UNNOTICED LONDON
[Illustration: CHEYNE ROW]
UNNOTICED
LONDON
BY
E. MONTIZAMBERT
[Illustration]
WITH TWENTY-FOUR
ILLUSTRATIONS
1923
LONDON & TORONTO
J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
FIRST EDITION _March 1922_
REPRINTED _May 1922_, _May 1923_
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
PREFACE
The following brief account of a few of the things that have interested
me in London is not intended for the use of the inveterate sightseer,
for whom so many admirable and complete fingerposts to the study of old
London have been written, by such experts as Mr. Bell, Mr. Wilfred
Whitten, Mr. E. V. Lucas, Mr. Ordish and Mr. Hare. It is meant for the
people who do not realise one-eighth of the stories packed into the
streets of London, the city which, as Sir Walter Besant, that great
London lover, once said, has an unbroken history of one thousand years
and has never been sacked by an enemy. For, in talking about the
extraordinary beauty of London, I became aware of a vast public who have
eyes and see not, who thoroughly dislike the idea of sight-seeing yet
acknowledge their pleasure in a chance discovery made _en route_ to tea
at the Ritz,--people who are appalled at the very idea of entering a
museum. Then there are the travellers who say vaguely that when they can
find time they really mean to see something of London, but they turn
their backs on the greatest city of the world without having seen much
more than Bond Street, because they are obsessed by the idea that to
see London requires some occult store of knowledge and energy, and their
eyes are sealed to the interest and beauty that lie around their path.
Finally there are people like the old lady who, when she heard I was
writing a book about old London, asked with astonishment, “Is there
anything old left in London?”
I hasten to add that I have not tried in the following pages to tell of
every interesting place or even of all there is of interest in the
places visited,--only enough, I hope, to make people go and see for
themselves and have the pleasure of discovering the rest. I am not
afraid that if they once go to the Chapter House they will miss any of
its beauties: my dread is lest they fail to go there, from the vision of
a plethora of things they think they have no time to see. For I want
more than anything else to prick the curiosity of the travellers up and
down the streets of the city who miss so much pleasure that they might
have so easily, because they are not alive to all the interesting and
unexpected things that wait for their coming just round the corner.
A little further afield there are so many other treasures waiting to be
noticed,--Hogarth’s pleasant house in Chiswick, that, like many another
London visitor, I am promising myself to see the first time I have a
free Monday, Wednesday or Saturday;--Eltham, with its sunk garden
surrounding the remains of the old palace of the English kings, where
John of Eltham, Edward II.’s son, was born;--Southwark, with its
cathedral and the remains of the Marshalsea Prison that not everyone
knows how to find;--and Islington, with the Canonbury Tower and the
house in Duncan Street, No. 64, where Lamb lived for four years. But
these I must leave regretfully for another day.
In conclusion, I should like to express my thanks to the _Montreal
Gazette_ and to the _Daily Express_ for permission to reprint one or two
sketches which originally appeared in their pages, and to all those
friends for whose kindly help and encouragement I am much indebted.
To
SIR SQUIRE SPRIGGE
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. CHELSEA 1
The Chelsea of Sir Thomas More--Crosby Hall--Cheyne
Walk--Sandford Manor--Chelsea
Hospital--Buns--Chelsea Old Church--The
Physic Garden--Ranelagh.
II. KNIGHTSBRIDGE TO SOHO 24
Tattersall’s--Ely House--London Museum--St.
James’s Church--The Haymarket Shoppe--A
King in Soho.
III. TRAFALGAR SQUARE TO FLEET STREET 38
The Strand--Charing Cross--Water Gates--The
Adelphi--St. Clement Danes--Savoy
Chapel--Prince Henry’s Room--The Temple.
IV. ROUND ABOUT THE TOWER 68
Roman Baths--London Stone--Great Tower
Street--All Hallows, Barking--St. Olave’s--Roman
Wall--Port of London Authority--Trinity
House--The Crooked Billet--The
Tower.
V. ROUND ABOUT CHEAPSIDE 84
Bow Church--The Old Mansion House--The
Old Watling Restaurant--37, Cheapside--Wood
Street--The City Companies--The Guildhall.
VI. ROUND ABOUT HOLBORN 103
Tyburn--Staple Inn--Tooks Court--Gray’s
Inn--Hatton Garden--Ely Place--St. Sepulchre’s--Panier
Alley.
VII. DOWN CHANCERY LANE 117
Lincoln’s Inn Fields--Soane Museum--Lincoln’s
Inn--Record Office--Moravian Chapel--Nevills
Court--Clifford’s Inn.
VIII. THE CHARTERHOUSE AND ST. BARTHOLOMEW’S 137
Pye Corner--St. Bartholomew’s the Great--St.
John’s Gate--The Charterhouse.
IX. A STROLL IN WHITEHALL AND WESTMINSTER 158
Whitehall--United Services Museum--The
Abbey Cloisters--The Chapter House--Ashburnham
House--Jerusalem Chamber--St.
Margaret’s.
X. MUSEUMS 172
British Museum--Foundling Hospital--South
Kensington--Wallace--Geffrye.
XI. PARKS 197
Hyde Park--Kensington Gardens--Green
Park--St. James’s Park--Regent’s Park--Battersea--Kew.
INDEX 217
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
CHEYNE ROW _Frontispiece_
CROSBY HALL 5
THE OLD SNUFF HOUSE _facing_ 34
WATER GATE, YORK HOUSE _facing_ 46
ST. CLEMENT DANES 51
DR. JOHNSON’S PEW, ST. CLEMENT DANES 54
THE TEMPLE CHURCH, THE ROUND 61
LONDON STONE, CANNON STREET 71
THE TOWER OF LONDON. BYWARD TOWER _facing_ 76
THE TOWER OF LONDON 79
TRAITORS’ GATE, TOWER OF LONDON 81
GUILDHALL _facing_ 96
STAPLE INN 106
GRAY’S INN HALL 108
LINCOLN’S INN _facing_ 117
LINCOLN’S INN GATEWAY 119
RAHERE’S TOMB IN ST. BARTHOLOMEW’S CHURCH 142
CHURCH OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW THE GREAT 145
ST. JOHN’S GATE, CLERKENWELL 149
THE CHARTERHOUSE FROM THE SQUARE _facing_ 154
UNITED SERVICES’ MUSEUM _facing_ 160
POETS’ CORNER, WESTMINSTER ABBEY 163
FOUNDLING HOSPITAL 181
PETER PAN STATUE IN KENSINGTON GARDENS 205
“Sir, the happiness of London is not to be conceived but by those
who have been in it.”
DR. JOHNSON
UNNOTICED LONDON
CHAPTER I
CHELSEA
“I have passed manye landes and manye yles and
contrees, and cherched many full straunge places,....
Now I am comen home to reste.”
SIR JOHN MAUNDEVILLE.
If a hurried traveller had only time to roam about one of the London
boroughs I think he should choose Chelsea, because in that small area of
houses built along a mile and a half of the Thames riverside there is
much that is typical of quite different phases of London life, from the
sixteenth century to the present day.
It lies between the Kings Road and the Embankment, beginning at Lower
Sloane Street--Chelsea Bridge Road, and is reached by the district
railway to Sloane Square Station or by the No. 11 bus passing the
Strand, Trafalgar Square and Victoria: by Nos. 19 or 22 from Hyde Park
Corner, and from Kensington by the 31, with its terminus at Limerston
Street, and by the Nos. 49 and 49a.
Perhaps the reason why this quarter has always been beloved is because
while other districts have had their moment of fame and now live on
their past in somnolent content, Chelsea has fallen in and out of
fashion with a fine carelessness and has always guarded the creative
gift of dwellers of all ranks, so that the name of the little village
has been famous for such a diversity of things as literature and
custards, art and water-works, china and buns, horticulture and
learning.
There is something cosy and charming about the name Chelsea, a good old
Anglo-Saxon word that once meant, “The Gravel Isle, Chesel-sey.” It has
not become quite so unrecognisable as its neighbour Battersea, but it
has no more just cause for converting into “sea” the ey that means
island with which it once ended. But you cannot lay down stern rules for
a name that has taken the bit between its teeth like Chelsea. It started
its career in the Domesday Book as Chelched, and by the time it got to
the sixteenth century Sir Thomas More is dating a letter to Henry VIII.
“At my pore howse in Chelcith.”
Of the two Thomases whose memory pervades Chelsea, Sir Thomas More is
perhaps the most lovable. His son-in-law once said of him: “whom in
sixteen years and more, being in his house conversant with him, I could
never perceive as much as once in a fume.”
It is in Roper’s _Life_ that you read how his neighbours loved him with
reason. Once, when he had been away on a mission to Cambrai in 1528, he
went to report to the King at Woodstock, and then heard that part of his
house and barns in Chelsea had been burnt. He had no thought of his own
loss, but sent to comfort his wife and tell her to find out the extent
of his neighbours’ loss and indemnify them as far as possible.
There have been many other saintly men whom one reveres, but surely none
with such wide sympathies. He entertained Erasmus with learned talk, but
he also entertained John Heywood the playwright and Court jester. He was
wise, but he was also witty, and of which modern philosopher could it be
told “that when an interlude was performed, he would make one among the
players, occasionally coming upon them with surprise, and without
rehearsal fall into a character, and support the part by his
extemporaneous invention and acquit himself with credit.”
Dear Sir Thomas More of delectable memory--it is good to come across
signs that you still live in English hearts, even if they take the form
of stucco decorations on a Lyons tea house in Carey Street.
It was Sir Thomas More who first made Chelsea the fashion, though an old
Manor house that stood near the church had many lordly owners before
Henry VIII. bought it and, following More’s example, built himself the
big country mansion of which there are still traces in the basements of
the houses on the corner of Cheyne Walk and Oakley Street. The King is
also said to have had a hunting lodge near by and part of it still
exists at the end of Glebe Place in a small rather dilapidated building.
Sir Thomas More had built his house on the site of the present Beaufort
Street and it stood there till Sir Hans Sloane, the Chelsea Baron
Haussmann of that day, pulled it down in 1740. The lovely gardens went
down to the river. Henry VIII. used to come and dine here, and walk with
his arm round the neck of the friend he afterwards brought to the block,
and here More received his other famous friends, among them Erasmus, and
Holbein, who stayed with him for three years, painting many portraits.
It is pleasant to think that the spirit of More’s hospitality lived
again during the war and curiously enough at this very place and in one
of his own houses. For though his country home was destroyed, his town
house, Crosby Hall, built as the great town mansion of Sir John Crosby,
a merchant prince, in 1466, was brought from Bishopsgate piece by piece
in 1910, and four years later the marvellous timbered roof looked down
on the groups of Belgian fugitives that were sheltered there.
If you ask the porter at More’s Gardens, a big block of flats on the
north-east corner of Battersea Bridge, for the key of Crosby Hall, he
will unlock a door in an ugly hoarding facing the embankment, close to
Chelsea Old Church.
[Illustration: CROSBY HALL]
You step through it into a remote space where a mediæval building stands
in the midst of the little rock gardens planted by the Belgian refugees
to while away their anxious, tedious hours. Many men have passed through
the old hall since Sir John Crosby built it, for at different times it
had belonged to the Duke of Gloucester (Richard III.), Sir Thomas More,
his son-in-law William Roper, and various ambassadors and nobles. In
1609 it was the home of that Countess of Pembroke whose charms evoked
from William Browne the epitaph so often attributed to Ben Jonson:
Underneath this sable herse
Lies the subject of all verse;
Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother;
Death! ere thou hast slain another
Fair and learned and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee.
One wonders what they would all have thought of these latest comers to
the old mansion which carried on the English tradition of hospitality so
well that the poet among the visitors wrote, and you may see his words
on a brass tablet opposite the fireplace:
Je sens dans l’air que je respire
Un parfum de Liberté,
Un peu de cette terre hospitalière,
* * * * *
Le sol de l’Angleterre.
The reconstitution of Crosby Hall was never finished; first because of
the death of King Edward, who took a great interest in the scheme, and
then owing to the war; but there it stands, its perpendicular lines,
mullioned windows and oriel and the wonderful oaken roof making it one
of the best examples that remain to us of fifteenth-century domestic
architecture.
Chelsea is full of memories of every period since Sir Thomas More’s day.
Queen Elizabeth as a child stayed at her father’s manor house here, and
later, as a girl of thirteen, she is said to have lived for a time at
Sir Thomas More’s house, when it had passed into the hands of her
stepmother, Catherine Parr.
The charming Georgian houses of the Cheyne Walk of to-day carry on the
tradition of the beautiful Chelsea homes of those times, such as
Shrewsbury House which stood on the west side of Oakley Street before it
was pulled down in 1813. It was owned by the husband of the famous Bess
of Hardwicke, the Earl of Shrewsbury, who guarded Mary Queen of Scots in
her captivity.
The delightful little houses in Paradise Row with their dormer windows
and tiled roofs were pulled down only a few years ago. Pepys said that
one of them was “the prettiest contrived house that ever I saw in my
life.” Ormonde Court now reigns in their stead, so there is no trace
to-day of the little house in Paradise Row that the fair but frail
Duchesse de Mazarin, niece of Anne of Austria’s Cardinal Prime Minister,
rented from Lord Cheyne when she had fallen on such evil days that her
aristocratic guests used to leave money under their plates to pay for
their dinner. She was not the only favourite of Charles II. to have a
summer home in Chelsea. Nell Gwynne lived at the Sandford Manor House
and the route by which the Merry Monarch rode to visit her is still
called the King’s Road.
I hesitate to tell that Nell Gwynne’s very house is still in existence
for fear of taxing too much the ready courtesy of the occupants, two
members of the staff of The Imperial Gas Works Co., owners of the
property, who divide the house between them.
My kindly guide had disquieting doubts as to whether Nell ever really
lived there, but he admitted that a thimble, unquestionably hers, and a
masonic jewel belonging to the King, were found in the house when it was
being repaired. Thimbles are not usually associated with the memory of
“pretty witty Nellie,” but the Chelsea air may have moved her to
industry. At all events there is the Jacobean house, shorn now of its
top story to lessen the weight on the bulging walls, and with its brick
carving but faintly seen under successive coats of rough plaster. But
not even the Queen Anne door can destroy the picture any lively
imagination may summon of the nonchalant Nell tripping up and down the
same staircase to be seen to-day, its design of six steps and a door
repeated to the top of the house, belying the legend that Charles once
rode his pony up the stairs. The walnut trees Nell planted have
disappeared, but what is left of the old house stands in a pleasant
green hollow, an oasis in the acrid surroundings of a gas factory, the
paling of which separates it from the outside world not a stone’s throw
from unsuspecting passengers on a No. 11 bus.
Joseph Addison lived for a time in the old Manor House, and two of his
letters, written to the Lord Warwick whose mother he afterwards married,
describe the bird concerts in the neighbouring woods.
If anyone wants to know exactly what the place looked like in Nell
Gwynne’s day, a very interesting account of it may be found in a book
written by a French London-lover, called _Fulham Old and New_. It is now
out of print, but may be consulted at the Fulham Public Library, reached
by any of the buses travelling westward along the Fulham Road.
All this is ancient history, of which there is little trace to-day. The
shades of Sir Robert Walpole, Dean Swift, Fielding and Smollett, and
good Dr. Burney, Fanny’s father, who was organist of Chelsea Hospital
and buried in its now closed cemetery, may still haunt Chelsea; but the
actual homes of the people of living memory make a more vivid appeal.
Chelsea still keeps up the reputation of being the haunt of famous
people. Unlike the inhabitants of the Paris Latin Quarter, artists and
poets who have once breathed her air do not remove to more fashionable
Mayfair streets when they have “arrived.”
And what a brilliant band of them were found in the Chelsea of the
nineteenth century! Meredith wrote _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_ at
No. 7 Hobury Street; Charles and Henry Kingsley spent their youth in the
old rectory in Church Street when their father was rector of Chelsea Old
Church; George Eliot moved her household gods to No. 4 Cheyne Walk, the
beautiful house where Daniel Maclise, the early Victorian painter, had
lived, only three short weeks before her death; and Cecil Lawson, the
painter of _The Harvest Moon_ in the Tate Gallery, lived at No. 15.
A volume might be written about Cheyne Walk alone; those pleasant
red-brick houses with their wrought-iron railings were the homes of some
of the greatest geniuses of the Victorian age. Turner lived at 118 for
the four years before his death in 1851: Rossetti lived at No. 16 with
Swinburne and W. M. Rossetti. Meredith had some idea of joining this
_ménage_, but recoiled at the sight of Rossetti’s oft-quoted poached
eggs “bleeding to death” on cold bacon very late in the morning. He paid
a quarter’s rent and decided to live by himself. The Rev. Mr. Haweis was
a later tenant of this famous house, which, in spite of popular
tradition, has no connection with Catherine of Braganza. Mrs. Gaskell,
the authoress of _Cranford_, was born at No. 93. Whistler spent twelve
years at No. 96, and here he painted the portraits of his mother and
Carlyle.
The painter had many Chelsea houses, from 101 Cheyne Walk, where he
lived for four years from 1873, to the White House in Tite Street which
he built, and, after his quarrel with the architect, adorned with a
truly Whistlerian inscription, now removed, “Except the Lord build the
house, they labour in vain that build it. This house was built by Mr.
X.”
William de Morgan and Leigh Hunt lived in Chelsea, but the man whose
memory is the most vivid of all this brilliant group was Thomas Carlyle.
His house at 24 Cheyne Row is a memorial museum open to any visitor on
the payment of one shilling, sixpence on Saturday. The house is kept
exactly as it was in the days which Mr. Blunt has so charmingly
described in his book _The Carlyles’ Chelsea Home_.
I can tell no more about it except from hearsay, for the terrible
loneliness of Hugo’s house in the Place des Vosges and of Balzac’s in
the Rue Raynouard in Paris dissuaded me from visiting any more houses
turned into museums of their owners’ belongings.
I would rather go to the Chelsea Hospital, that is very much alive with
the presence of remarkably long-lived old men: one of them lived till he
was 123 years and another to 116. They think nothing there of mere
centenarians--they even tell you of one pensioner who had served for
eighty-five years and married at the age of 100. They think that was a
mistake on the whole, but they are secretly proud of it, and also of the
lady warriors--one of them had the domestic-sounding name of Hannah
Snell--who lie buried in the old churchyard among their comrades.
Visitors can see the hospital every week-day from 10 till dusk, except
for an hour from 12.45 to 1.45, and they may attend the chapel services
on Sunday at 11 A.M. and 6.30, when the pensioners in their brave
scarlet coats remind one of Herkomer’s picture. My advice to you, if you
want to see Chelsea Hospital really well, is to enlist one of the
pensioners as guide. He will show you the old leather black-jacks, and
Grinling Gibbons’ statue of Charles II. in a toga, and the colonnades of
the old Wren building, so fine in its severe simplicity--and the flags
in the chapel, so filmy now with age that they look as if a breath of
wind would blow them to pieces--and the old portraits and many other
arresting things. But what he will like best to exhibit will be the
fragments of the bomb that hit one of the buildings during an air-raid.
He won’t allow you to hold on to the belief that Nell Gwynne had
anything to do with the foundation, but he will tell you a lot of
interesting details about the regulations of the Hospital--how very
little like an institution it is, and you will leave the building with
an added respect for Charles II.
After strolling about Chelsea one’s mind turns with insistence to the
thought of buns, “r-r-rare Chelsea buns,” as Swift wrote to Stella.
There is now nothing left but the name of Bunhouse Place, at the corner
of Union Street and the Pimlico Road, of the famous shop where 100,000
buns used to be sold of a Good Friday Eve one hundred and forty years
ago, and where the Georges and their Queens used to drive to fetch their
buns. It was taken down in 1839, but the fasting sightseer--being in
Chelsea and not in Bloomsbury or Bayswater--can easily find other places
to stay his hunger. If he does not belong to the decorative sex--the
phrase is Mr. Wagner’s, not mine--he will doubtless follow that very
knowledgeable guide and betake him to the “Six Bells,” 195 King’s
Road--a short distance from the Chelsea Town Hall, and there find the
comfort that attracts its artist _clientèle_.
There are other restaurants that are much frequented by the artists of
the quarter:--the “Blue Cockatoo,” in Cheyne Walk, near Oakley Street,
and the “Good Intent,” 316 King’s Road, and a new and yet more
attractive one on the corner of Arthur Street with the enticing name of
“The Good Humoured Ladies.”
Chelsea is full of interesting shops. The Chelsea Book Club is on the
Embankment by Church Street--its delights must be sampled to be
realised--and next door there is a queer handmade toy shop called
Pomona--why Pomona?
Across the road is Chelsea Old Church, with its high
seventeenth-century tower. To me its interior is the most satisfying in
London. The spirit of ancient days dwells there, untouched by modern
currents of unrest, and in the tranquil beauty there is no jarring note.
Sir Thomas More was one of its celebrated parishioners--you may see his
monument and the epitaph he wrote himself.
What a pleasant, kindly, independent spirit had this great Chancellor,
who donned the humble surplice of a parish clerk and sang in the choir
unperturbed by the remonstrances of even so great a personage as the
Duke of Norfolk. I always liked the tale of how the latter came to dine
with Sir Thomas in Chelsea and “fortuned to find him at the church in
choir with a surplice on his back singing, and as they went home
together arm in arm, the duke said, ‘God’s Body, God’s Body, my Lord
Chancellor, a parish clerk--a parish clerk! You dishonour the King and
his office!’ And Sir Thomas replied mildly that he did not think the
duke’s master and his would be offended with him for serving God his
Master or thereby count his office dishonoured.”
I love Chelsea Old Church better than any other London church. It has
nothing of the heavy solidity that smacks of broadcloth and thick gold
watch-chains. The congregation on a summer Sunday evening might be met
with in any village in England. The very altar has no pomp of
embroidered frontal and massive ornaments; it looks almost like a
Jacobean dining-room with its simple oaken table and dignified chairs on
either side.
The church is filled with enchanting old treasures--chained Bibles and
old monuments to the great dead who worshipped there, but I cannot find
it in my heart to catalogue them for you as if it were a museum. Enter
those dim walls and see for yourself, and you will love it as did that
lover of England from across the sea whose epitaph is not the least
among the beautiful things of Chelsea Old Church:
In memory of Henry James, Novelist
Born in New York, 1843. Died in Chelsea, 1916
Lover and interpreter of the fine
amenities of brave decisions and generous
loyalties: resident of this parish, who
renounced a cherished citizenship to give his
allegiance to England in the first
year of the Great War.
In other churches with their solemn balconies and air of chill
emptiness, it is difficult to imagine the things that have happened
there in other days. But in Chelsea Old Church, which somehow always
seems peopled with friendly ghosts and never lonely, one can almost see
Henry VIII. being married secretly to Jane Seymour before the public
ceremony, and hear the cadence of Dr. John Donne’s voice as he preached
the funeral oration of the woman he had immortalised in _The Autumnal
Beauty_.
No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face.
I think of all the great people who lie buried here the most fascinating
is this Lady Danvers, George Herbert’s mother, whose “great and harmless
wit, cheerful gravity and obliging behaviour,” attracted so many friends
and among them Dr. Donne. She must have been an adorable mother. I
sometimes wonder if the care of her ten children ever made her late for
church, and if it were some memory of his boyhood days that made her
saintly son write with the cheerful gravity he may have inherited,
Oh be drest,
Stay not for the last pin,
Thus hell doth jest away thy blessings and extremely flout thee
Thy clothes being fast but thy soul loose about thee.
Mrs. Herbert came to live in Chelsea when she married Sir John Danvers,
after she had “brought up her children carefully and put them in good
courses for making their fortunes.” Danvers House, where she and her
husband lived, gave its name to Danvers Street, at the corner of which
Crosby Hall now stands.
THE CHELSEA PHYSIC GARDEN
“God Almighty first planted a garden.”
BACON.
One of the things I like best in Chelsea is the old herb garden, the
Chelsea Physic Garden, that makes a home of peace with its base on the
Embankment and the western angle at the beginning of Cheyne Walk and
the end of the Royal Hospital Road, once called the Queen’s Road in
honour of Catherine of Braganza, Charles II.’s Queen.
My friendship with the garden is based on no intimate acquaintance, for
not to every one is it given to pass the iron gates that guard its
fragrant stillness. If you would do more than gaze through the iron bars
at this enchanted space that dreams away the year round undisturbed, you
must write to the Clerk of the Trustees of the London Parochial
Charities, 3 Temple Gardens, E.C.4, and ask for a ticket of admission to
the most ancient Botanical Garden in England.
Once you have taken the trouble to secure this card you may stroll along
the paths of the Chelsea Physic Garden that are much as they were when
Evelyn went there on 7th August, 1685, to visit “Mr. Wats, keeper of the
Apothecaries’ Garden of Simples at Chelsea,” and admire the innumerable
rarities there, the “tree bearing Jesuit’s bark, which had done such
wonders in Quartan agues.”
The Apothecaries’ Society laid out the garden about two hundred and
fifty years ago. They leased the ground at that time, but later on Sir
Hans Sloane gave them the freehold with one of those quaint conditions
attached that lend a refreshing grace to a legal transaction.
The Apothecaries had to despatch 2000 specimens of distinct plants,
grown in the garden well dried and preserved and sent in batches of 50,
every year to the Royal Society. One would like to know what the Royal
Society did with them, but the most interesting things in history are so
often left out.
In 1899 the garden was handed over to the Trustees of the London
Parochial Charities, who maintain this delectable if deserted London
corner for the teaching of botany and for providing opportunity and
material for botanical investigation.
Perhaps it was the attraction of the Physic Garden that influenced the
choice of the Huguenot market gardeners who settled in Chelsea when they
were driven from their own country by the Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes in 1685. It startled me to find that at the time when England was
merry, the Guilds were every bit as dictatorial as the Trades Unions are
to-day. More so, in fact, for while a goodly percentage of our workers
and nearly all our waiters are now said to be foreigners, none of the
foreign workmen of the seventeenth century were allowed to carry on
their trades in London and compete with their English confrères.
So the hatters went to Wandsworth and the silk mercers to Spitalfields,
and the nurserymen chose the village of Chelsea lying two miles out of
London along the river bank.
Their spirits may still hover among the perfumed beauty of the annual
Chelsea Flower Show of the Royal Horticultural Society. It is held in
the grounds of the Chelsea Hospital once a year at the end of May or the
beginning of June, when the delicate loveliness of the flowers attracts
an immense number of garden lovers.
And now to tell you how to reach the Chelsea Hospital, the Flower Show
and Ranelagh Gardens.
I have never been able to discover whether the extreme reluctance of the
British to give a detailed address is due to a naïve belief that
everyone is born into this world with an intimate knowledge of the
topography of London, or to a malicious delight in puzzling the
ignorant, but I have a deeply-rooted conviction that the maze was an
English invention. So to the stranger bewildered by the laconic
“Chelsea” on the cards of admission to the Flower Show I would say that
it is reached either by the District Railway to Sloane Square station
and then a short walk down Sloane Street to Pimlico Road, or by the 11
or the 46 bus that stops at the corner of Pimlico Road and Lower Sloane
Street.
The Flower Show is one of the most charming events of the London season.
In no other city in the world may you see anything like this meeting of
the great brotherhood of gardeners of every social rank gathered to
admire the gorgeous achievements of the grand masters of the art of
growing flowers; where peeresses humbly consult horny-handed experts and
frivolous young men reveal unsuspected enthusiasms for blue aquilegias.
The adjacent Ranelagh Gardens are often called Chelsea Hospital Gardens,
perhaps to avoid confusion with the grounds of the Ranelagh Club at
Barnes. They are closed to the general public during the three days of
the Flower Show, so if you go to see the flowers you have the added and
unexpected pleasure of wandering through the green glades of Ranelagh
undisturbed by the shouts of the Pimlico children.
There are no flowers in these gardens, but they have a peculiar charm of
their own. There is none of the flatness of Hyde Park--the undulating
paths and quaint bosquets belong to another day when powdered courtiers
pursued fair ladies in the pleasure gardens that were so much the
fashion. The story of Ranelagh is bound up with the history of the
Georgian period. There is not a book of memoirs but mentions this famous
pleasure resort. Walpole said of it, “Nobody goes anywhere else;
everybody goes there. My Lord Chesterfield is so fond of it that he says
he has ordered all his letters to be directed there.”
It is quite true that everybody went there. Johnson, whom I find as hard
to keep out of the description of any part of London as Mr. Dick found
it to keep King Charles’s head out of his memorial, was very fond of
going to Ranelagh. Boswell says that, to the remark that there was not
half a guinea’s worth of pleasure in seeing Ranelagh, he answered, “No,
but there is half a guinea’s worth of inferiority to other people in not
having seen it.”
There is little left of the actual gardens where Johnson, Sir Joshua
Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, Walpole, the beautiful Duchess of
Devonshire, the King of Denmark, the Spanish ambassadors and the entire
English Court used to take part in the merry-making, but you may be sure
they all walked up the broad avenue of trees that once shaded the
brilliant scene. In the seventeenth century the property belonged to
Viscount Ranelagh, an Irish nobleman by whose name the gardens are still
called.
When the estate was bought by a syndicate after his death a huge rotunda
was built with boxes all round. It must have been something like the
Albert Hall, and every night the place was filled with fine ladies and
wits, rubbing shoulders with all classes of society come to gaze at the
attractions and listen to the music. The vogue of Ranelagh lasted many
years and only ended when the rotunda was pulled down at the beginning
of the nineteenth century.
Every now and then one meets pessimistic creatures, usually artists, who
shake their heads and say that Chelsea is going to the dogs--by which
they mean that all the old studios are being taken by speculators with
the intention of converting them into flats.
But the Chelsea of to-day is as charming as it ever was. There are just
as many famous inhabitants. Sargent, Derwent Wood, Augustus John, Glyn
Philpot, Wilson Steer and many another well-known genius, all live
within sound of the “Six Bells” and some studios must have been saved
from the speculator judging from the number of Chelsea addresses in this
year’s Academy catalogue.