Lowe was the well-known tenor singer of Vauxhall and lessee of Marylebone Gardens from 1763 to 1768. Becoming bankrupt in 1768, he was glad to accept engagements at the humbler Finch’s Grotto. He was announced to sing in August 1769, and appeared under the designation of Brother Lowe at one of the Freemasons’ Concerts at the Grotto. Finch died on October 23, 1770, and his successor, a Mr. Williams, advertised the place as Williams’s Grotto Gardens. The concerts were continued and among the musical entertainments were Bates’s “The Gamester” (1771) and Barnshaw’s “Linco’s Travels.”[269] The programmes of entertainments under Finch and Williams included concertos on the organ, pieces for horns and clarionets, Handel’s Coronation Anthem, an Ode to Summer with music by Brewster, and songs, such as “Thro’ the Wood, Laddie”; “Water parted from the Sea”; “Oh what a charming thing is a Battle”; “British Wives”; “O’er Mountains and Moorlands”; “Cupid’s Recruiting Sergeant” (with drum and fife accompaniment); “Swift Wing’d Vengeance,” from Bates’s Pharnaces; “Shepherds cease your soft complainings;” a satirical song on Garrick’s Stratford Jubilee; “Hark, hark, the joy inspiring horn”; “The Season of Love,” sung by Mr. Dearle, (1765):-- Bright Sol is return’d and the Winter is o’er, O come then, Philander, with Sylvia away.[270] Fireworks were occasionally displayed, and when a ball was given, the place was illuminated at a cost of about five pounds, and horns and clarionets played till twelve in the garden. In 1771 and 1772 a grand transparent painting forty feet wide and thirty high, with illuminations, was displayed. Over the centre arch of this masterpiece was a medallion of Neptune supported by Tritons: on each side were two fountains “with serpents jetting water, representing different coloured crystal.” On one wing was Neptune drawn by sea-horses; on the other, Venus rising from the sea; and the back arches showed a distant prospect of the sea. In June 1771 a representation was given “of the famous Fall of Water call’d Pystill Rhiader near the seat of Sir Watkin Williams Wynne, Bart., in Denbighshire.” Apparently these entertainments failed to pay the proprietor and in 1773 (?) he pulled down the grotto over the spring and rooted up the shrubs to form a skittle ground in connection with the tavern, which still continued to be carried on. About 1777 the “messuages and lands known as the Grotto Gardens” were purchased for the parish of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, part of the ground being used for the erection of a workhouse and part for a Burial Ground (consecrated in 1780). In 1799 the Workhouse was sold to Mr. John Harris, hat manufacturer, and M.P. for Southwark in 1830, who used it as his manufactory and residence. Some relics of the old Grotto were to be found many years after the closing of the Gardens, notably the Octagon Room, which was converted into a mill and at one time used as the armoury of the Southwark Volunteers.