I've long bored people with the tale of City Road's Eagle pub cropping up in the lyrics of Pop! Goes the Weasel but, last night at the London Fortean Society's fun and informative The Victorian Pleasure Garden with historian Lee Jackson at The Bell in Whitechapel, I realised that I'd not got my story entirely straight. Victorian gadabouts and wastrels did indeed divest themselves of their monies at The Eagle on City Road but, strictly speaking, it wasn't a pub at the time. It was a pleasure garden. Such a large one it even had a rollercoaster!
Don't imagine that meant people weren't getting hammered there though. Quite the opposite. Pleasure gardens may have had hot air balloons, mazes, fireworks, fountains, and fortune tellers but for many the main appeal was that they were a place to go after the pubs had closed that served booze until the wee small hours. Lee told stories of convoys of taxis departing central London for Chelsea's Cremorne Gardens when the pubs chucked out.
But, first, some history - and Lee Jackson was just the man to provide that history. He's written a book, Palaces of Pleasure, about the rise and fall of the pleasure garden and he took us, first, back to their inception in the Georgian era and, further back still, the Restoration. They began in London in the 1660s in Vauxhall where a garden with architectural whimsies, avenues, art, little supper rooms tucked away in alcoves, and a sixty piece orchestra would become the place to see people and be seen in polite society.
Vauxhall became famous (and not just for the thinness of its ham which observers remarked was so slight as to be transparent) and soon others sprang up in its wake. Often in spaces that were not quite urban, not quite rural. To employ a word that's become almost meaningless due to overuse they operated in liminal spaces. Islington and other areas of London saw pleasure gardens spring up but they also appeared in Norwich, Bristol, Birmingham, Manchester, and even in New York.
The Q&A at the end of the evening touched on Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens which many consider to be the last remaining pleasure garden on Earth. The name 'vauxhall' came to mean pleasure garden and often they were open, only in the summer - it gets cold in Britain in the winter, from 5pm until midnight or much later. As described in William Makepeace Thackeray's 1848 novel Vanity Fair they'd often consist of not just fountains, fireworks, and hot air balloon demonstations (a lovely poster shows an advert for the ascent of the Royal Nassau Balloon) but tightrope walkers, ballet, circus performers, cosmoramas, fortune telling hermits, grottoes, gravel paths lit by oil lamps, and unlit paths (or dark walks) designed expressly for 'romantic encounters'!
But by 1820, Vauxhall was struggling financially. It had been bought out by three rich tea packagers (Mr Fish, Mr Guy, and Mr Hughes) who had diversified into running slightly corrupt sounding lotteries (they were known to win themselves) and branding wine. Wine which was so foul tasting and unpopular they couldn't shift it. Wine they then insisted would be the only wine available for visitors to the pleasure gardens of Vauxhall.
It's one way to flog a bad product. Some of the entertainment they put on to distract people from their dodgy plonk was a bit odd too. There were musicians who played their own chins, a fake north pole, and a recreation of a ship entirely entombed in ice! Unsurprisingly their tenure did not last long and Vauxhall Gardens passed through various other owners before closing in 1859.
It wasn't just the poor quality vino and the dubious 'turns' that brought about its downfall. There was increasing moral concern about prostitution in Vauxhall, it was said the garden was 'well stocked with harlots' even on a family fun day, and the aristocracy had, for the most part, stopped coming as there were too many of the hoi polloi lowering the tone.
Cholera was rife and fear of contamination and contagion kept some away. Others were being distracted by the new music hall craze and what with them being indoors music halls could run all through the winter making them far more cost effective than a large garden that sat empty for months on end. Music halls were so 'relaxed' that it was not considered a breach of etiquette if gentlemen wore their toppers indoors. Such decadence.
Vauxhall's closure, however, did not mean the end of the pleasure garden. They battled on for a few more decades into the Victorian era. The one Lee Jackson was most interested in, and focused most of his talk on, was Cremorne Gardens in Chelsea, roughly where the former Lots Road Power Station stands now.
The land was purchased, originally, by an eccentric blunderbuss marksman with the fantastic name of Charles Random. Judging by some of his behaviour, Random was a prime example of nominative determinism. The Kentish Town dweller had done time for lying about the Napoleonic Wars prematurely ending so that he could artificially inflate the value of shares and the events he'd planned for Cremorne included not just billiards and racquets but the shooting of waterfowl and an act called The Italian Salamander which was basically a man dressed up who'd walk through a burning shed.
Nicholson mixed with both gamblers and aristocrats and he promised visitors to Cremorne Gardens such tempting fayre as mazes, Robin Hood themed events, 'wizardism', sham elections, laughing gas, and an invisible poet. Which was just a man hiding in a box. But it was the late opening, the promise of booze, and the polka dancing which really pulled the crowds in.
So many others came and went following Random and Nicholson that I lost track but the schedule of events continued to be as quirky as ever. Often cruel and dangerous too. Alongside of their time temptations like the Faker of Oolu, the Kostroma People, and the Beckwith frogs you could witness a monkey being sent up in a balloon and forced to parachute down. A note was attached to the unfortunate primate informing anyone who should find it that they could receive a two pound cash prize for doing so.
People, too, came to sticky ends. Mons de Groof's homemade parachute, created to resemble bat wings, failed and he plunged to his death and The Female Blondin, a tightrope walker who had successfully crossed the Thames, was crippled for life when she lost her footing entertaining those at a pleasure garden near Highbury Barn!
The accidents and animal cruelty may or may not have been a factor when, in the 1870s, many of the pleasure gardens began to close down. Certainly concerns about prostitution and vice had an affect, as did the incredibly snobbish view that although the entertainment provided was suitable for educated upper and working class people, the lower orders would not be able to control themselves and would end up spending all their money on drink and other fripperies. Some were even accused of dancing 'Satan's hornpipe'!
The spread of suburbia also had an effect as London extended exponentially in all directions bringing the previously 'liminal' pleasure gardens into far more populous areas than they'd previously been in. Scottish philosopher and essayist Thomas Carlyle was far from the only one who complained about the late night noise and traffic. More than a century before the term had been coined, nimbyism was alive and well.
What with music halls going from strength to strength and cheap day trips to the seaside offering alternative, and stiff, competition for summer fun it hardly came as a surprise when many of the pleasure garden owners followed the money and sold their land to property developers. It happened then. It happened now. Twas ever thus.
The Salvation Army made a (crowdfunded) statement purchase of The Eagle on City Road which they immediately closed thus doing their bit not just to stop people sinning but to prevent people having fun. All that's left of the pleasure gardens now are two sets of gates. One in Highbury and the other, those from Cremorne, in the World's End estate.
The pleasure garden era lasted only from the mid-17c to the late 19c but that's still a long time and the story they told, and Lee Jackson superbly put into some kind of narrative sense for us, was one that said a lot about how people lived, thought, and had fun in those days. In some ways very very different to how we do it now but, more often than not, not so dissimilar at all.
I've not even touched on how glove shops and cigar shops in the West End were known as places that gentlemen could take ladies late at night or Whistler's firework painting from a pleasure garden that so upset John Ruskin that it went to court but I hope I've given you a feel for what was yet another interesting evening c/o the London Fortean Society.
The Q&A touched on the Surrey Zoological Gardens (in the Walworth area apparently), Georgian menageries, the shooting of a mad elephant, Poldark, and 'fallen' women and I learnt that London Zoo's success can, in some way, be credited to it inheriting the menagerie from the Tower of London. I also got to hear a salamander described as a 'big fat newt on steroids'.
I'll be back in The Bell next month for a talk on the QAnon conspiracy and although I don't know the first thing about QAnon or any conspiracies relating to it or them I've learnt to trust that the LFS, more often than not, come up with the goods. I'll also be interested to see how much further the pub's renovation has gone. It's being converted into a 'gay space' but so far that's not stretched farther than painting signage on the toilet doors to suggest the promise of a unisex urinal and hanging up a tasteful, black and white photo of George Michael at the height of his designer stubble phase. Thanks to Raymond Noire for giving me the blog title. So much better than Vauxhall and I!
Very useful and informative blogging. Keep spreading knowledge with us.
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