Cremorne and the Later London Gardens

The open-air resorts described in this volume lack the romantic associations of the classic pleasure-gardens of the eighteenth century, and it is impossible to impart to Cremorne or the Surrey ‘Zoo’ the historic dignity of a Vauxhall or a Ranelagh.  Yet, if these places are undeserving of the detailed treatment that has been accorded to their prototypes, they may claim at least a brief and modest chronicle, which may seem the more necessary because it has mainly to be constructed, not from books, but from stray handbills and forgotten newspapers.  Already, indeed, we are growing accustomed to speak of the nineteenth century as the ‘last,’ and to recognize that the London of Dickens, and Thackeray—the London of the thirties, the forties, and even of the sixties—had a physiognomy of its own.

Such places of resort, for the most part, enjoyed no kind of fashionable vogue; they were frequented (if invidious distinctions must be made) by the lower middle classes and the ‘lower orders.’  Yet they offer some curious glimpses of manners and modes of recreation which may be worth considering.  I have endeavoured to describe some twenty of these places, selecting those which seem, in various ways, to be typical.  To the general reader this selection will be enough—though, I trust, not more than enough—but the London topographer who turns to the appendix and the notes will find a quite formidable list of tea-gardens and tavern-gardens, which, if my aim had been to omit nothing, I could have described in greater detail.

I have taken some pains in compiling these lists, partly from topographical curiosity, partly from the conviction that their enumeration almost rises to the dignity of pointing a moral.  The main contrast is between the tavern and public-house of former days and the gin-palace, with whose aspect—externally, if not (in any sense of the word) internally—we are only too familiar.  A description that I have found in a London guide-book of 1846 of the tea and tavern gardens of that date has already an old-world air: ‘The amusements are innocent, the indulgence temperate; and a suitable mixture of female society renders it [our guide means them] both gay and pleasing.’  The public-house was then, as now, no inconspicuous feature of the Metropolis; yet in the earlier half of the nineteenth century it had, if not exactly gaiety and innocence, some characteristics which tended in that direction—its little gardens in summer, its tavern concerts in winter-time.  In the fifties, or earlier, many of these garden spaces—often, it is true, of Lilliputian dimensions—were marked out as building-ground, which was either sold to alien contractors or utilized by the proprietor of the tavern when he thought fit to erect thereon a roomier and more imposing edifice.  At the same period, or some years later, the increase of music-halls, of local theatres, and places of entertainment, rendered the tavern concert, with its unambitious glee-parties and comic singing, a superfluity.  The disappearance of the tavern concert may not be a matter of keen regret, but the abolition of the garden has altered—and for the worse—the whole character of the public-house.