The open-air resorts described in this volume lack the romantic associations of the classic pleasure-gardens of the eighteenth century, and it is impossible to impart to Cremorne or the Surrey ‘Zoo’ the historic dignity of a Vauxhall or a Ranelagh. Yet, if these places are undeserving of the detailed treatment that has been accorded to their prototypes, they may claim at least a brief and modest chronicle, which may seem the more necessary because it has mainly to be constructed, not from books, but from stray handbills and forgotten newspapers. Already, indeed, we are growing accustomed to speak of the nineteenth century as the ‘last,’ and to recognize that the London of Dickens, and Thackeray—the London of the thirties, the forties, and even of the sixties—had a physiognomy of its own.

Such places of resort, for the most part, enjoyed no kind of fashionable vogue; they were frequented (if invidious distinctions must be made) by the lower middle classes and the ‘lower orders.’ Yet they offer some curious glimpses of manners and modes of recreation which may be worth considering. I have endeavoured to describe some twenty of these places, selecting those which seem, in various ways, to be typical. To the general reader this selection will be enough—though, I trust, not more than enough—but the London topographer who turns to the appendix and the notes will find a quite formidable list of tea-gardens and tavern-gardens, which, if my aim had been to omit nothing, I could have described in greater detail.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. At the same period, or some years later, the increase of music-halls, of local theatres, and places of entertainment, rendered the tavern concert, with its unambitious glee-parties and comic singing, a superfluity. The disappearance of the tavern concert may not be a matter of keen regret, but the abolition of the garden has altered—and for the worse—the whole character of the public-house.

In the garden a man might sit with a friend or chance acquaintance as long as his pleasure and a treacherous climate permitted. In the gin-palace he practically cannot sit at all, but is huddled, sometimes with his wife and children, into a kind of pen, from which custom and a sort of shy politeness bid him depart at the earliest moment to make room for new-comers. The London public-house has thus become a mere counter for the hurried consumption of drink; it has lost any convenience or merit it may once have had as an improvised club and a cheerful resort.

The proprietors of the larger houses seem, indeed, to have had a suspicion of this, for they sometimes offer, for the behoof of their wealthier customers, a comfortable lounge or smoking-saloon. But this does not benefit the humbler classes, and it has often seemed to me that a good way of discouraging intemperance in a great city is not to attempt the heroic, unpopular, and impossible task of abolishing the traffic in drink, but to compel the owners of licensed houses to dispense their stock-in-trade under more rational and recreative conditions—to give us ‘clubs’ for ‘pubs,’ or, at any rate, cafÉs and cafÉ-restaurants.

We have our obvious models on the Continent in the large cafÉ, the beer-garden, and even in the small cafÉ. The poor man would not be ‘robbed of his beer,’ nor would the change be quite ‘un-English,’ as the record of our little tavern gardens will show. Even in London at this moment there is an (almost solitary) instance of a cafÉ-restaurant of this kind, in Leicester Square.

The one feature common to all these Continental places is the custom of sitting down at a table; there is no standing at a bar, or the rapid displacement of one customer by another. The coffee, the liqueur, or the lager, is not only drained—shall I say, to its dregs?—but is spun out and husbanded to the utmost, and for an hour or so there is at least the semblance of the comfort and convenience of a club.

It is too late now to restore the little summer gardens, but it should be possible to convert our public-houses, not into coffee-palaces, which do not meet the general need, but into cafÉs, by which I mean places where varied drinks, strong or otherwise, would be obtainable, though under less absurd and demoralizing conditions than at present. Every one should be made to sit down, should be waited on—by a waitress if we like—and the great bar itself should be dissolved, except as a counter for the attendants. There could be cafÉs both large and small—places that the London Baedeker would describe as (relatively) ‘expensive,’ and others to suit the pence of the people. The cafÉ might even be musical, though perhaps a line would be drawn at the cafÉ chantant. Probably many small places would not be able to conform to these conditions, and would have to be closed; but, in view of the diminished competition, the larger houses could be called upon without hardship to undertake the necessary reconstruction.

But I am converting this preface into a temperance pamphlet, and, before is it too late, I break off to ask a kindly consideration for a little volume which recalls, I think, some interesting and not uninstructive features of old London life. In reading the proof-sheets I have had the kind help of my brother, Mr. A. E. Wroth.

WARWICK WROTH.

1907.