[124] Woodward’s Eccentric Excursions, p. 18.

[125] Before 1702.

[126] The Country Journal, or the Craftsman, 7 March, 1729–30. If an allusion in a pamphlet of 1735—A seasonable examination of the pleas and pretensions of ... Playhouses erected in defiance of Royal Licence (London, printed for T. Cooper, 1735)—may be relied on, Pancras Wells had about that time some kind of (unlicensed) theatrical or “variety” entertainments resembling those of Sadler’s Wells.

[127] According to Roffe (St. Pancras), Pancras Wells occupied the south side of Church Hill from its base to its summit. Palmer in his St. Pancras, published in 1870, says the Well “is now enclosed in the garden of a private house, neglected and passed out of mind.”

[128] It is shown in the bird’s-eye view of Pancras Wells of 1730. In April 1731, James Dalton, a notorious footpad, robbed a linenpedlar at night near the Adam and Eve after drinking with him at the tavern (Pinks’s Clerkenwell, p. 549).

[129] The Connoisseur, 1754, No. 26.

[130] Five of these pier-glasses were stolen from the long room in 1778 (London Evening Post, 11–14 July, 1778).

[131] Advertisement of 1786 quoted in Clinch’s Marylebone and St. Pancras, p. 157.

[132] There are advertisements of the Adam and Eve issued (at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century?) by G. Swinnerton, Junr. and Co., and by George Lambert (quoted in Walford, vol. v. p. 338). The Picture of London, 1805, mentions the Adam and Eve Tea-gardens, bowling-green, &c., but the conversion of the gardens into the cemetery (authorised by Act of Parliament in 1803) appears to have been already carried out in 1804.

[133] There is a mention of the inn in 1725: the Assembly Rooms were certainly in existence in 1750, and perhaps at an earlier date. The original sign of the inn appears to have been the Black Bull; see Notes and Queries, 1st ser. viii. p. 293; W. Elliot’s Some Account of Kentish Town (1821), p. 65.

[134] The new or altered building contained the circular structure shown in so many views of the place.

[135] The White Conduit meadow long continued in use as a cricket ground. About 1784 and subsequently a club composed of gentlemen and men of rank played its matches there. Among the players were the Duke of Dorset, Lord Winchilsea, Lord Talbot, Col. Tarleton, and Thomas Lord, who afterwards established the Marylebone Cricket Club.

[136] A poem by W. W[oty] printed in the London Chronicle, 1760, vol. vii. p. 531.

[137] “White Conduit Loaves” was a London cry till about 1825.

[138] Forster’s Life of Goldsmith; cp. Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World, Letter 122.

[139] “An Awkward Position,” a painting by A. Solomon, depicts the situation. This was exhibited in the Royal Academy, and reproduced in the Illustrated London News, 14 June, 1851.

[140] Ashton, The Fleet, p. 66.

[141] Bartholomew sold his interest in White Conduit House 25 March, 1795.

[142] About 1772 these performances were prohibited on Sundays.

[143] See a bill in the London Sections Collection, Guildhall Library, and cp. Rogers’s Views of Pleasure Gardens of London, p. 55; also G. Cruikshank’s Ivan Ivanitz Chabert, a print published 13 March, 1818. Hone’s Every Day Book, ii. p. 771, ff.

[144] Born 1769, died 1838.

[145] Till May of 1829 the old building was still standing.

[146] Hone’s Every Day Book, ii. p. 1204.

[147] Cp. the White Conduit concert described in the Sketches by Boz (“The Mistaken Milliner,” cap. viii.).

[148] The Variety Stage, by Stuart and Park, p. 8; 103.

[149] The place appears to be referred to as early as 1633 as “the bowling place in Islington Fields” (Pinks, p. 710).

[150] Mrs. Dobney died at about the age of ninety on 15 March, 1760.

[151] Pinks states that Price had been starring at the Three Hats, Islington, prior to his performance at Dobney’s in 1767 (cp. Memoirs of J. de Castro (1824), p. 29, who says that Price, Thomas Johnson, and old Sampson exhibited at the Three Hats). This may have been the case, though from 1758 to the spring of 1767, Thomas Johnson was certainly the chief equestrian performer at the “Three Hats.”

[152] London Evening Post, August 1776. The Pantheon is the tea-house in Exmouth Street.

[153] Tomlins in his Perambulation of Islington, published in 1858, but written in part about 1849, describes Prospect House as still existing behind Winchester Place, though the bowling green (he says) had been already covered by Winchester Place.

[154] Busby’s Folly is first mentioned in 1664 as a meeting-place of the Society of Bull Feathers Hall, a fraternity of Odd Fellows. It is supposed to have derived its name from Christopher Busby, landlord of the White Lion Inn, Islington, in 1668.

[155] Prologue written and spoken by Mr. Gibson before the Orphan at the New Theatre in the Haymarket on 31 May, 1762 (Owen’s Weekly Chronicle or Universal Journal, June 5 to 12, 1762). The “wonder of a Chelsea field” mentioned in this prologue is evidently Coan, the dwarf (called “the jovial pigmy”), who attracted visitors to the Dwarf’s Tavern in Chelsea Fields (see infra, Star and Garter, Chelsea).

[156] According to Nelson and Lewis, the house facing to the south at the northern termination of Colebrooke Row, was occupied about 1772 by the Rev. John Rule, who there kept a school, of some repute, for gentlemen’s sons. The Castle Inn was the adjoining house and a house next to the Castle was supposed by a doubtful tradition (cp. J. Knight, art. “Cibber” in Dict. Nat. Biog.) to be that in which Colley Cibber died 12 December, 1757 (see Nelson and Lewis). The old house with a red-tiled roof, still existing, though divided into the dwelling houses Nos. 56 and 57 Colebrooke Row, was apparently the Castle Inn. The southern end of Colebrooke Row was built in the present century. The Row also now extends a little farther to the north than when Nelson wrote, so that Rule’s house is not now at the extreme northern end of the Row.

[157] Sampson’s Riding School at Islington is mentioned in the Macaroni and Theatrical Magazine for January 1773, p. 162, together with Astley’s and Hughes’s.

[158] They were probably in existence before this date, but are not marked in the survey of Islington of 1735. An advertisement in The Morning Herald of 22 April, 1786, announces the sale of the ground-rents of an Islington copyhold estate. This estate, situated “in the Lower Street, opposite Cross Street, Islington, and extending down to Frog Lane,” comprised a brick mansion and garden, four dwelling-houses and gardens, and the Barley Mow Tea House and Gardens. A plan of the estate was to be seen at Mr. Spurrier’s, the auctioneer’s, Copthall Court, Throgmorton Street. The estate was therefore between the present Essex Road, where it is touched by Cross Street, and Popham Road.

[159] See the survey of roads in Islington parish in 1735 (Nelson’s Islington, p. 20).

[160] Hone, Every Day Book, i. p. 860. Tomlins (Islington, 204, 205) discovered that in 1753 it was occupied by a currier, and supposes, therefore, that it was not a place of entertainment till after that date. The meeting of the Highbury Society there before 1740 seems however to bear out Hone’s assertion that Copenhagen House was already an inn in the first half of the eighteenth century.

[161] Map in Gibson’s edition of Camden’s Britannia, 1695.

[162] Hone, however, shows (op. cit. 860) that there is some reason for supposing that Copenhagen House was not in existence until after 1624.

[163] On the Highbury Society, see note infra under Highbury Barn.

[164] The graphic account in Hone (op. cit. 862) is worth reading, though too long for quotation here.

[165] Hazlitt’s memoir is published in the Examiner for February 17, 1819; most of it is reprinted in Hone’s Every Day Book, i. 865, ff.

[166] Picture of London, 1823 and 1829; Hone’s Every Day Book, i. 859, 870.

[167] The hay-harvest is referred to in Nelson’s Islington, 1811, 74. A view of 1809, published by Cundee in the Juvenile Tourist, 1810, shows cockney visitors playing in the hay.

[168] Plan in Lewis’s Islington.

[169] J. Hollingshead’s My Lifetime, i. 13. The cricket ground was between Copenhagen House and Maiden Lane.

[170] Tomlins, Perambulation of Islington, p. 205.

[171] F. Miller, St. Pancras, 269.

[172] Highbury Barn, i.e., the grange or farm of Highbury Manor, is mentioned by that name at an early period, and there are extant various leases of it of the fifteenth century, granted by the Prior and Convent of St. John of Jerusalem (e.g. “our certain grange, situate upon the site of our manor of Highbury called Highbury Barn”—see Tomlins’s Perambulation of Islington). The name Highbury Barn is, therefore, much older than the date of the incorporation of the large barn of Highbury Farm with the Highbury Tavern premises.

[173] The site of the Prior’s house was occupied by a private residence called Highbury House built in 1781 and immediately opposite the Highbury Barn Tavern.

[174] The Highbury Society, formed by Protestant Dissenters to commemorate the abandonment of the Schism Bill at the end of the reign of Anne, met at first at Copenhagen House, but about 1740 assembled at Highbury Barn. The members beguiled their pilgrimage from Moorfields to Highbury by bowling a ball of ivory at objects in their path. This society was dissolved about 1833.

[175] The younger Willoughby was certainly proprietor in 1792 and later, and Lewis says he succeeded his father on the death of the latter in December 1785. In May 1789 Highbury House (Nichols, Canonbury, p. 31, note) opposite the Tavern was sold by auction, as were also Highbury Tea House with gardens and bowling-green and two good messuages adjoining, together with many fields in the neighbourhood. This sale does not, however, necessarily imply any change in the management of Highbury Barn, which may at that time have been only rented by Willoughby from the owner of Highbury House and the adjoining property.

[176] A few years previous to 1811 Willoughby cultivated at one end of the gardens a small plantation of hops, and afterwards erected a brewery on the premises. Highbury Barn was sometimes called “Willoughby’s Tea Gardens” (Picture of London, 1802).

[177] Lysons, Nelson and Lewis all identify the moated house called in the Survey of 1611 “The Devil’s House” or the “Lower House” with the old Tallington or Tollington Manor House. In the survey of the roads of Islington (Nelson’s Islington, p. 20), however, both Tallington House and Devil’s House are separately marked, the two being divided by Heame Lane, a lane running at right angles to Tallington (Devil’s) Lane. This Tallington House must therefore have been an eighteenth-century residence and not the old Manor House.

[178] Nelson (Islington), writing about 1811, says that about thirty or forty years before his time (1776?) the landlord’s name was Fawcett.

[179] This seems to be implied by Nelson (Islington, 1811), who says that in his time the old “house had been fitted up in the modern taste.”

[180] Lewis’s Islington, 1841, mentions the house as still existing, and it is described as still standing in Tomlins’s Perambulation of Islington, a work published in 1858, but in part written nine years before the date of publication.

[181] Tea-drinking on Sunday at Little Hornsey is mentioned in the Connoisseur, No. 68, May 15, 1755, and Hornsey Wood is referred to in The Idler, No. 15, July 1758, in a way which implies that its reputation as a place of Sunday recreation was already well established. It appears from a passage in Low Life, referred to in the next note, that in or before 1764 the sign of the tavern was The Horns. The place was, however, usually known as Hornsey Wood House, and in its latest days as Hornsey Wood Tavern.

[182] Low Life (1764), p. 46.

[183] Mr. Rose, the “citizen at Vauxhall,” described in the Connoisseur, May 1755, No. 68, used to grumble when his wife and daughters went “to Little Hornsey to drink tea.”

[184] Newspaper cutting, 1753 (W. Coll.).

[185] See Boyne’s Trade Tokens, ed. Williamson, ii. p. 818. This token is undated. The only dated token of Hampstead is one of 1670.

[186] The “Mirmillo” of Garth’s Dispensary.

[187] The modern public-house in Well Walk called the Wells Tavern, though at one period, (before 1840) bearing the sign of the Green Man, is probably on the site of the original tavern.

[188] Sion Chapel (the exact site of which is unknown) is of course distinct from the Episcopal Chapel into which the Great Room was converted in 1733.

[189] Baker’s comedy, Hampstead Heath, London, 1706.

[190] The Country Journal, or the Craftsman for 16 October, 1736, has the notice:—“On Sunday between seven and eight in the evening one Mr. Thomas Lane, a farrier of Hampstead, going home from the Spaniards upon the Heath near the house called Mother Huff’s,” was attacked and robbed and stripped naked by three men who jumped out of the bushes.

[191] Lysons’s Magna Britannia, vol. iii. 1724, p. 44.

[192] This lady had made an earlier appearance at Cuper’s Gardens; see Welsted’s Epistle on False Fame.

[193] The spring at this time was adjacent to the Great Room, and was in this position, i.e. on the opposite side to the existing fountain, at any rate as late as 1806.

[194] In Bickham’s Musical Entertainer (1733, &c.).

[195] Evelina (1778), letter li.

[196] The house, No. 17 in Well Walk, which is just behind the existing fountain, has a shallow well supposed to contain the source of the original spring.

[197] MS. History of Middlesex, 1752, quoted by Park.

[198] A Modern Sabbath, 1797, p. 53; see also Woodward’s Eccentric Excursions, 13.

[199] Dickens, Pickwick Papers, cap. xlvi.

[200] Cp. The Idler, No. 15, July 1758.

[201] Lysons, Environs, ii. 527.

[202] Evelyn (Diary, 2 June, 1676) describes the gardens as very large and woody, but ill kept.

[203] E.g. “Galloway Races” in 1725 and 1729.

[204] Ambulator, 1774; Dodsley’s London, 1761.

[205] From the manuscript history of Middlesex quoted by Park (Hampstead), the spring would appear to have been discovered about 1742; the date on the reservoir containing the water was, however, 1714, and Walford (v. 245) states that the spring was known before 1600. But there is no evidence that Kilburn Wells was a place of entertainment earlier than about 1742, though the Bell tavern dated from about 1600.

[206] Richard Owen Cambridge, Dialogue between a master and his servant (1752). “Kupers” = Cuper’s Gardens, Lambeth.

[207] Picture of London, 1802 and 1829.

[208] Gibson, View of the Gardens near London, Dec. 1691.

[209] Lord Ranelagh’s house remained standing till 1805, and was used in connexion with the Ranelagh entertainments.

[210] Robinson lived at Prospect Place adjoining the gardens. He died on 3 March, 1777.

[211] Cp. Walpole’s letter to Mann of 26 May, 1742: “The building and disposition of the gardens cost sixteen thousand pounds.”

[212] Walpole to Mann, 26 May, 1742.

[213] Walpole to Conway, 29 June, 1744.

[214] Walpole to Montagu, 26 May, 1748.

[215] Gray to Chute, July 1745 (Gray’s Works, ed. Gosse, ii. 125, ff.).

[216] Works, ed. Gosse, ii. 139.

[217] See especially Kearsley’s Strangers’ Guide (1793?).

[218] This was the number about 1793.

[219] Burney says that the first organist was Keeble, who was succeeded by Butler. Burney himself was organist in 1770.

[220] Boswell, Life, chap. xxvi. p. 236, ed. Croker.

[221] Life, 1777–1778, chap. lxi. p. 561, ed. Croker.

[222] In the early days, sometimes one shilling and two shillings, including the breakfast and the morning concert. On special nights when fireworks were displayed, the price was raised to three shillings or more. Tickets costing from half a guinea to two guineas were issued for the masquerades.

[223] Sometimes it was advertised as open “every evening.” People were allowed to walk in the gardens and view the Rotunda during the day-time for one shilling.

[224] “Harlequin in Ranelagh,” London Magazine, May 1774.

[225] Cp. Gent. Mag. 1764, p. 247.

[226] Ranelagh House: a satire, 1747.

[227] London Magazine, 1774.

[228] Other early vocalists were:—Mrs. Storer (1751); Miss Young (1755); Miss Formantel (Ten favourite songs sung by Miss Formantel at Ranelagh, music by Mr. Oswald, published July 1758).

[229] According to a statement of Burney’s (note in Croker’s ed. of Boswell’s Johnson, p. 143, anno “1763”), the salt-box song was sung by Beard accompanied on that instrument by Brent, the fencing master, while Skeggs played on the broomstick as bassoon. Croker assigns the composition, and apparently the first performance, of the Ode to 1769, and states that the first edition (which he himself had seen) of it bears the date 1749, a date which he considered to be a misprint for 1769. But the date 1769 is, as some later writers have seen, clearly erroneous, and the composition—and possibly the first performance at Ranelagh—must be assigned to 1759. The published edition of the Ode, in the British Museum, is dated (May) 1763, and the Ode was undoubtedly performed at Ranelagh on 10 June of that year (1763). (See Annual Register; Lloyd’s Evening Post, 8–16 June, 1763.)

[230] Cp. Six new English songs composed by Ferdinando Tenducci, and to be sung by him at Ranelagh. Sold by the author at his lodging in the Great Piazza, Covent Garden, 1763 (W. Coll.).

Other performers at this period were:—1762: Champness, Hudson, Miss Thomas, Miss Brent. 1763: Dearle, Miss Wright, Miss Brent. 1765 (?): the elder Fawcett.

[231] Gent. Mag. 1767, p. 277.

[232] Walpole’s Letters, ed. Cunningham, ii. 150, ff. (Walpole to Mann, 3 May, 1749).

[233] It is to be feared that this advertisement was an invention of the editor’s, but it would have had little point for his readers had it not been actually based on familiar incidents of the Ranelagh masquerades.

[234] Mrs. Baddeley also sang there in 1772.

[235] An impetus to the fireworks seems to have been first given by Angelo, father of Henry Angelo, who directed the displays in 1766. In 1771 the fireworkers were Clitherow and Caillot.

[236] The admission ticket for the Regatta Ball (Lake scene) was prepared by Cipriani and Bartolozzi.

[237] Evening Mail, Feb. 15–17, 1792.

[238] Newspaper cutting [W. Coll.] assigned to 28 June (referring to 27 June), 1793. Mr. Vizetelly (Chevalier D’Eon, p. 322) states that D’Eon fenced at Ranelagh in 1794. The managers of Ranelagh had given the Chevalier, who was then in money difficulties, a benefit night in 1791 (24 June).

[239] Another great fête of this period (June 1802 or 1803?) was the Ball given by the Spanish Ambassador.

[240] The European Magazine, October 1802, and several newspapers of the time.

[241] The name was spelt Strumbels, Strombels and Strumbello. Davis (Knightsbridge) calls it Stromboli House.

[242] O’Keefe’s Recollections.

[243] Davis’s Knightsbridge. Strumbelo is marked in the map of 1789 in Fores’s New Guide.

[244] The Star and Garter was at the end of Five Fields Row. In Faulkner’s time (Chelsea, ii. p. 354), about 1829, the house, no longer used as a tavern, was Mr. Homden’s Academy.

[245] On the Cherokee Chiefs, see Forster’s Goldsmith, bk. iii. chap. vi. (ann. 1762).

[246] John Coan, “the unparalleled Norfolk Dwarf,” died there 16 March 1764 (Daily Advertiser, 17 March, 1764).

[247] The Dwarf’s Tavern according to Faulkner (Chelsea, ii. 354), was situated in Chelsea Fields “on the spot which was afterwards called Spring Gardens, between Ebury Street and Belgrave Terrace,” and which was subsequently (a few years before 1829) occupied by Ackerman’s Waterproof Cloth Manufactory. This Spring Garden is the place usually marked in the maps (e.g., Horwood’s Plan, B. 1795) as the New Spring Gardens, Chelsea, and was a place of public entertainment, as may be inferred from a newspaper advertisement of January 1792: “J. Louis, of New Spring Gardens, Chelsea, having fitted up likewise the above house (i.e. York Coffee House) in Norris Street, Haymarket, for the winter, serves dinners and suppers there.”

This Spring Garden was distinct from the Spring Gardens, Knightsbridge, a place frequented by Pepys, and perhaps identical with the World’s End, Knightsbridge (see Davis’s Knightsbridge, p. 149, ff.). The Knightsbridge Spring Gardens (which stood about where William Street joins Lowndes Square) ceased to be a place of entertainment before 1773, in which year the house belonging to them was occupied by Dr. C. Kelly, who had his anatomical museum there. Walford (v. 18) engraves from a drawing in the Crace Collection a view of the “Spring Gardens,” which he assigns to the Knightsbridge Spring Gardens, but it is possibly a representation of the Chelsea Spring Gardens.

[248] O’Keefe’s Recollections, vol. i. p. 88: “1762. At Cromwell House, Brompton, once the seat of Oliver, was also a tea-garden concert.”

[249] The price appears on the (undated) pewter and brass admission tickets to Cromwell’s Gardens. The British Museum has four specimens in pewter, with Cromwell’s head; and one of the brass tickets.

[250] The Sunday Rambler visits the gardens between 7.30 and 9 p.m.

[251] I follow the Modern Sabbath, ed. 1797, in stating that Cromwell’s Gardens were identical with the Florida Gardens. In the second edition of the Sunday Ramble (1776) Cromwell’s Gardens at Brompton are described under that name, and in the 1797 ed. (A Modern Sabbath) almost the same description is repeated, and it is expressly stated that the name of the place had been changed from Cromwell’s to Florida Gardens. On the other hand, Faulkner describes the Florida Gardens as having been originally a nursery garden kept by “Hyam” (he is called Hiem in the advertisements) and converted by him (for the first time, it is implied) into a place of public amusement. Faulkner after describing Hale House, mentions Cromwell’s Gardens as a separate place of amusement earlier than the Florida Gardens. The contemporary authority of the Modern Sabbath seems, however, preferable; especially as Faulkner does not appear to be able to state the precise site of Cromwell’s Gardens. A further complication may perhaps be thought to be introduced by the passage in O’Keefe (cited in Note 1) where Cromwell’s Gardens are described as “at Cromwell House” (i.e. Hale House). But the inhabitants of Cromwell House from 1754 to 1794, or later, are well known to have been people of substance, and the gardens proper of Hale House could hardly have been employed as a tea-garden. The Florida Gardens (afterwards occupied by Canning’s Gloucester Lodge) were (as stated above) adjacent to Hale House, and may possibly at one time have belonged to its owners, and have been let out partly as a tea-garden and partly as a nursery. The writer of the Modern Sabbath in fact remarks that Cromwell’s Gardens is supposed to have taken its name from the ground being formerly the patrimonial estate of the Protector who once had a palace here upon the site of which is a handsome seat (i.e. Hale House). The change of name from Cromwell to Florida took place (as appears from the various editions of a Sunday Ramble) at some time between 1776 and 1797. I suggest that the change took place about 1780, because Lysons (who, however, does not mention Cromwell’s Gardens) says that the place was “much puffed in the daily papers between the years 1780 and 1790 by the name of Florida Gardens.” In any case they certainly were advertised by Hiem as the Florida Gardens as early as 1781.