Gardens -- England -- London; London (England) -- Description and travel; Parks -- England -- London
intersecting gravel paths, and one row of mulberry trees some seventy
years old. The red-brick buildings have a venerable appearance,
although they do not carry the weight of centuries with dignity, like
the “Wash-house Court,” the hall, the library, or the brick cloister,
and the delightful old walls with their deliciously-scented fig-trees.
The whole place has a mediæval look and feeling, and teems with ghosts
and recollections of the monks of the early peaceful days, and their
courageous successors at the Dissolution. The pious founder, as the
chorus of the old Carthusian melody says, must not be forgotten:--
“Then blessed be the memory
Of good old Thomas Sutton,
Who gave us lodging, learning,
As well as beef and mutton.”
Of the shades which surround these peaceful green courts none appear
more real than that of Colonel Newcome. The guardian will point out the
room in which he died, or his pew in the chapel, as if he belonged to
history as much as Wray, who bequeathed the old books in the “Officers’
Library,” or any of the well-known pensioners. With such true and
pathetic touches has Thackeray drawn the character of Colonel Newcome
that fiction has here become entwined round the walls almost as closely
as fact.
Further eastward is an open piece of ground, which is hardly a garden;
but as it is green, and took the place of what was known as the
Artillery Garden, it may claim a moment’s consideration. Push open
a door in the modern-looking castellated building in the City Road
near Bunhill Fields, and a large, quiet, open space is discovered. Old
guns look inoffensively down on a wide square of green turf. This is
the home of the Honourable Artillery Company, the descendants of the
“Trained Bands” of citizens, first enrolled in 1585 in the fear of
a Spanish invasion. They have been here since 1622, when they moved
from near Bishopsgate Without. “Artillery Garden,” or Teazel Close or
Garden, was the name of the older place, from the teazel grown there
for the cloth workers.
“Teazel of ground we enlarge St. Mary’s Spittle,
Trees cut down, and gardens added to it,
Thanks to the lords that gave us leave to do it,”
says an old poem. The existing Artillery Ground was a great place for
cricket matches, where county met county in the eighteenth century. It
was here that a vast crowd witnessed the first balloon ever launched
into the air in England, sent up by Count Zambeccari in 1783. The next
year, from the same place, Lunardi was more ambitious, and actually
went up in his balloon. It proved too small for the friend who was
ready to risk his life in his company, so he took a dog, a cat, and a
pigeon with him instead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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