These gardens, attached to the Montpelier House tavern, came into existence in the later years of the eighteenth century. William Hazlitt, the essayist (born in 1778), recalls with pleasure his ‘infant wanderings’ in this place, to which he used to be taken by his father. [81a]

In July, 1796, the newly formed Montpelier Club played their first match in their cricket ground at Montpelier Gardens; and on August 10 and 11 of that year the same ground was the scene of a match of a rather painful, if curious, character. The game, like all the cricket of the period, had high stakes dependent on it—in this case 1,000 guineas—and the players were selected (by two noble lords) from the pensioners of Greenwich Hospital: eleven men with one leg against eleven with one arm. The match began at ten, but about three a riotous crowd broke in, demolished the gates and fences, and stopped the proceedings till six o’clock, when play was resumed. On the second day the elevens reappeared, being brought to the scene of action in three Greenwich stage-coaches, not without flags and music. The match was played out, and the one-legged men beat the poor one-arms by 103. [81b]In the first thirty years of the nineteenth century the place had considerable local reputation as a tea-garden, and was noted for its maze. It did not become extinct till the end of the fifties.

In 1828 one of the attractions by day and by candle-light was the waxworks booth of the Messrs. Ewing, ‘consisting of 129 public characters, large as life.’ In this collection, omitting minor celebrities, were to be seen George IV. in his chair of state; the lamented Princess Charlotte; Guy Fawkes, who attempted to blow up the Parliament House; the Archbishop of York; Wallace, the hero of Scotland; ‘the unfortunate John Bellingham’; and Daniel Dancer, ‘the miserable miser,’ with his sister and servant. There was, moreover, a likeness of the celebrated living skeleton, ‘procured at enormous expense and difficulty’ (presumably to the skeleton). ‘Those who delight,’ said the bills, ‘in the wonders of the Creator will no doubt be highly gratified, without enduring that unpleasantness which some have complained of when viewing the being himself [i.e., the skeleton].’ [82]

The gardens were to the west of the present Walworth Road, a little to the south-west of Princes Street. The Montpelier tavern and Walworth Palace of Varieties (No. 18, Montpelier Street) is on part of the site.

[Bills and newspaper notices; Picture of London, 1802–1830; W. W. Read’s Annals of Cricket.]