The author of the _Sunday Ramble_, a little guide-book of the last century often quoted in this work, visited, or says that he visited, on a single Sunday all the best known gardens near town. But it would have required an abnormally long life and a survey far less hurried to make acquaintance with all the open-air resorts that flourished during the whole, or part, of the eighteenth century. Such a long-lived Rambler who wished to know his gardens at first hand would probably have visited them (as in this volume we invite the reader to do) in five or six large groups, paying little heed to what might seem the pedantry of Parishes and Hundreds. Beginning in what are now the densely populated districts of Clerkenwell and central London, he would find himself in the open fields and in a region abounding in mineral springs. Islington Spa (1684–1840) and its opposite neighbour Sadler’s Wells (from 1683) had chalybeate springs that claimed to rival the water (“so mightily cry’d up”) of Tunbridge Wells in Kent, and if the water itself was unpalatable, the adjoining pleasure gardens and Long Rooms, with their gay company, tended to make the drinking of medicinal water both pleasant and seductive. At no great distance from Sadler’s Wells were the Wells of Bagnigge (from 1759), the London Spa (from 1685), St. Chad’s Well, and Pancras Wells (from _circ._ 1697); and a walk to Old Street would be rewarded by a plunge in the clear waters of the Peerless Pool, or by a basket of carp and tench caught in the fish pond close by. Behind the Foundling Hospital there might be found a bowling green; at the Mulberry Garden (Clerkenwell) a skittle-ground and an evening concert; in Rosoman Street, a wonderful grotto and an enchanted fountain[3] and (at the New Wells, _circ._ 1737–1750), a complete “variety” entertainment. Sunday afternoon, if you did not mind the society of prentices and milliners, might be spent in Spa Fields at the Pantheon tea-house and garden (1770–1776), or at the Adam and Eve Gardens at Tottenham Court. Farther west lay the Marylebone Bowling Green and Garden, developed in 1738 into the well-known Marylebone Gardens, and in this neighbourhood were several humbler places of entertainment, the Jew’s Harp House, The Queen’s Head and Artichoke, and The Yorkshire Stingo. Islington and North London were full of rural resorts, the Sunday haunts of the London “cit” and his family. In Penton Street was the renowned White Conduit House, and near it Dobney’s Bowling Green, both visited in early days for their delightful prospects of the distant country. The Three Hats in Islington attracted visitors who wished to see the surprising horsemanship of Sampson and of Johnson “the Irish Tartar.” Canonbury, Highbury, Kentish Town, and Hornsey were pleasant places farther afield.