The London pleasure gardens of the eighteenth century

Chapter 63: THE CASTLE INN AND TEA-GARDENS, COLEBROOKE ROW, ISLINGTON

Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

History - British History - 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.

THE CASTLE INN AND TEA-GARDENS, COLEBROOKE ROW, ISLINGTON

The Castle Inn is mentioned in 1754 as a Sunday resort of the London “cit.,” who frequented it in the evening to smoke his pipe and obtain the light refreshment of cyder and heart-cakes. The house must have stood nearly alone till 1768, when the oldest portion of the street called Colebrooke Row was built. The Castle Inn, with its tea gardens, was then the last house but one at the northern end of the Row.[156] A pleasant nursery garden occupied, till about 1822, six acres of the ground in the rear of Colebrooke Row.

The inn and tea gardens were still in existence about 1772, but the house had ceased to be a place of public entertainment at the time when Nelson published his Islington, i.e. 1811.

[The Connoisseur, No. 26 (1754); Nelson’s Islington (1811), p. 385; Lewis’s Islington (1842), pp. 351, 352.]