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The London pleasure gardens of the eighteenth century

Chapter 116: RESTORATION SPRING GARDENS, ST. GEORGE’S FIELDS
By Warwick William Wroth
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History - BritishHistory - Early Modern (c. 1450-1750)

About This Book

A detailed survey traces the development, character, and decline of London’s eighteenth-century pleasure gardens, offering descriptive notices of over sixty venues. Arranged by neighbourhood, the work records origins, proprietors, physical layouts, entertainments, and the social atmosphere of each resort, with attention to music, illuminations, rotundas, tea-houses, and seasonal amusements. Entries are supported by illustrations, plans, contemporary advertisements and newspaper extracts, and by annotated notes and references; a collaborating contributor supplies several of the shorter garden accounts.

RESTORATION SPRING GARDENS,
ST. GEORGE’S FIELDS

The Restoration Tavern was in existence in the early part of the reign of Charles II.[290] In 1714 there was a new cock-pit in its grounds and a great match of cock fighting was announced to take place there; “two guineas a battle, and twenty guineas the odd battle” all the week, beginning at four o’clock. The races and popular sports then frequent in St. George’s Fields probably brought additional custom to the house.

In the gardens of the tavern was a purging spring which was advertised[291] in 1733 as already well-known for the cure of all cancerous and scorbutic humours. About the same year a second spring was discovered, a chalybeate “of the nature of Piermont Water but superior.” The water was obtainable every day at the gardens,[292] and was declared to “far exceed” the water at the neighbouring Dog and Duck. Dr. Rendle says that it must have been the mere soakage of a swamp, but whatever may have been the virtues of the spring it was probably before long eclipsed by its rival at the Dog and Duck, though the Restoration was in existence in 1755 and perhaps for some years later.

In 1771 the garden, or at any rate about an acre of it, was taken by William Curtis,[293] the author of Flora Londinensis, who formed a Botanical Garden there which was afterwards open to subscribers until 1789, when the botanist removed to another garden in the more salubrious air of Brompton.

Restoration Garden is marked in the map in Stow’s Survey, 1755, as abutting on the western side of Angel Street (a continuation of the Broad Wall), southern end. In a map of the Surrey side of the Thames showing the proposed roads from Blackfriars Bridge (circ. 1768) the ground is marked as “Public House Gardens” and “Gardens.” The Half-way House from the Borough to Westminster Bridge is marked immediately south of the gardens; and still further south is the Westminster Bridge Road, the end east of the Asylum. St. Saviour’s Union, Marlborough Street (near the New Cut), is now near the site.

[Rendle and Norman, Inns of Old Southwark (1888), pp. 367, 368; and see Notes.]