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The London pleasure gardens of the eighteenth century cover

The London pleasure gardens of the eighteenth century

Chapter 98: STROMBOLO HOUSE AND GARDENS, CHELSEA
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.

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.]