it now is, and the statue left standing in the centre. St. James’s is still one of the finest residential squares in London, and the old rhyme, picturing the attractions in store for the lady of quality who became a duchess and lived in the Square, might have been written in the twentieth instead of the eighteenth century.

Less cheerful has been the fate of Golden Square, which has a forsaken look, and the days when it may have justified its name are past. Originally Gelding Square, from the name of an inn hard by, the grander-sounding and more attractive corruption supplanted the older name. Another derivation for the word is also given—“Golding,” from the name of the first builder; but anyhow it was called Golden Square soon after it came into being. The houses round it were built about the opening years of the eighteenth century, when the dismal memories of the Plague were growing faint. For the site of Golden Square, “far from the haunts of men,” was one of the spots where, during the Plague, thousands of dead were cast, by scores every night. These gloomy scenes forgotten, the Square was built, and at one time fashionable Lord Bolingbroke lived here, while Secretary for War. It is still “not exactly in anybody’s way, to or from anywhere.” The garden is neat, with a row of trees round the Square enclosure, and a path following the same lines. In the centre stands a statue of George II., looking thoroughly out of place, like a dilapidated Roman emperor. It was bought from Canons, the Duke of Chandos’s house, near Edgware, when the house was pulled down and everything sold in 1747. There are a few seats, but they are rarely used, and it has a very quiet and dreary aspect when compared with the cheerful crowds enjoying the gardens in its larger neighbour, Leicester Square. This was known as Leicester Fields, and was traversed by two rows of elm trees; and even after the houses round it were begun, about 1635, the name of Fields clung to it. The ground was part of the Lammas Lands belonging to the parish of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, and Robert Sydney, Earl of Leicester, who built the house from which the Square takes its name, paid compensation for the land, to the poor of the parish £3 yearly. The house occupied the north-east corner of the Square, and in after years became famous as a royal residence. It has been called “the pouting-place” of princes, as it was to Leicester House that the Prince of Wales retired when he quarrelled with his father, George I.; and there Caroline the Illustrious gathered all the dissatisfied courtiers, and such wit and beauty as could be found, round her. When he became George II., and quarrelled in his turn with his son, Frederick, Prince of Wales, the latter came to live in Leicester House. The statue of George I. which stood in the centre of the garden was, it was said, put up by Frederick, with the express purpose of annoying his father. A view of the Square in 1700, shows a neatly-kept square garden with four straight walks, and trees at even distances, and Leicester House standing back, with a forecourt and large entrance gates, and a garden of its own with lawns and statues at the back. Savile House, next door to Leicester House, on the site of the present Empire Theatre, was also the scene of many interesting incidents, until it was practically destroyed during the Gordon Riots. The list of great names connected with the Square is too long to recite, but four of the greatest are commemorated by the four busts in the modern garden—Sir Joshua Reynolds, Hogarth, John Hunter, the eminent surgeon, and Sir Isaac Newton. But before these monuments were erected Leicester Square Garden had gone through a period of decay. It was left unkept up and uncared for; the gilt statue was tumbling to pieces, and was only propped up with wooden posts. The garden from 1851 for ten years, was used to exhibit the Great Globe of Wylde, the geographer, who leased the space from the Tulk family, then the owners of the land. Leicester House, after it ceased to be a royal residence, was in the hands of Sir Ashton Lever, who turned it into a museum, which was open from 1771 to 1784, but failed to obtain much popularity. The collection was dispersed, and soon after the house was pulled down and the site built over, and the Square was allowed to get more and more untidy. Several efforts were made to purchase it for the public, but the price asked was prohibitive, as the owners wished to build on it. When, however, after much litigation, the Court of Appeal decided it could not be built on, but must be maintained as an open space, they were more ready to come to terms. A generous purchaser came forward, Mr. Albert (afterwards Baron) Grant, who bought the land, laid it out as a garden, and presented it to the public, to be kept up by the Metropolitan Board of Works. The plans for the newly-restored garden, were made for Mr. Grant by Mr. James Knowles, and the planting done by Mr. John Gibson, who was then occupied with the sub-tropical garden in Battersea Park. The statue of Shakespeare in the centre, and the four busts, were also the gift of the same public benefactor, who presented the Square complete, with trees, statues, railings, and seats, in 1874.

Soho Square was another of the fashionable squares of London, now gloomy and deserted by its former aristocratic residents. The gardens are kept up for the benefit of those living in the Square only, and are not enjoyed by the masses, like Leicester Square. Maitland describes the building and consecration of St. Anne’s, Soho, or, as he calls it, St. Anne’s, Westminster, which was in 1685 separated from St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, and a new parish created, just in the same way as scores of parishes have to be treated nowadays, to meet the needs of the much more rapidly-growing population. Of the new parish, he says the only remarkable things were “its beautiful streets, spacious and handsome Church, and stately Quadrate, denominated King’s-Square, but vulgarly Soho-Square.” Various suggestions have been made as to the origin of the name, and the most popular explanation is that it was a hunting-cry used in hunting hares, which sport was indulged in over these fields. The word Soho occurs in the parish registers as early as 1632. When first built the Square was called King Square, from Geoffrey King, who surveyed it, not after King Charles II. But the old name of the fields became for ever attached to the Square, to the entire exclusion of the more modern one, after the battle of Sedgemoor. Monmouth’s supporters on that occasion took the word Soho for their watchword, from the fact that Monmouth lived in the Square. In 1690 John Evelyn notes that he went with his family “to winter at Soho in the Great Square.” Monmouth House was built by Wren, when the Square was begun in 1681, and it was pulled down, to make room for smaller houses on the south side of the Square, in 1773. There are some fine old trees in the garden, and a statue of Charles II. used, till the middle of last century, like the one in St. James’s Square, to stand in a basin of water, with figures round it, emblematic of the rivers Thames, Severn, Tyne, and Humber, spouting water. Nollekens, the sculptor, who was born in 28 Dean Street, Soho, in 1738, recalled how he stood as a boy “for hours together to see the water run out of the jug of the old river-gods in the basin in the middle of the Square, but the water never would run out of their jugs but when the windmill was going round at the top of Rathbone Place.” The centre of the Square was in 1748 “new made and inclosed with iron railings on a stone kirb,” and “eight lamp Irons 3 ft. 6 in. high above the spikes in each of the Eight corner Angles”: the “Channell all round the Square” was paved with “good new Kentish Ragg stones.”

Beyond Oxford Street are collected a great number of squares in the district of Bloomsbury. They are all surrounded by solid, well-built houses, which seem to hold their own with dignity, even though fashion has moved away from them westward. Before the squares arose, this was the site of two great palaces with their gardens. One of them, Southampton House, afterwards known as Bedford or Russell House, was where Bloomsbury Square now is. In 1665, February 9, Evelyn notes that he “dined at my Lord Treasurer’s the Earl of Southampton, in Bloomsbury, where he was building a noble square or piazza, a little town; his own house stands too low—some noble rooms, a pretty cedar chapel, a naked garden to the North, but good air.” This house was pulled down in 1800, and Russell Square was built on the garden. Both Bloomsbury, or Southampton Square, as it was sometimes called, and Russell Square have good trees, and in each garden there is a statue by Westmacott. Charles James Fox, seated in classical drapery, erected in 1816, looks down Bedford Place, where stood Southampton House, towards the larger statue, with elaborate pedestal and cupids, of Francis, Duke of Bedford, in Russell Square. This is one of London’s largest Squares, being only about 140 feet smaller than Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and included most of the garden of Southampton House, with its fine limes, and a large locust-tree, Robinia pseudo acacia.

The laying out is more original in design than most of the squares, having been done by Repton in 1810. In Repton’s book on Landscape Gardening he goes fully into his reasons for the design of Russell Square. “The ground,” he said, “had all been brought to one level plain at too great expense to admit of its being altered.” He approves of the novel plan of placing the statue at the edge instead of in the usual position in the centre of the Square. “To screen the broad gravel-walk from the street, a compact hedge is intended to be kept clipt to about six feet high; this, composed of privet and hornbeam, will become almost as impervious as a hedge of laurels, or other evergreens, which will not succeed in a London atmosphere.” He says he has not “clothed the lawn” with plantation, so that children playing there could be seen from the windows, to meet “the particular wishes of some mothers.” “The outline of this area is formed by a walk under two rows of lime-trees, regularly planted at equal distances, not in a perfect circle, but finishing towards the statue in two straight lines.” He imagines that fanciful advocates of landscape gardening will object to this as too formal, and be “further shocked” by learning that he hoped they would be kept cut and trimmed. Within were to be “groves in one quarter of the area, the other three enriched with flowers and shrubs, each disposed in a different manner, to indulge the various tastes for regular or irregular gardens.” He ends his description by saying: “A few years hence, when the present patches of shrubs shall have become thickets—when the present meagre rows of trees shall have become an umbrageous avenue—and the children now in their nurses’ arms shall have become the parents or grand-sires of future generations—this square may serve to record, that the Art of Landscape Gardening in the beginning of the nineteenth century was not directed by whim or caprice, but founded on a due consideration of utility as well as beauty, without a bigoted adherence to forms and lines, whether straight, or crooked, or serpentine.”

Repton always put forth his ideas in high-sounding language, often not so well justified as in the present case. The lime-trees have been allowed to grow taller than he desired, and yet are not fine trees from having at one period been kept trimmed; but they certainly form an attractive addition to the usual design, and looking at them, after nearly a hundred years, from the outside, where they form a background to the statue, the effect in summer is very attractive.

Bedford Square is on the gardens of the other great house—Montagu House, built by the Duke of Montagu. Evelyn also notes going to see that. In 1676, “I dined,” he says, “with Mr. Charleton and went to see Mr. Montagu’s new palace near Bloomsbury, built by Mr. Hooke of our Society [the Royal] after the French manner.” This house was burnt down ten years later, and rebuilt with equal magnificence; but when the Duke moved to Montagu House, Whitehall, in 1757, it became the home of the British Museum. The old house was pulled down and the present building erected in 1845. The Square was laid out at the end of the eighteenth century on the gardens and the open fields of the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields beyond. Lord Loughborough lived in No. 6, and after him Lord Eldon from 1804 to 1815. At the time of the Gordon Riots in 1780, when Lord Mansfield’s house was plundered, troops were stationed near, and a camp formed in the garden of the British Museum. That garden was also of use when, in March 1815, Lord Eldon’s house in Bedford Square was attacked by a mob, and he was forced to make his escape out of the back into the Museum garden.

Of Queen’s Square, built in Queen Anne’s time, but containing a statue of Queen Charlotte, and all the other squares of this district there is little of special interest to record directly connected with their gardens. They all have good trees, and are kept up much in the same style.

Red Lion Square is an exception. It has a longer history, and now its garden differs from the rest, as it is open to the public, and a great boon in this crowded district. It takes its name from a Red Lion Inn, which stood in the fields long before any other houses had grown up near it. It was to this inn that the bodies of the regicides Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw were carried, when they were exhumed from Westminster Abbey and taken, with all the horrible indignities meted out to traitors, to Tyburn. A tradition, probably without foundation, was for long current that a rough stone obelisk, which stood afterwards in the Square, marked the spot where Cromwell’s body was buried by friends who rescued the remains from the scaffold. The houses were built round it at the end of the seventeenth century, but the space in the middle seems, like all other squares at this time, to have been more or less a rubbish heap, and a resort of “vagabonds and other disorderly persons.” In 1737 the inhabitants got an Act of Parliament to allow them to levy a rate to keep the Square in order. A contemporary, in praising this determination to beautify the Square, “which had run much to decay,” hopes that “Leicester Fields and Golden Square will soon follow these good examples.” The “beautifying” consisted in setting up a railing round it, with watch-houses at the corners, while the obelisk rose in the centre out of the rank grass.

The present garden, when first opened to the public, was managed by the Metropolitan Gardens Association, but since 1895 the London County Council have looked after it; the inhabitants having made a practically free gift of it for the public benefit. The nice old trees, flowers, seats, and fountain make it a much less gloomy spot than during any time of its history since the Red Lion kept solitary watch in the fields.

The largest of all the squares is Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The garden, which is 7¼ acres in extent, was, after many lengthy negotiations, finally opened to the public in 1895. The fine old houses which survive, show the importance and size of Inigo Jones’s original conception. It has been said that the Square is exactly the same size as the base of the Great Pyramid, but this is not the case. The west side, which was completed by Inigo Jones, was begun in 1618, but the centre of the Square was left an open waste till long after that date. The Fields, before the building commenced, were used as a place of execution, and Babington and his associates met a traitor’s death, in 1586, on the spot where it was supposed they had planned some of their conspiracy. The surrounding houses had been built, and the ground was no longer an open field when William, Lord Russell, was beheaded there in 1683. The scaffold was erected in what is now the centre of the garden. The Fields for many years bore a bad name, and were the haunt of thieves and ruffians of all sorts. When things reached such a climax, that the Master of the Rolls was knocked down in crossing the Fields, the centre was railed in. This was done about 1735, with a view to improving their condition, and they remained closed, and kept up by the inhabitants, until a few years ago. The chief feature in the pleasant gardens now are the very fine trees. There are some patriarchal planes, with immense branches, under which numbers of people are always to be seen resting. The houses, Old Lindsay House, Newcastle House, the College of Surgeons, Sir John Soane’s Museum, with long histories of their own, and all the lesser ones, with a sleepy air of dingy respectability and ancient splendour, now look down on a most peaceful, well-kept garden, and Gay’s lines of warning are no longer a necessary caution:—

Adjoining the Fields is New Square, which used to be known as Little Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and earlier still as Fickett’s Field or Croft. It was built in 1687. Fickett’s Fields occupied a wider area, and until 1620 they, like the larger Fields, were a place of execution. The site of New Square was planted and laid out in very early days. The Knights of St. John in 1376 made it into a walking place, planted with trees, for the clerks, apprentices, and students of the law. In 1399 a certain Roger Legit was fined and imprisoned for setting mantraps with a “malicious intention to maim the said clerks and others,” as they strolled in their shaded walks. This Square, like all others, went through phases of being unkept and untidy, but was finally remodelled, into its present neat form, in 1845.

Eastwards, into the heart of London there are the squares which are the remains of the open ground without the City walls. Charterhouse Square, which is now a retired, quiet spot with old houses telling of a former prosperity, has a history reaching back to the fourteenth century. In the days of the Black Death, when people were dying so fast that the Chronicler of London, Stowe, says that “scarce the tenth person of all sorts was left alive,” the “churchyards were not sufficient to receive the dead, but men were forced to chuse out certaine fields for burials: whereupon Ralph Stratford, Bishop of London, in the yeere 1348 bought a piece of ground, called No man’s land, which he inclosed with a wall of Bricke, and dedicated for buriall of the dead, builded thereupon a proper Chappell, which is now enlarged, and made a dwelling-house: and this burying plot is become a faire Garden, retaining the old name of Pardon Churchyard.” It was very soon after this purchase, that the Carthusian monastery was founded hard by; but although the land was bought by the Order, Pardon Churchyard was maintained as a burial-ground for felons and suicides. After the dissolution of the monasteries, when Charterhouse School and Hospital had been established by Thomas Sutton, the houses round the other three sides of the Square began to be built. One of the finest was Rutland House, once the residence of the Venetian Ambassador. It is still a quiet, quaint place of old memories; and the garden, with two walks crossing each other diagonally, and some fair-sized trees, has a solemn look, as if, even after all the centuries that have passed, it had some trace of its origin. Finsbury Circus and Finsbury Square are very different. They are more modern, bustling places which have entirely effaced the past. That they were, for long years, the most resorted to of open spaces, where Londoners took their walks is well-nigh forgotten, except in the name Finsbury, or Fensbury, the fen or moor-like fields without the walls. Bethlehem Hospital, known as Bedlam, was, for many generations, the only large building on the Fields. Finsbury Square was begun more than a hundred years ago, and but for the few green trees, nothing suggests the former country origin. Trinity Square, by the Tower, is so unique in aspect and association that it must be mentioned. In the sixteenth century the “tenements and garden plots” encroached on Tower Hill right up to the “Tower Ditch,” and from the earliest time some kind of garden existed at the Tower. When it was a royal residence, frequent entries appear in the accounts of payments for the upkeep of the garden. Although so much has changed, and the wild animals that afforded amusement for centuries are removed, it is pleasant to see the moat turned into walks, and well planted with iris and hardy plants, and making quite a bright show in summer, in contrast to the sombre grey walls.

Away in the East End there are numbers of other gloomy little squares whose gardens are the playground of the neighbourhood. They are useful spaces of air and light, and the few trees and low houses surrounding them give a little ventilation in some of the very crowded districts. They are all much alike; in some more care has been taken in the planting and selection of the trees than in others. There is De Beauvoir Square, Dalston; Arbour Square, off the Commercial Road; York Square, Stepney; Wellclose, near the Mint and London Docks; Trafalgar Square, Mile End; and many others dotted about among the dismal streets. Turning to the West End again, the largest of the square spaces is Vincent Square, which forms the playground of the Westminster boys. It derives its name from Dr. Vincent, the head-master who was chiefly instrumental in obtaining it for the use of the boys. It was first marked out in 1810, and enclosed by railings in 1842. The 10 acres of ground were part of Tothill Fields, and the site was a burial-place in the time of the Great Plague.

There is nothing of historical interest in the Squares of Belgravia. The ground covered by Belgrave Square was known as Five Fields, which were so swampy that no one had attempted to build on them. It was the celebrated builder, Thomas Cubitt, who in 1825 was able by draining, and removing clay, which he used for bricks, to reach a solid foundation, and in a few years had built Belgrave and Eaton Squares and the streets adjoining. The site of the centre of Belgrave Square was then a market-garden. Ebury Square, the garden of which is open to the public, and tastefully laid out, was built about 1820. The farm on that spot, which in 1676 came to the Grosvenor family, was a farm of 430 acres in Queen Elizabeth’s time, and is mentioned as early as 1307, when Edward I. gave John de Benstede permission to fortify it. There was only one road across the swampy ground from St. James’s to Chelsea, and that was the King’s Road, which followed the line of the centre of Eaton Square. There were, however, numerous footpaths, infested by footpads and robbers at night, and bright with wild flowers and scented by briar roses by day. There is a great sameness among all the squares between Vauxhall Bridge and the Pimlico Road. Of this latter original-sounding name there seems no satisfactory explanation. The space between Warwick Street and the river, was in old times occupied by the Manor House of Neyte, and in later days by nurseries and a tea garden, known as the Neat House. The ground near Eccleston Square was an osier bed. The whole surface was raised by Cubitt, with soil from St. Katherine’s Docks in 1827, and the houses built, and square gardens laid out; Eccleston in 1835, Warwick 1843, St. George’s 1850, and so on until the whole was covered. The gardens are all in the same style, and have no horticultural interest. The garden in front of Cadogan Place varied most from the usual pattern, having been designed by Repton. “Instead of raising the surface to the level of the street, as had usually been the custom, by bringing earth from a distance,” he “recommended a valley to be formed through its whole length, with other lesser valleys flowing from it, and hills to be raised by the ground so taken from the valleys.” The original intention was to bring the overflow of the Serpentine down Repton’s valley, but this was never done, and the gardens now only show the variation of level in one part. There is a good assortment of trees, and a group of mulberries which bear fruit every year.

Further west again, the old hamlet of Brompton has small, quiet squares of its own. The trees of Brompton Square, that quiet cul-de-sac, and the way through with a nice row of trees to Holy Trinity Church (built in 1829), with Cottage Place running parallel with it, is rather unlike any other corner of London. Before it was built over Brompton was famous for its gardens—first that of London and Wise, in the reign of William III. and Anne, and then that of William Curtis, the editor of the Botanical Magazine. A guide-book of 1792, describes Brompton as “a populous hamlet of Kensington, adjoining Knightsbridge, remarkable for the salubrity of its air. This place was the residence of Oliver Cromwell.” Kensington Square is older than any of the Brompton Squares, having been begun in James II.’s reign, and completed after William III. was living in Kensington Palace. From the first it was very fashionable, and has many celebrated names connected with it—Addison, Talleyrand, Archbishop Herring, John Stuart Mill, and many others. The weeping ash trees and circular beds give the gardens a character of their own. Edwardes differs from all other London Squares. The small houses and large square garden are said by Leigh Hunt, who lived there at one time, to have been laid out to suit the taste of French refugees, who it was thought might take up their quarters there. The small houses were to suit their empty pockets, and the large garden their taste for a sociable out-of-door life. Loudon was an admirer of the design of the garden, which he says was made by Aiglio, an eminent landscape painter, in 1819. The arrangement is quite distinct from other squares—small paths, partly hidden by groups of bushes and larger trees, all round the edge, and from them twisting walks diverge towards the centre. At their meeting-point now stands a shell from the battle of the Alma. The Square with its nice trees, standard hollies, and even a few conifers and carefully-planted beds, is further original in possessing a beadle. This gentleman, who lives in a delightful little house, with a portico in which the visitors to the Square can shelter from the rain, looks most imposing in his uniform and gold-braided hat, and adds greatly to the old-world appearance of the place. It is sad to think the leases all fall in within the next few years, and this quaint personage and vast garden (it is 3¼ acres) and funny little houses may all disappear from London.

It is impossible in such a hasty glance to give more than a very faint sketch of the story of the squares, or a mere suggestion of the romance attached to them. Though the gardening in many leaves much to be desired, it is well to appreciate things as they are, and enjoy to the full the pleasure the sight of the huge planes in Berkeley or Bedford Squares, or Lincoln’s Inn Fields, can bring even to the harassed Londoner. When the sun shines through the large leaves, and the chequered light and shade play on the grass beneath, and sunbeams even light up the massive black stems, which defy the injurious fogs, they possess a soothing and refreshing power. They, indeed, add to the enjoyment, the health, and the beauty of London.