London's
Tea Gardens
An essay by William B Boulton
Visit
page one, two, three,
four, five,
six, seven,
eight, nine,
ten, eleven
LONDON
has always shown a disposition to make the best of a short summer
and a fickle climate. You may turn to the letters, or diaries,
or news-sheets of any period since that of the Stuarts, and
find continuous record of a public ever ready to support an
entertainment which included among its attractions the consumption
of victuals in the open air. The peg upon which this attraction
was hung has never been a matter of great moment. Highly-born
people flocked to Spring Gardens in the days of Charles the
First without intending to play bowls. The Mulberry Garden of
the same times was only an attractive title for an open-air
restaurant. Music and the promenade were the excuses for eating
suppers at Vauxhall. The waters of Bagnigge Wells were little
drunk by the humbler people who flocked there, except in the
form of tea. And coming to more recent times, the fireworks
and the twenty thousand additional lamps of the Vauxhall and
Cremorne of the first half of the [twentieth] century had less
to do with the success of those famous institutions than the
bad food and worse liquor, which Londoners are ever ready to
pay for at exorbitant rates if only served out of doors.
There
is, in fact, an unbroken tradition of al fresco entertainment
in London over a period of two centuries at least. From the
days of Charles the First there is continuous record of junketings
in one part of the town or another. Let us turn to the accounts
of these old merrymakings, scattered in newspapers and magazines;
preserved in advertisements, often of an almost touching quaintness;
in letters and memoirs, and chance phrases of the diaries of
generations long since asleep; in the records also, it must
be confessed, of police courts and hostile licensing authorities.
The draughtsmen and the engravers of a century were often busy
with the doings at these places, and will give us much help
in repeopling their forgotten shades and arbours, and in recalling
a phase of social life which provided one of the chief relaxations
of numbers of our citizen ancestors.
We
know little or nothing of the al fresco entertain-ment in London
before the days of Charles the First, and its vogue may be said
to have come to an end with the extinction of Cremorne within
the memory of those not yet past middle age: just as the need
of open air relaxation in London was growing sorest, as it would
seem. That, as we say, gives a period of over two centuries
during which the alfresco entertainment flourished, a space
of time in which London and the needs of its inhabitants have
been totally transformed. It is important to remember this fact,
and to think of the London of all but the present century as
a great centre of population indeed, but compared with its present
huge bulk, as a relatively small town. Take any old map, for
example, of the middle years of the period we have marked out
as that of the London al fresco, 1750 to 1760, the palmy days
of its vogue, and trace the boundaries of London upon it.
When
George the Third came to the throne, London, including Westminster,
was bounded by Oxford Street and Holborn on the north, by the
river on the south, by the outer boundary of the city on the
east, and by Hyde Park, Arlington Street, and St. James' Street
on the west. All the rest of modern London was suburban merely,
or open and pleasant country interspersed with wild heaths,
and dotted with ancient villages. That country stretched out
fingers and touched the city wall itself at Finsbury and the
Tower. The fashionable dwellers in the Savoy and t he lawyers
of the Temple looked across the river to t he hills of Surrey
and Kent; and there is room for reflection in the fact that
the Zoological Gardens, which were not opened till 1828, had
for years to be fenced against the hares and rabbits which nibbled
the hark off their shrubs and dug up their bulbs.
It
was in and about a town of such dimensions then, and with such
surroundings, that the al fresco entertainment took origin and
developed, a town thickly populated and stuffy, it is true,
the bulk of whose inhabitants lived and died within the limits
of their own streets, but still a town whose innermost slum
was within easy walk of a delightful country, and whose suburbs
were without the distressing squalor, and vulgarity of architecture
which make for some of us the oldest part of London to-day its
most cheerful part.
It
was the citizens of such a town, sober merchants and shopkeepers,
apprentices, sempstresses, and artisans who worked continuously,
but leisurely and without much stress, during the week and spread
themselves over an area of many square miles on Sundays, who
formed the chief patrons of the al fresco entertainment. The
lawyers and military men who filled the chief of the few recognised
professions of the last century, supplied their quota of course,
and the aristocracy came to most of the alfresco entertainments
at one time or another, but merely as incidental visitors.
Continue
to page 2 of The Tea Gardens
