Vauxhall Gardens is a public park in Kennington in the London Borough of Lambeth, England, on the south bank of the River Thames.
Originally known as New Spring Gardens, it is believed to have opened before the Restoration of 1660, being mentioned by Samuel Pepys in 1662. From 1785 to 1859, the site was known as Vauxhall, a pleasure garden and one of the leading venues for public entertainment in London from the mid-17th century to the mid-19th century. The Gardens consisted of several acres of trees and shrubs with attractive walks. Initially entrance was free, with food and drink being sold to support the venture.
The pleasure grounds was accessed by boats on the Thames until the erection of Vauxhall Bridge in the 1810s. The area was absorbed into the metropolis as the city expanded in the early to mid-19th century.
The site became Vauxhall Gardens in 1785 and admission was charged for its attractions. The Gardens drew enormous crowds, with its paths being noted for romantic assignations. Tightrope walkers, hot-air balloon ascents, concerts and fireworks provided entertainment. The rococo "Turkish tent" became one of the Gardens' structures, the interior of the Rotunda became one of Vauxhall's most viewed attractions, and the chinoiserie style was a feature of several buildings. A statue depicting George Frideric Handel in the Gardens later found its way to Westminster Abbey. In 1817, the Battle of Waterloo was re-enacted, with 1,000 soldiers participating.
It closed in 1840 after its owners became bankrupt, but re-opened in 1841. It changed hands in 1842, and was permanently closed in 1859. The land was redeveloped in the following decades, but slum clearance in the late 20th century saw part of the original site open up as a public park. This was initially called Spring Gardens and was renamed in 2012 as Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. It is managed as a public park by the London Borough of Lambeth.
Vauxhall Gardens is depicted in a tile motif at Vauxhall tube station by George Smith.
Cultural significance
Eminent 18th-century scholar John Barrell, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, brings out Vauxhall's significance. "Vauxhall pleasure gardens, on the south bank of the Thames, entertained Londoners and visitors to London for 200 years. From 1729, under the management of Jonathan Tyers, property developer, impresario, patron of the arts, the gardens grew into an extraordinary business, a cradle of modern painting and architecture, and ... music .... A pioneer of mass entertainment, Tyers had to become also a pioneer of mass catering, of outdoor lighting, of advertising, and of all the logistics involved in running one of the most complex and profitable business ventures of the eighteenth century in Britain."The English pleasures of Vauxhall John Barrell, 25 January 2012 References to Vauxhall are, for 150 years, as ubiquitous as references to "Broadway" later would be. For example, an old Polish word for a pleasure garden () and the name of Foksal Street in Warsaw are Polonized versions of Vauxhall. In Russia, () has become synonymous with railway stations (and sometimes other transportation hubs) due to the preponderance of such "entertainment establishments" as the Vauxhall near train stations in the 18th and 19th centuries.
History
The Gardens are believed to have opened just before the Restoration of 1660, on property formerly owned by Jane Fauxe, or Vaux, a widow, in 1615. Whereas John Nichols in his History of Lambeth Parish conjectures that she was the widow of Guy Fawkes, executed in 1606, John Timbs in his 1867 Curiosities of London states for a fact that there was no such connection, and that the Vaux name derives from one Falkes de Breauté, a mercenary working for King John who acquired the land by marriage. Jane is stated to be the widow of John, a vintner. Curiosities of London John Timbs, 1867, page 745 Perhaps the earliest record is Samuel Pepys' description of a visit he made to the New Spring Gardens on 29 May 1662. The then name distinguished the gardens from the Old Spring Gardens at Charing Cross; however Pepys implies that there were both Old and New Spring Gardens at Vauxhall; and indeed Spring Gardens appears to have been a longstanding appellation for a variety of entertainment enterprises.London; being an accurate history and description of the British metropolis... vol IV, David Hughson, 1807, page 327
The Gardens consisted of several acres laid out with walks. Initially admission was free, the proprietors making money by selling food and drink. John Evelyn described "the New Spring Garden at Lambeth" as a "very pretty contrived plantation" in 1661. John Aubrey, in his Antiquities of Surrey gives the following account: At Vauxhall, Sir Samuel Morland built a fine room, anno 1667, the inside all of looking-glass, and fountains very pleasant to behold, which is much visited by strangers: it stands in the middle of the garden, covered with Cornish slate, on the point of which he placed a punchinello, very well carved, which held a dial, but the winds have demolished it.
A plan of 1681 shows the circular central feature planted with trees and shrubs, and the formal allées that were to remain a feature as long as the Gardens lasted.Coke, 1984: p.75.
Sir John Hawkins, in his General History of Music (1776), says: The house seems to have been rebuilt since the time that Sir Samuel Morland dwelt in it. About the year 1730,The lease to Jonathan Tyers (1702–1767) was from 1728; little is known of Tyers' early history; his portrait bust, attributed to Louis-François Roubiliac, is in the Birmingham City Museum and Art Collections. David Coke, "Vauxhall Gardens", Rococo: Art and Design in Hogarth's England (London: Victoria and Albert Museum) 1984:75–81, p.75, and cat. no. F1 (bust). Mr. Jonathan Tyers became the occupier of it, and, there being a large garden belonging to it, planted with a great number of stately trees, and laid out in shady walks, it obtained the name of Spring Gardens; and the house being converted into a tavern, or place of entertainment, was much frequented by the votaries of pleasure. Mr. Tyers opened it with an advertisement of a RidottoIn Venice, a ridotto was a small apartment for entertaining convenient to Piazza San Marco, the intimate setting for paintings of fashionable life by Alessandro Longhi: see Procuratie; the squib in the paper reported that "several Painters, and Artificers are employed to finish the Temples, Obelisks, Triumphal Arches, Grotto Rooms &c for the Ridotto Al' Fresco, commanded for the 7th of June, at Spring Gardens, Vauxhall." (quoted by Coke 1984:75). al Fresco, a term which the people of this country had till that time been strangers to. These entertainments were repeated in the course of the summer, and numbers resorted to partake of them. This encouraged the proprietor to make his garden a place of musical entertainment, for every evening during the summer season. To this end he was at great expense in decorating the gardens with paintings; he engaged a band of excellent musicians; he issued silver ticketsThese were season tickets; William Hogarth, who marshalled the painters to decorate the supper boxes, was issued a gold "lifetime" ticket, now in the British Museum (1984 Rococo exhibition, cat. no. F4. at one guinea each for admission, and receiving great encouragement, he set up an organ in the orchestra, and, in a conspicuous part of the garden, erected a fine statue of Mr. Handel.The seated marble of Handel by Louis-François Roubiliac (1738), almost the only survivor of the vanished Vauxhall Gardens, is at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The 'supposed' last night of the gardens was on 5 September 1839 when it attracted 1089 people. Vauxhall was sold at auction on 9 September 1841 for £20,000, following bankruptcy of the owners, after which it re-opened, but it was permanently closed in 1859, and most of the land sold for building purposes.
The Spring Gardens and the Rococo in England The Spring Gardens were the most prominent vehicle in England for the public display of the new Rococo style.The Gardens were so central to the dissemination of Rococo in the public fancy, a section devoted to "Vauxhall Gardens" with an introductory essay by David Coke, was included in the 1984 exhibition Rococo: Art and Design in Hogarth's England held at the Victoria and Albert Museum (pp 75–81 and catalogue numbers F1-F43). The earliest pictorial representation of Tyers' Spring Gardens, Vauxhall, is the "Vauxhall fan" (1736), an etching printed in blue designed to be pasted to a fan;1984 exhibition catalogue F5, lent by the Prince of Wales. it shows the earliest groups of pavilions, in a sober classical taste, but the interiors of the supper boxes were painted by members of Hogarth's St. Martin's Lane Academy, prominent among them Francis Hayman.Hayman's 'conversation piece of Tyers and his family (1740), at the National Portrait Gallery, was included in the 1984 Rococo exhibition, cat. no. F2. Hayman provided most of the subjects, which were rapidly executed by students and assistants; Hubert Gravelot provided designs for two others, and Hogarth's designs were pressed into service in hastily dashed-off copies that filled the back of every box. At a certain hour, all the paintings were let down at once, to offer some security to the companies at supper and a suitable backdrop, one observer thought, for the live beauties of London."And what adds not a little to the pleasure of these pictures, they give an unexceptionable opportunity of gazing on any pleasing fair-one, without any other pretence than the credit of a fine taste for the piece behind her", according to a correspondent to the Scots Magazine quoted by Coke 1984:78. Frederick, Prince of Wales, who had come to England with his father George II in 1728 and who was a prominent patron of the Rococo, took sufficient interest in the Gardens to have his own pavilion built from the very first.He was the owner of the real estate. (Coke 1984:76).
The first fully Rococo structure erected at the Spring Gardens, Vauxhall, was the "Turkish Tent" that was still a novelty in 1744; "this fantastic structure introduced that element of frivolous impermanence which became so characteristic of Vauxhall," David Coke has remarked.Coke 1984:80. In the course of the 1740s it was joined by other examples of Rococo chinoiserie and above all by the Rotunda, with the most-viewed Rococo interior decoration in England, designed by George Michael Moser, another member of the St. Martin's Lane Academy; the ornaments were "Executed by French and Italians" George Vertue noted.The Walpole Society, Vertue Note-Books III:150.
The experience Enormous crowds could be accommodated at Spring Gardens, Vauxhall. In 1749 a rehearsal of Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks attracted an audience of 12,000, and in 1786 a fancy-dress jubilee to celebrate the proprietor's long ownership was thronged with 61,000 revellers. Many of the best known musicians and singers of the day performed at the Gardens, for example Sophia Baddeley. In 1732, their fashionable status was confirmed by a fancy dress ball attended by Frederick, Prince of Wales. At that time access from the West End was by water, but the opening of Westminster Bridge in the 1740s made access easier though less charming.
The main walks were lit at night by thousands of lamps. Over time more features and eyecatchers were added: additional supper boxes, a music room, a Chinese pavilion, a gothic orchestra that accommodated fifty musicians, and ruins, arches, statues and a cascade. An admission charge was introduced from the beginning and later James Boswell wrote: