The London pleasure gardens of the eighteenth centuryWroth, Warwick William
History
The London pleasure gardens of the eighteenth century
Wroth, Warwick William
London (England) -- History -- 18th century; Parks -- England -- London -- History
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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