Cremorne and the Later London Gardens - Softcover

Wroth, Warwick

9781546904052: Cremorne and the Later London Gardens

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1546904050 ISBN 13: 9781546904052

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017

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I have taken some pains in compiling these lists, partly from topographical curiosity, partly from the conviction that their enumeration almost rises to the dignity of pointing a moral. The main contrast is between the tavern and public-house of former days and the gin-palace, with whose aspect—externally, if not (in any sense of the word) internally—we are only too familiar. A description that I have found in a London guide-book of 1846 of the tea and tavern gardens of that date has already an old-world air: ‘The amusements are innocent, the indulgence temperate; and a suitable mixture of female society renders it [our guide means them] both gay and pleasing.’ The public-house was then, as now, no inconspicuous feature of the Metropolis; yet in the earlier half of the nineteenth century it had, if not exactly gaiety and innocence, some characteristics which tended in that direction—its little gardens in summer, its tavern concerts in winter-time. In the fifties, or earlier, many of these garden spaces—often, it is true, of Lilliputian dimensions—were marked out as building-ground, which was either sold to alien contractors or utilized by the proprietor of the tavern when he thought fit to erect thereon a roomier and more imposing edifice.

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