[Illustration: WATERSIDE ENTRANCE TO CUMBERLAND GARDENS.] The South Lambeth Water Works occupied the site for many years and the Phœnix Works of the South Metropolitan Gas Company are now on the spot.[317] [Newspaper cuttings in W. Coll.; Walford, vi. 389, 449; Timbs, _Curiosities of London_ (1868), p. 18, and _Club Life_, ii. 261; _Picture of London_, 1802, 1823 and 1829; the _Courier_ for 25 and 26 May, 1825; Allen, _Lambeth_, p. 379.] VIEWS. “Cumberland Gardens, &c.” A view by moonlight of the waterside entrance to the gardens. Undated (_circ._ 1800?). W. Coll. The gardens are well marked in Horwood’s _Plan_, D. 1799. VAUXHALL GARDENS § 1. 1661–1728 These, the most famous of all the London pleasure gardens, were known in their earliest days as the New Spring Garden at Vauxhall, and continued till late in the eighteenth century to be advertised as Spring Gardens.[318] The Spring Garden was opened to the public shortly after the Restoration, probably in 1661.[319] It was a prettily contrived plantation, laid out with walks and arbours: the nightingale sang in the trees; wild roses could be gathered in the hedges, and cherries in the orchard. The Rotunda, the Orchestra, and the Triumphal Arches, distinctive features of the later Vauxhall, were then non-existent, and the proprietor’s house from which refreshments were supplied was probably the only building that broke the charm of its rural isolation. It was a pleasant place to walk in, and the visitor might spend what he pleased, for nothing was charged for admission. It soon became one of the favourite haunts of Pepys, who first visited it on 29 May 1662. On hot summer days, he would take water to Foxhall with Deb and Mercer and his wife, to stroll in the garden alleys, and eat a lobster or a syllabub. On one day in May (29, 1666) he found two handsome ladies calling on Mrs. Pepys. He was burdened with Admiralty business--“but, Lord! to see how my nature could not refrain from the temptation, but I must invite them to go to Foxhall, to Spring Gardens.”