The Spa Fields Pantheon stood on the south side of the present Exmouth Street, and occupied the site of the Ducking Pond House,[26] a wayside inn, with a pond in the rear used for the sport of duck-hunting. The Ducking Pond premises having been acquired by Rosoman of Sadler’s Wells, were by him sub-let to William Craven, a publican, who, at a cost of £6,000, laid out a garden and erected on the site of the old inn a great tea-house called the Pantheon, or sometimes the Little Pantheon, when it was necessary to distinguish it from “the stately Pantheon” in Oxford Street, built in 1770–1771, and first opened in January 1772.[27] The Spa Fields Pantheon was opened to the public early in 1770, and consisted of a large Rotunda, with two galleries running round the whole of the interior, and a large stove in the centre. The place was principally resorted to by apprentices and small tradesmen, and on the afternoon and evening of Sunday, the day when it was chiefly frequented, hundreds of gaily-dressed people were to be found in the Rotunda, listening to the organ,[28] and regaling themselves with tea, coffee and negus, or with supplies of punch and red port. A nearer examination of this crowded assembly showed that it consisted of journeymen tailors, hairdressers, milliners and servant maids, whose behaviour, though boisterous, may have been sufficiently harmless. The proprietor endeavoured to secure the strict maintenance of order by selling nothing after ten o’clock in the evening. But his efforts, it would seem, were not entirely successful. “Speculator,” a correspondent of the _St. James’s Chronicle_, who visited the place in May 1772, “after coming from church,” looked down from his vantage-ground in one of the galleries upon what he describes as a dissipated scene. To his observation the ladies constituted by far the greater part of the assembly, and he was shocked more than once by the request, “Pray, Sir, will you treat me with a dish of tea?” A tavern with tea-rooms for more select parties stood on the east of the Rotunda. Behind the buildings was a pretty garden, with walks, shrubs and fruit trees. There was a pond or canal stocked with fish, and near it neat boxes and alcoves for the tea-drinkers. Seats were dispersed about the garden, the attractions of which were completed by a summer-house up a handsome flight of stone steps, and a statue of Hercules, with his club, on a high pedestal. The extent of the garden was about four acres. A writer in the _Town and Country Magazine_ for April 1770 (p. 195), speaks contemptuously of the canal “as about the size of a butcher’s tray, where citizens of _quality_ and their spouses come on Sunday to view the amorous flutterings of a duck and drake.” This, however, is the opinion of a fashionable gentleman who goes alternately to Almack’s and Cornelys’s, while Ranelagh (he says) “affords me great relief.”