Well Walk, about one hundred yards from the East Heath. It was a large
house lit with long windows, and within its walls took place concerts
and dances for the amusement of the Wells visitors up to 1733. The
first recorded entertainment was given therein 1701 (18 August), when
there was a “consort” of both vocal and instrumental music by the “best
masters.” The performance began at ten o’clock in the morning, and
dancing took place in the afternoon. The tickets for the dancing cost
sixpence, and one shilling was charged for the concert. In September of
the same year, another concert was given at eleven o’clock, at which
one Jemmy Bowen sang and two men performed on the violin. There was
dancing in the afternoon as usual. These performances were continued
every Monday during the season. “Very good music for dancing all
day long” was announced for 12 May, 1707, and on 22 July, 1710, a
girl of nine, a pupil of Mr. Tenoe, sang several operatic songs, and
this performance began at five for the “conveniency of gentlemen’s
returning.” The admission was two shillings and sixpence.
[Illustration: _A View of y^e Long Room at Hampstead from the
Heath._ | _Vue de la Chambre longue à Hampstead du Côté de
la Colline._]
In the vicinity of the Great Room, stood Sion Chapel,[188] where
couples on presenting a license and the sum of five shillings could
be married at any time. A clergyman was always in attendance, and if
the newly married would take their wedding dinner in the garden of the
tavern nothing beyond the license was required. In 1716 the chapel was
referred to as a “private and pleasure place” where many persons of
the best fashion were married. It may be suspected, however, that the
marriages were often, like those at the Fleet and Mayfair, irregular,
and that the license was occasionally dispensed with.
During the first ten or twenty years of the eighteenth century,
Hampstead Wells presented a gay and varied scene. When tired of the
music and dancing in the Great Room, the visitor could adjourn to the
bowling green, or to the raffling shops, where the cards were flying
and the dice rattling, while fine gentlemen lost their money with
“ease and negligence.” There was the promenade in Well Walk beneath
the avenue of limes, or a stroll might be taken on the breezy Heath.
Court ladies were there “all air and no dress”; city ladies all dress
and no air, and country dames with “broad brown faces like a Stepney
bun.” Citizens like Mr. Deputy Driver in the comedy[189] came down from
town, perhaps to find their ladies coquetting with a beau, or retired
to picquet with some brisk young Templar. “This Hampstead’s a charming
place,” exclaims Arabella the citizen’s wife: “To dance all night at
the Wells; be treated at Mother Huff’s,[190] have presents made one at
the raffling shops, and then take a walk in Cane Wood with a man of wit
that’s not over rude.”
With this gay and fashionable throng there mingled company of a lower
class, such as the Fleet Street sempstresses who danced minuets “in
their furbeloe scarfs” and ill-fitting clothes. By about 1724 the
more rakish and disreputable element had become predominant.[191] Bad
characters came from London in “vampt up old cloaths to catch the
apprentices.” Lord Lovemore might still court his “mimic charmer”[192]
there, but modest people did not care to join the company on the walks.
The playing and dicing were kept up as formerly, but gentlemen no
longer lost with ease and negligence, and one sharper tried to cheat
another. In 1733 the Great Room was converted into an Episcopal Chapel
and was used for church services until 1849. In 1869 the West Middlesex
Volunteers occupied the building. About 1880 it was demolished, and
to-day a modern red brick house in Well Walk (erected in 1892), and the
entrance to Gainsborough Gardens occupy the site. A tablet on the house
testifies that the “Old pump room” (_i.e._ Great Room) once stood
on the spot.
In 1734 Dr. John Soame published a pamphlet in which he extolled with
somewhat suspicious optimism the virtues of the neglected spring,
recommending the water for cutaneous affections and nervous disorders.
According to Soame, the spring[193] then threw off water at the
rate of five gallons in four minutes, and could be made to throw a
stream upwards to a height of at least twelve feet. “The Beautys
of Hampstead,” a song of this period, extols the “Chrystal bub’ling
Well,”[194] but the water-drinking does not appear again to have become
the vogue, though as a place of amusement the Wells still enjoyed
some degree of popularity. Another assembly-house, known as the Long
Room, took the place of the old Great Room. This was a substantial red
brick building of one storey. The ground floor consisted of an entire
room with two small ante-rooms, one on either side of the entrance,
used for tea-parties and card-playing. The floor above was divided up
into rooms, where a cosy supper or a game of cards might be enjoyed.
The house (probably built, in part, in the seventeenth century) still
exists, and is to be found on the opposite side to the old Great Room,
about a hundred yards further down Well Walk, going from the Heath.
It is now a private residence called Weatherall House. It was in the
Long Room that the Hampstead Balls took place of the kind described
by Frances Burney. Here Evelina[195] was worried by Beau Smith, and
refused the offers of “inelegant and low-bred” partners, who “begged
the favour of hopping a dance” with her. Samuel Rogers (_Table
Talk_) says that in his youth (_circ._ 1783) the Hampstead
Assemblies were frequented by “a great deal of good company,” and that
he himself danced four or five minuets there in one evening.
In 1802 a surgeon named John Bliss published a treatise, in which,
without success, he endeavoured once more to awaken an interest in the
medicinal properties of the Well. Mr. Keates, consulting chemist to
the Metropolitan Board of Works, in recent times stated that it was a
distinctly chalybeate water containing sufficient iron to render it
capable of producing marked therapeutic effects. It was extremely pure,
and in general character, though with a larger proportion of iron,
resembled that of Tunbridge Wells.[196]
[Dodsley’s _London_ (1761); _Ambulator_, 1774; Kearsley’s
_Strangers’ Guide_ (1793?); Walford, v. 467, ff.; Thorne’s
_Environs of London_ (1876), 281; Sir Gilbert Scott’s _Proposed
Destruction of the Well Walk_ (Hampstead, 1879), with plan of
Well Walk; Park’s _Hampstead_; Baines’s _Hampstead_.]
VIEWS.
1. The Pump-room, Well Walk (_i.e._ Great Room), since, the
Episcopal Chapel, in Baines’s _Hampstead_, from a drawing
by Blanche Cowper Baines, after E. H. Dixon.
2. The old Well Walk, Hampstead, about 1750 (Walford, v. 463).
3. A view of “Ye Long Room at Hampstead from the Heath.”
Chatelain del. et sculp. 1752 (W. Coll.).
4. Well Walk, engraving in Howitt’s _Northern Heights_,
from a photograph.
5. Well Walk in 1870 in Baines’s _Hampstead_, from a sketch
by Walter Field.
THE SPANIARDS
The old Spaniards inn, still standing on the north side of the road
between the upper and lower Heath of Hampstead, deserves a brief
mention, seeing that about the middle of the eighteenth century or
earlier, it had attached to it a curious garden laid out by one William
Staples, who was probably the keeper of the inn.[197]
A contemporary account describes how “out of a wild and thorny wood
full of hills, valleys, and sandpits,” the ingenious Mr. Staples “hath
now made pleasant grass and gravel walks, with a mount, from the
elevation whereof the beholder hath a prospect of Hanslope steeple
in Northamptonshire, within eight miles of Northampton; of Langdon
hill, in Essex, full sixty miles east,” and of other eminences, the
visibility of which was perhaps less mythical.
The walks and plats were ornamented with a number of curious devices
picked out with pebble stones of variegated colours. There were over
forty of these quaint designs, such as the sun in its glory, the twelve
signs of the Zodiac, the Tower of London, the grand colossus of Rhodes,
the pathway of all the planets, the spire of Salisbury, Adam and Eve,
the shield of David, the Egyptian pyramids, and an Egyptian sphinx: an
odd association of things earthly and celestial.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century the Spaniards was much
resorted to, especially on Sundays.[198] During the Gordon Riots of
1780, its landlord, Giles Thomas, is said to have arrested the progress
of the mob bent on the destruction of Caen Wood House, Lord Mansfield’s
residence, hard by, through rolling out his beer barrels into the road,
and setting them abroach, thus gaining time to summon the military for
the defence of the house.
[Illustration: SOUTH VIEW OF THE SPANIARDS, 1750.]
In the present century, though the mount and the pebbled plots had
disappeared, the Spaniards gardens were rendered attractive by a
bowling-green, and by pleasant arbours and parterres: it was resorted
to by many a party of tea-drinkers like that of Mr. Raddle, Mrs.
Bardell and her friends.[199]
[Park’s _Hampstead_; Baines’s _Hampstead_; Walford, v. 445, ff.;
Thorne’s _Environs of London_, 1876.]
VIEWS.
1. The south view of the Spaniards (showing the garden as laid
out by Staples) near Hampstead (Chatelain del., J. Roberts
sculp. 1750, W. Coll., reproduced in Chambers’s _Book of
Days_, ii. 71).
2. The Spaniards Tavern, Hampstead, Middlesex, drawn and
engraved for Dugdale’s _England and Wales_.
3. View of the inn as at present, Walford, v. 445.
4. “View of a skittle ground at Hampstead” (either the Spaniards
or Jack Straw’s Castle), Woodward’s _Eccentric Excursions_,
coloured print, pl. iv. p. 14 (1796).
NEW GEORGIA
New Georgia was situated in Turner’s Wood to the north-east of the
Spaniards tavern, Hampstead, and at the northern extremity of the road
opposite the western lodge of Caen Wood. It was a wooden cottage, two
storeys high, irregularly constructed, and standing in a wilderness
and garden laid out “in a delightful romantic taste.” The proprietor,
Robert Caston, built the cottage in 1737, and opened New Georgia to the
public.
He was his own architect, builder, and gardener, and probably compared
his labours to those of the founders of the American colony of Georgia
established in 1733. An inscription on the cottage explained the origin
of New Georgia as follows:--“I Robert Caston, begun this place in a
wild wood, stubbed up the wood, digged all the ponds, cut all the
walks, made all the gardens, built all the rooms, with my own hands;
nobody drove a nail here, laid a brick or a tile, but myself, and thank
God for giving me such strength, being sixty-four years of age when I
begun it.”
Tea was supplied in the cottage or the gardens, but the chief
attractions were a number of mechanical oddities set in motion in
the garden and in the various little rooms into which the house was
divided. London shopkeepers, like Zachary Treacle,[200] often made
their way to the place on Sunday afternoons, and were diverted by
reptiles that darted forth when a board or spring was trodden upon, by
a chair that collapsed when sat upon, and by various contrivances of
water-works.
The more boisterous, who on other Sundays delighted in a roll down the
hill in Greenwich Park, found amusement in thrusting their heads into
the New Georgia pillory to receive in that position the kisses of the
ladies. A thickly-planted maze was another source of diversion.
The place does not appear to have been frequented after about 1758,
and was subsequently (before 1795)[201] enclosed in the estate of Lord
Mansfield.
[_Gent. Mag._ 1748, vol. 18, 109; _The Connoisseur_, No. 26,
25 July, 1754; _The Idler_, No. 15, 22 July, 1758; Lysons’s
_Environs_, ii. 527; Lambert’s _London_ (1806), iv. 255; Park’s
_Hampstead_; Prickett’s _Highgate_, 72, ff. Walford, v. 446.]
VIEWS.
New Georgia is clearly marked in Rocque’s Survey, 1745, but
there appear to be no views.
BELSIZE HOUSE
Belsize House was a large Elizabethan mansion, modified in the time of
Charles II. Pepys, who visited it in 1668 (17 August) when it was the
residence of Lord Wotton, describes its gardens as “wonderful fine: too
good for the house the gardens are, being, indeed, the most noble that
ever I saw, and brave orange and lemon trees.”[202]
The house was a private residence until 1720, when it was converted
into a place of public amusement, under the management of a Welshman
named Howell. At this time it was a somewhat imposing structure, with
wings, and a tower in the centre. The entrance was by a door placed
between the wings, and also by an external staircase at one wing.
The inaugural entertainment took place about April, 1720, and consisted
of an “uncommon solemnity of music and dancing.” The place was usually
open from 6 a.m. till 8 p.m., without charge for admission. The Park,
Wilderness and Garden, about a mile in circumference, were advertised
(about 1721?), as being wonderfully improved and filled with a variety
of birds, “which compose a most melodious and delightful harmony.”
Those who wished for an early stroll in the park could “breakfast on
tea or coffee as cheap as at their own chambers.” As the journey from
London was not unattended with risks, twelve stout fellows (afterwards
increased to thirty), completely armed, were announced as “always at
hand to patrol timid females or other.”
[Illustration: BELSIZE HOUSE AND PARK.]
Belsize became a fashionable rendezvous. In July 1721 the Prince and
Princess of Wales, attended by several persons of rank, dined at the
house, and were entertained with hunting and other diversions. In
June, 1722, on the occasion of a wild deer hunt, three or four hundred
coaches brought down the “Nobility and Gentry” from town. Athletic
sports were introduced, and the proprietor gave a plate of several
guineas to be run for by eleven footmen (1721). Gambling and intrigue
were the less wholesome results of this influx of the nobility and
gentry. In May 1722 the Justices took steps to prevent the unlawful
gaming, while in the same year “A serious Person of Quality” published
a satire called _Belsize House_, in which he undertook to expose
“the Fops and Beaux who daily frequent that Academy,” and also the
“characters of the women who make this an exchange for assignations.”
This house, which is a nuisance to the land
Doth near a park and handsome garden stand
Fronting the road, betwixt a range of trees
Which is perfumed with a Hampstead breeze.
The Welsh Ambassador has many ways
Fool’s pence, while summer season holds, to raise.
For ’tis not only chocolate and tea,
With ratafia, bring him company.
Nor is it claret, Rhenish wine or sack
The fond and rampant Lords and Ladies lack
Or ven’son pasty for a certain dish
With several varieties of fish;
But hither they and other chubs resort
To see the Welsh Ambassador make sport,
Who in the art of hunting has the luck
To kill in fatal corner tired buck,
The which he roasts and stews and sometimes bakes,
Whereby His Excellency profit makes.
He also on another element
Does give his choused customers content
With net or angling rod, to catch a dish
Of trouts or carp or other sorts of fish.
The Welsh Ambassador was the nickname of the proprietor, James Howell,
an enterprising though not very reputable person, who had once been
imprisoned for some offence in Newgate.
Races[203] and similar amusements continued for several years to be
provided, and music was performed every day during the season. In the
spring of 1733 (31 May) a race was advertised for ponies twelve hands
six inches high. The length of the race was six times round the course;
“Mr. Treacle’s black pony,” which distinguished itself by winning the
plate at Hampstead Heath in the previous year, being excluded.
In 1736 a fat doe was advertised to be hunted to death by small
beagles, beginning at nine in the morning, and sportsmen were invited
to bring their own dogs, if “not too large.” In the same year (16
September) a boys’ race was run, beginning at three o’clock, six times
round the course: a prize of one guinea was given to the winner, and
half a guinea to the second runner. “Each person to pay sixpence
coming in, and all persons sitting on the wall or getting over will be
prosecuted.”
For an afternoon in August 1737, there was announced a running match
six times round the park, between “the Cobler’s Boy and John Wise the
Mile-End Drover,” for twenty guineas. In 1745 there were foot-races in
the park, and this is the last notice we have of Belsize as a place of
amusement.
The mansion falling into a ruinous state[204] was pulled down at
the close of the eighteenth century (before 1798), and a large,
plainly-built house was erected in its stead. From 1798–1807 this new
Belsize House was tenanted by the Right Hon. Spencer Perceval and
others. In the autumn of 1853 the house was pulled down (cp. _The
Illustrated London News_ for 9th September, 1854, p. 239), and the
buildings of the Belsize Estate were subsequently erected on the site
of the Park.
The present Belsize Avenue (on the west side of Haverstock Hill) is the
representative of a beautiful avenue of elms, which originally led up
to the old Belsize House, the site of which was near the present St.
Peter’s Church.
[Palmer’s _St. Pancras_, 227, ff.; Baines’s _Hampstead_; Walford
v. 494, ff.; Howitt’s _Northern Heights_; Lambert’s _London_,
1806, iv. 256; Thorne’s _Environs of London_, s.v. “Hampstead”;
Park’s _Hampstead_; newspaper advertisements, W. Coll.]
VIEWS.
1. Old Belsize House. A view on a Belsize House advertisement,
_circ._ 1721? and a view by Maurer, 1750; cp. Howitt’s
_Northern Heights_ and C. Knight’s _Old England_, ii.
fig. 2404.
2. Belsize House in 1800 (Walford, v. 492).
KILBURN WELLS
The spring known as Kilburn Wells was situated in the Abbey Field near
the site of the old Kilburn Priory, and in the rear of the Bell Tavern.
It attracted public notice about the middle of the last century;[205]
and some endeavours were made, probably by the proprietor of the Bell,
to bring Kilburn Wells into vogue: at any rate, in 1752 it is referred
to as a place in some respects akin to Sadler’s Wells:--
Shall you prolong the midnight ball
With costly supper at Vaux Hall,
And yet prohibit earlier suppers
At Kilburn, Sadler’s Wells or Kupers?[206]
About 1773 Kilburn Wells began to be more widely known, and the
proprietor’s advertisement of 17 July in that year announced that the
water was then in the utmost perfection, the gardens enlarged and
greatly improved, and the house and offices “repainted and beautified
in the most elegant manner.” The Great Room was described as specially
adapted for “the use and amusement of the politest companies” who might
require it for music, dancing, or entertainments. “This happy spot is
equally celebrated for its rural situation, extensive prospects, and
the acknowledged efficacy of its waters; is most delightfully situated
on the site of the once famous Abbey of Kilburn on the Edgware Road, at
an easy distance, being but a morning’s walk from the metropolis, two
miles from Oxford Street; the footway from Marybone across the fields
still nearer. A plentiful larder is always provided, together with the
best of wines and other liquors. Breakfasting and hot loaves.”
An account of the medicinal water drawn up by the usual “eminent
physician” was given away to visitors, and in one of the rooms was a
long list of the diseases said to have been cured. Tn 1792 Godfrey
Schmeisser made a careful analysis of the water. It was a mild
purgative, milky in appearance, and had a bitterish saline taste. The
use of the water for curative purposes appears to have ceased in the
early part of the present century (before 1814), but the Old Bell,
or Kilburn Wells as the place was generally denominated, enjoyed
popularity as a tea-garden as late as 1829.[207]
About 1863 the Old Bell was pulled down, and the present Bell
public-house erected on the spot. A brick reservoir long enclosed the
spring, but some years ago it was demolished and built over. It stood
immediately behind the Bank at the corner of Belsize Road.
[Thorne’s _Environs of London_; Lambert’s _London_, iv. 288;
Howitt’s _Northern Heights_; Baines’s _Hampstead_; Park’s
_Hampstead_; Walford, v. 245, ff.]
VIEWS.
1. The Bell Inn, Kilburn, 1750 (Walford, v. 246).
2. The Bell Inn, Kilburn, from a mezzotint, 1789, reproduced in
Baines’s _Hampstead_.
3. View of the Old Bell Inn at Kilburn on the Edgware Road.
Rathbone del. Prestal sculp. 1789. Crace, _Cat._ p. 670,
No. 76.
4. An engraved handbill, describing the waters, at the top of
which is a print of the Long Room, by F. Vivares; mentioned in
Park’s _Hampstead_, p. xxxi*, additions.
V
CHELSEA GROUP
RANELAGH HOUSE AND GARDENS
§ 1. _Origin of Ranelagh_
About the year 1690 Richard, Viscount (afterwards Earl of) Ranelagh,
Paymaster-General of the Forces, built for himself on the east side of
Chelsea Hospital a private residence known as Ranelagh House, and laid
out a garden. In 1691[208] the house is described as “very fine within,
all the rooms being wainscotted with Norway oak,” and the garden plats
and walks were “curiously kept and elegantly designed.” Bowack in 1705
says that the gardens were “esteemed to be the best in England, the
size considered.” Here Lord Ranelagh lived till his death in 1712.
In 1733 the property was sold, and at that time Lacy, patentee of Drury
Lane Theatre, made arrangements for forming Ranelagh into a place of
public amusement. Nothing decisive was done till 1741, when a large
circular building, the famous Rotunda (at first generally called the
Amphitheatre), was erected in the Ranelagh grounds by William Jones,
architect to the East India Company.[209]
The capital for the undertaking was furnished by a few shareholders,
and was divided into thirty-six shares of £1,000 each. The principal
shareholder and manager was Sir Thomas Robinson, Bart., M.P., whose
gigantic form was for many years familiar to all frequenters of
the Rotunda: a writer of 1774 calls him its Maypole and Garland of
Delights.[210]
The Rotunda and Gardens were first opened on 5 April, 1742, with a
public breakfast, and a visit to Ranelagh became the vogue. Of the
early fortunes of the place the best chronicler is Horace Walpole. On
April 22, 1742, he writes to Mann:--“I have been breakfasting this
morning at Ranelagh Garden: they have built an immense amphitheatre,
with balconies full of little ale-houses: it is in rivalry to Vauxhall
and costs above twelve thousand pounds.”[211]
On May 26[212] he again describes the “vast amphitheatre, finely gilt,
painted and illuminated; into which everybody that loves eating,
drinking, staring, or crowding, is admitted for twelvepence.” In
1744,[213] Mr. Walpole goes “every night constantly” to Ranelagh,
“which has totally beat Vauxhall.” “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 thither.” “The floor
is all of beaten princes”; “you can’t set your foot without treading on
a Prince or Duke of Cumberland.” In 1748,[214] “Ranelagh is so crowded,
that going there t’other night in a string of coaches, we had a stop of
six and thirty minutes.”
In 1745 Mr. Thomas Gray had written to a friend[215] that he had no
intention of following the stream to Ranelagh, and he touched a weak
spot in the delights of the London Pleasure Gardens--the uncertainty of
the London weather. “I have never been at Ranelagh Gardens since they
were opened.... They do not succeed: people see it once, or twice, and
so they go to Vauxhall. Well, but is it not a very great design, very
new, finely lighted? Well, yes, aye, very fine truly, so they yawn and
go to Vauxhall, and then it’s too hot, and then it’s too cold, and
here’s a wind and there’s a damp.” But in August 1746 we find Gray
declaring[216] that his evenings lately have been chiefly spent at
Ranelagh and Vauxhall.
Other literary people, at least as interesting, as Walpole’s Dukes and
Princes, frequented Ranelagh. The learned Mrs. Carter was there in
1748, and found the gardens very pleasant on a June evening, though she
did not relish such “tumultary torchlight entertainments.” Goldsmith
and Reynolds used to go there together about 1771, and Dr. Johnson
“often went to Ranelagh,” which he deemed, as the Rev. Dr. Maxwell
apologetically observes, “a place of innocent recreation.”
§ 2. _The Rotunda_