CHAPTER 32

Gardens of Delight

The pleasure gardens of Vauxhall, and of Ranelagh, and of Cremorne, sprang up by the side of the river in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their charm and popularity were in large part the consequence of their riverine location. Once more the Thames created the atmosphere, or setting, for the deliberate licence of the populace. The first of them, Cuper’s Gardens, was beside the river in the area then known as Lambeth Marsh but what is more recognisable now as the southern approach to Waterloo Bridge. It was opened in the 1630s, with gardens and bowling greens and serpentine walks as well as the attendant pleasures of a tavern and a supper room. In 1708 the author of A New View of London, Edward Hatton, described the venue as that to which “many of the westerly part of the town resort for diversion during the summer season.” A musical pavilion was opened in the 1730s, and concerts were performed in front of large audiences. There were also firework displays. These are the constituents of riverside pleasure: food and drink, music and fireworks. Yet Cuper’s Gardens also became a haunt of thieves and pick-pockets, to the extent that it was refused a licence in 1753 and was closed down seven years later.

The New Spring Garden was close to Battersea and, before the opening of Westminster Bridge in 1750, could only be reached from the more fashionable side of the river by wherry. It had been established just before the Restoration of 1660, in anticipation of happy times, and changed its name to Vauxhall Gardens in 1785. In the seventeenth century it was known for its alcoves, its bands, its comic singers, its illuminated lamps hanging on the boughs of adjacent trees, its greedy waiters and its expensive drinks. Pepys visited the Garden in 1667, and in his diary remarked that “to hear the nightingale and other birds, and here fiddles and there a harp, and here a Jew’s trump and here laughing, and there fine people walking, is very diverting.” He was not so pleased, however, with the riotous behaviour of the young men who flocked to the gardens for female company. Or as a ballad put it:

Women squeak and men drunk fall,

Sweet enjoyment of Vauxhall.

Another contemporary song was rather more discreet about the London citizens who have

Sail’d triumphant in the liquid way,

To hear the fiddlers of Spring Garden play.

In the eighteenth century the Gardens were refurbished with supper rooms, artificial ruins, water spectacles and an orchestra large enough to hold fifty musicians. Handel’s “Music for the Royal Fireworks” was performed here in front of an audience of twelve thousand people. A statue of the composer was later placed beside the entrance. A rotunda was built, 70 feet (21.3 m) in diameter, with a picture room attached. It has been conjectured that the domes of Vauxhall in fact materially influenced the architecture of the Festival Gardens, erected in Battersea Park in 1951; the scenery of the Thames might then be seen to regenerate itself.

Rowlandson completed an aquatint of the Gardens in 1784, with the unmistakable figure of Samuel Johnson disporting himself in a supper box close to the orchestra. When Goldsmith described the variegated scene as one uniting “rural beauty with courtly magnificence,” he might have been remarking upon the influence of the river itself that contains both elements within its progress. Vauxhall was not frequented for its cultural pleasures alone, however, and there were events concerning tightrope walkers, fireworks and the new craze of “ballooning.” Fire and air were therefore being celebrated by water. The portions of food served here were considered to be exiguous, however, and it was claimed that a competent waiter could cover the 11 acres (4.4 ha) of the grounds with the slices from one ham.

There were two celebrated pleasure gardens to the north of the Thames, in the neighbourhood of Chelsea, known as Cremorne Gardens and Ranelagh Gardens. Ranelagh was situated in the eastern section of what is now Chelsea Hospital Gardens. It became a commercial pleasure garden in 1742, and survived for sixty-one years on the customary riverine diet of music, balloons, fireworks, food and drink. A rotunda, bigger than the Pantheon in Rome, was erected in its grounds and was subsequently painted by Canaletto; this was a resort, with a great fireplace at its centre, for anybody who “loves eating, drinking, staring and crowding.” There was also a Chinese pavilion, and an orchestra where the young Mozart once played. It out-Vauxhalled Vauxhall, and in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771) Lydia Melford described it as “the enchanted palace of a genio, adorned with the most exquisite performances of painting, carving and gilding, enlightened with a thousand golden lamps that emulate the noonday sun.” It was one of the many pleasure domes of the Thames. Its charms have not entirely deserted it, however, and it is now the setting for the annual Chelsea Flower Show.

Cremorne Gardens was a little further upriver, on the bankside site now largely covered by Lots Road Power Station. It was opened in the 1840s, almost half a century after the demise of Ranelagh, complete with a theatre, a banqueting hall, a dancing platform and a bowling saloon together with various “arbours” and “bowers” and grottoes without which no riverside resort was complete. In 1848 it was the site for the first flight of a “steam-powered aeroplane,” which flew some 40 metres (131 feet) before hitting a canvas barrier. There were fireworks and balloon ascents, once more, as well as more dubious pleasures. In The Seven Curses of London (1869) James Greenwood described Cremorne Gardens in the “season”:

By about ten o’clock age and innocence—of whom there had been much in the place that day—had retired, weary of amusement, leaving the massive elms, the grass-plots, and the geranium-beds, the kiosks, temples, “monster platforms,” and “crystal circle” of Cremorne to flicker in the thousand gaslights there for the gratification of the dancing public only. On and around that platform waltzed, strolled, and fed some thousand souls, perhaps seven hundred of them men of the upper and middle class, the remainder prostitutes more or less prononcées.

The Gardens were condemned by the minister of the local Baptist chapel as “the nursery of every kind of vice” the proprietor sued, but received only a farthing in damages. In 1877, in a fit of mid-Victorian rectitude, the place was closed down. All that is left is a small patch of green, still called by the same name. There were also smaller resorts, such as the seventeenth-century Cherry Gardens at Rotherhithe; Cherry Gardens was then succeeded by tea-gardens, but they were closed down by the end of the nineteenth century. Cherry trees, however, are now being grown upon the site.

There were pleasure gardens, of a kind, upon the water itself. In the nineteenth century an island in the river, known as Walnut Tree Ait for the prevalence of its osiers, was transformed into an island of entertainment by the erection of a hotel and a concert hall. It was purchased by the theatrical impresario, Fred Karno, and renamed the Karsino. Karno then described it as “the hub of the universe for river people,” but it did not survive the First World War. The island was then granted another life as the Thames Riviera, with a ferry service from the southern bank, but still it did not succeed.

The first floating restaurant was envisaged in the seventeenth century, when in 1636 John Rookes petitioned the king for the opening of a boat on the Thames that would serve “such provisions and necessaries as are vendible in the Tavernes and Victuallinge houses especially in the summer season.” The fate of this venture is not known, but the history of floating inns or restaurants on the river is not a particularly successful one.

There was another ship of pleasure upon the Thames, a large barge or houseboat anchored in the river on the bend where “Cleopatra’s Needle” is now to be found, known appositely as “The Folly.” It was formally opened in the seventeenth century, and there is an engraving of it moored in the middle of the river with all the appearance of stateliness and respectability. Built of timber and divided into many separate rooms for the pleasures of the day or the night, it was surmounted by a large platform and balustrade, where its patrons could also take the air. It was at first frequented by the men and women of fashion who, dressed in silk and crinoline, would wait on the bank to be wherried across. It was described by one contemporary moralist as “a musical summer house for the entertainment of quality where they might meet and ogle one another.” Pepys visited the place on 13 April 1688, where he recorded spending a shilling. But, like most riverside locations, it eventually acquired a reputation for vice and “low” company who seemed to specialise in what was called “promiscuous dancing.” Tom D’Urfey wrote a song in 1719, entitled “A Touch of the Thames,” in which he recorded how

When Drapers’ smugg’d Prentices,

With Exchange Girls mostly jolly,

After shop was shut up,

Could sail to the Folly.

A German tourist of the same century recorded that “innumerable harlots are to be found there and those who resort to them can take them over to Cupid’s Gardens.” Cupid’s Gardens had become the popular name for Cuper’s Gardens, on the opposite bank. So “the Folly” fell into decay, and the barge was eventually dismantled and chopped into firewood.

There was one perennial complaint about the river gardens that reflected an aspect of the river itself. The population of these places was considered to be too heterogeneous, an unstable combination of the “high” and “low” in society that could on occasion cause fights and even riots. In Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1778) it is said of Vauxhall that “there’s always a riot—and there the folks run about—and there’s such squealing and squalling.” We have already had cause to observe the libertarianism, or democracy, of the river. This also serves to characterise the entertainments held beside it where the rougher elements of London were in a state of comparative equality with the nobility who patronised the assemblies. “There is,” one observer wrote, “his Grace of Grafton down to children out of the Foundling Hospital, from my lady Townshend to the kitten…”

There are gardens, as well as pleasure gardens, that seem to emerge naturally along the banks of the Thames. Many of them are sufficiently well known, including the gardens of the Hospital in Chelsea and the Chelsea Physic Garden close by. Battersea Park, on the southern bank, stretches beside the river. Opposite the gardens of Syon House, which clothe the world in green, lie Kew Gardens, once part of Richmond Gardens, praised for their “wild” or “natural” aspect. A German observer, Count Kielsmanegge, reported that “you pass through fields clothed with grass, through cornfields and a wild ground interspersed with broom and furze, which afford excellent shelter for hares and pheasants.” Erasmus Darwin, in The Botanic Garden (1789–91), commemorates the world of Kew:

So sits enthroned, in vegetable pride,

Imperial Kew, by Thames’s glittering side;

Obedient sails from realms unfurrowed bring

For her the unnamed progeny of Spring.

This was a reflection of the wealth of rare botanical specimens that were brought to Kew from Britain’s colonial possessions. In a similar spirit the Museum of Garden History is still to be found beside the Thames, at Lambeth.

Along the river, between London and Teddington, there were once vast estates of market gardens growing fruit and vegetables for London; raspberries and strawberries, for example, were once an Isleworth speciality. More curiously there was in the eighteenth century a great vineyard on the south bank of the river, not far from the present Waterloo Bridge, which according to Samuel Ireland in his Picturesque Views of the River Thames (1801) was “the richest and most diversified vineyard the world can boast” producing liquor “from humble port to imperial tokay.”

Throughout its existence the river has been the source of fertility. It supports a rich alluvial soil that is never barren except, of course, where it has been forcibly displaced. The countryside of the Thames is lush and green for all seasons. The rich pastures of North Wiltshire led to the claim that they were favoured by God’s presence. In the seventeenth century Thomas Fuller “heard it reported from credible persons that such was the fruitfulness of the [Thames] land, that in spring time, let it be bit bare to the roots, a wand [sapling] laid along therein overnight will be covered with new grown grass by the next morning.” Such is the force that, in the words of Dylan Thomas, through the green fuse drives the flower.

Some of the river’s green eyots (sometimes spelled as aits or aights) possess names that derive from the Saxon people. “Nettle Eyot” and Dumsea Bushes or Domesday Bushes, near Chertsey, are two of these ancient nomenclatures. Dog Ait at Shepperton is similarly old. Even the smallest islands in the river have names—Headpile Ait, Cherry Tree Ait, Flagg Ait and Teynter Ait are little patches of land on the river near Taplow. They have also been called holts or hams. The subject of names is always most difficult. Some eyots have become public parks, while others remain private. They have been centres of entertainment and places of retreat; they have been used by courting couples, and by hermits. They are somewhere out of this world.

The riverside gardens of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries played a part in London’s destiny. The most famous of them must be that in Chelsea belonging to Sir Thomas More. It was here, just by the water, that he closed the wicket gate, parting from his family for ever, before sailing downriver to meet his interrogators at Lambeth. While there, he was asked to walk down into the riverside garden for further reflection on his refusal to obey the king’s commands.

There were great gardens leading down to the banks at York Place, Cardinal Wolsey’s London residence, but the only verdant memorials of Wolsey’s ascendancy are now the gardens of Hampton Court. There was a large and ornate garden attached to the Bridge House of London Bridge, and there had been royal gardens in the Tower of London since the middle of the thirteenth century. There was an orchard within the walls of the Tower, too, complete with vines and fruit trees. The gardens of Bridewell have long since departed, as have the gardens laid out by Lord Protector Somerset. The gardens at Richmond Palace were said to be “moost faire and pleasaunt” with “ryall knottse aleyed and herbid…with many vynys, sedis and straunge frute right goodly besett.” There were also many ecclesiastical gardens, like those belonging to the Bishop of Winchester in Southwark. The space between the Thames and the Strand was in fact entirely taken up by the gardens of the bishops, with the Bishop of Exeter’s Inn, the Bishop of Bath’s Inn and the Bishop of Norwich’s Inn. The view from the river was, literally, of back gardens. There still exist of course the great gardens of Fulham Palace and Lambeth. All of these were designed to be seen from the river, as a token of state and of status. But they were primarily areas of privilege, delightful spaces for private discourse and for self-communing. Their gardens seats and arbours were part of a general moral design “whereby they might the more fullie view and haue delight of the whole beautie of the garden” with its fountains and knot beds and paved alley-ways. They were devoted to “recreation” in an intellectual and civic sense. That is why their position by the river was so essential to their success.

The gardens of Ham House have been restored in accordance to their seventeenth-century design, and the villa of Marble Hill stands in its garden setting. The parks of Bushy and of Richmond reach towards the Thames. Along this part of the river, roughly between Richmond and Hampton, there are in fact many celebrated English gardens designed by Alexander Pope, Charles Bridgeman, William Kent and of course “Capability” Brown. The luxuriousness and fecundity of the riverine setting ensure their survival. The flowing or serpentine line, adumbrated by William Hogarth in his Analysis of Beauty (1753), has always been an intrinsic aspect of the English aesthetic. It is known as the “line of beauty,” curved or curling, like the sinuous grace of the river itself. The landscape of the gardens by the river was, from the eighteenth century, subdued by the “peculiar curve, alike averse to crooked and to straight” that is a reflection of the movement of the Thames. At Syon House and at Strawberry Hill, in Richmond and Isleworth and Twickenham, emerged the “undulating line.” It is the line of the river.