Part 15 (2/2)
The old gardens have bravely withstood the vandals and iconoclasts of modern Chelsea, as well as the attacks of builders, seeking what they may devour; but the growth of bricks and mortar round about them has but ill suited the delicate plants, which, it is to be feared, grow now but feebly for the most part. It is long since the days of the Stuarts,--days when the gardens of Chelsea could still grow roses.
Nevertheless, the ”Physick Garden” is still delightful for purposes quite other than those for which it was first made; and, fortunately, the terms of the bequest render its alienation difficult and unlikely.
Perhaps, in the happy future, who knows? the garden may be opened altogether to the Chelsea public. Of its original cedar trees, planted by Sir Hans Sloane in 1683, but one now remains, and this is very decrepit; in its decrepitude it is, however, still quite as picturesque as it could ever have been in its prime. The river, in pre-Embankment days, flowed close by the Physick Garden, the modern roadway and parade being land embanked and reclaimed from the river.
The Watergate to Sir Hans's garden has, in consequence, disappeared; but his statue, erected in 1733, still stands, bewigged and robed, chipped and stained, on its pedestal by the historic cedar tree.
Close by was the site of Chelsea Ferry, and it was near here that the Old Swan Tavern, with its attractive wooden balconies projecting over the river, and an entrance from Queen's Road, used to stand. This was the famous tavern, house of call for barges, and resort of so many distinguished pleasure parties, that used to serve as goal for the annual race,--prototype of the modern Oxford and Cambridge race,--that was rowed by the young Thames watermen for the prizes of the ”Doggett”
badge and the coat full of pockets and guineas. The tavern was destroyed in 1873 to make room for the new Embankment, which has so completely changed the aspect of all this part of the river. To quote a writer in the _Art Journal_ for 1881:--
”No doubt the Embankment at Chelsea was needed; no doubt the broad margin of mud which used to fringe old Cheyne Walk was very unhealthy in summer-time; yet no one who cares for what is quaint and picturesque, and who clings to relics of the old days of which we shall soon have no traces left, can recall the river strand at Chelsea, with its wharfs and its water-stairs, its barges and its altogether indescribable but most picturesque aspect, and not feel as he looks at the trim even wall of the Embankment, and the broad monotonous pavement above it, even if he does not say in words, 'Oh, the difference to me!'”
On the site of the ancient tavern is now built ”Old Swan House,” a modern-antique mansion designed in a charming style by Mr. Norman Shaw. A few paces westward from Old Swan House, the modern red-brick t.i.te Street, full of artists' studios and of the elect, runs up towards Queen's Road. t.i.te Street is, so far as its externals go, somewhat dark and shut in by its tall houses; but it more than atones for any outside dulness by the excessive light and learning of its interiors. ”The White House,” near the lower end of the street on the right, was built for Mr. Whistler. Further up the street--also on the right--is ”Gough House,” a fine old mansion of Charles II.'s time, now most happily adapted to the needs of the Victoria Hospital for Sick Children.
Close to the site of the old ”Rotunda” of Ranelagh, is the famous ”Royal Military Hospital,” usually called ”Chelsea Hospital,” and made familiar to all the world outside London by Herkomer's great pictures, ”The Last Muster” and ”Chelsea Pensioners.” It was John Evelyn who first gained Charles II.'s consent to the erection of a Royal Hospital for veteran soldiers on this site,--though local tradition, apparently without any reason at all, persists in attributing its foundation to Nell Gwynne, who, with all her frailties, was ever the people's darling, and especially a Chelsea darling. The Hospital building--an open quadrangle with wings,--was designed by Wren. In colour as well as form, it is solid and reposeful--a n.o.ble example of Wren's style and taste. The gardens, open to the public during the day, have something of the calm regularity of old Dutch palaces. But then Chelsea, in building as in horticulture, had always a tendency to the neat Dutch formalism of William and Mary.
A little north of Chelsea Hospital, between the modern Union Street and Westbourne Street, stood, in the days of the Georges, the ”Old Original Chelsea Bun-House,” that was for so long the resort of eighteenth-century fas.h.i.+on. Hither used to drive George I. and his consort, Caroline of Ans.p.a.ch; George III. and Queen Charlotte also came here in person to fetch their buns home, which, of course, set the fas.h.i.+on. The old house had a picturesque colonnade; but in 1839 new proprietors rebuilt it; which rash proceeding, however, killed the custom.
Since Stuart and early Hanoverian days, times have changed for Chelsea and Kensington; they are now,--as more distant Hammersmith and Fulham are rapidly becoming, and as Putney and Dulwich soon threaten to be,--integral parts of the ”monster London,” that, like a great irresistible flood, in spreading absorbs all the peaceful little pools that lie in its path. The squalor and the gloom, as well as the splendour and the riches of the great city, are now their heritage.
Never more will the waves lap peacefully at Chelsea along the river's shelving sh.o.r.es; never again will the streets and squares of old Kensington regain their former seclusion and calm. Instead, a modern, and, let us hope, a yearly more beautiful city will spread, gradually and certainly, over all the available area. Chelsea and Kensington in the past have had many glories; who can say what splendid fortune may yet be theirs? And we who lament the inevitable changes of time, must remember that they are still living cities, hallowed by their past, interesting by their present, but whose greater and more enduring magnificence is yet to come.
CHAPTER XI
BLOOMSBURY
”Some love the Chelsea river gales, And the slow barges' ruddy sails, And these I'll woo when glamour fails In Bloomsbury.
”Enough for me in yonder square To see the perky sparrows pair, Or long laburnum gild the air In Bloomsbury.
”Enough for me in midnight skies To see the moons of London rise, And weave their silver fantasies In Bloomsbury.
”Oh, mine in snows and summer heats, These good old Tory brick-built streets!
My eye is pleased with all it meets In Bloomsbury.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: _The German Band._]
The peculiar and somewhat old-world charm of Bloomsbury is, like that of Chelsea, only made known to her devotees. To the visitor to London, no less than to the fas.h.i.+onable dweller in the West-End, it is a grimy, sordid, squalid region, where slums abound, where ”no nice people live,” and where mere ”going out to dinner” necessitates either the paying of a half-crown cab fare, or the sacrifice of an hour in the bone-shaking omnibus. Hence arises the custom of saying that ”Bloomsbury is so far away.” Of course, the distance or proximity of any part of London depends on what one chooses for the centre; but, taking either Oxford Circus or Charing-Cross--surely natural enough centres--as the diverging point, Bloomsbury is more central than any residential part of the metropolis. But even at the play poor Bloomsbury is maligned; and this, too, notwithstanding the fact that it is the chosen abode of so many of the theatrical profession. ”They call the place where I live, Bloomsbury,” says Mr. Todman, the old second-hand bookseller of _Liberty Hall_, ”though why Bloomsbury, I don't know; for there ain't so much bloomin' as there is buryin',”
(this, by the way, is a two-edged libel, for Bloomsbury being on high ground is notoriously healthy). And then the same gentleman goes on to remark, ”they call my 'ouse a ramblin' one, though why it ain't rambled away to some nicer place, I can't think.” We get, from the same play, a further impression that the Bloomsburians live mainly on a dish called ”Smoked 'Add.i.c.k.” Perhaps the dramatist was led to this conclusion from the very pervading smell of fried fish that fills certain ”unlovely streets” of cookshops or boarding-houses; where, however, in my experience the 'add.i.c.k aroma has always yielded the palm to that of ”sheeps'-trotters” or ”stewed eels.” Be this as it may, the old solidly built squares and houses of Bloomsbury have a dignity of their own. Some of the streets have, it is true, ”come down in the world;” nevertheless, in their decay they retain a mournful look of having known better days,--a look that even their tenement rooms,--their broken windows, half-stuffed with paper,--their shock-headed dirty inmates,--cannot altogether abolish or destroy.
d.i.c.kens, who always saw the human side of everything, has often noticed the peculiar pathos of some of these old, world-forgotten houses. In his inimitable _Sketches by Boz_ he gives a graphic account of the gradual decay of a house ”over the water.” Here, the process is somewhat similar. First, it changes from a private dwelling-house to a ”select boarding-house”; then, it becomes a friendly, social affair, a ”Home from Home”; then, its area steps become dirtier, its cook sits on them, sh.e.l.ling peas, and exchanging jokes with the milkman; it blossoms out in gaudy paint, like a decorator's shop; cracked flowerpots, of odd shapes and sizes, adorn its windows; and it descends, by slow degrees, yet further in the scale of ”gentility,”
till finally it becomes a mere tenement house, its juvenile population going in and out with jugs of beer, its area railings hung round with pewter milk-pots, and its door ornamented with a row of half-broken bell-chains for the different occupants. And, if you should chance, too hurriedly, to ring one of these in search of a special inhabitant, ten to one a cross, dirty-faced female will appear, grumbling: ”Can't yer see as _this_ 'ere is Mrs. Smith's bell?--Two pair back--ye've rung the wrong 'un!”
The Bloomsbury houses are pathetic, however, not so much from age, as because their glory has departed,--because they have had their day, and ceased to be; for, in the matter of actual age, few of them date back farther than the end of the eighteenth century. Queen Square, indeed, which is far prior to any of its neighbouring squares, was laid out in the reign of Queen Anne, in whose honour it was named, and whose statue still adorns it. It is a curiously shaped square, for, though enclosed, no houses were built at the northern end; this arrangement was made for the sake of the fine view of the hills of Highgate and Hampstead, that the square then commanded. Strange transformation! The Bloomsbury that we know was then all fields; the houses of Queen Square being, so to speak, the last sentinels of the London of that day! Rocques' map of 1746 gives no houses beyond the northern end of Southampton Row. Between Great Russell Street and the present Euston Road, was then open country,--called, first, the ”Long Fields,”--then ”Southampton Fields,” or ”Lamb's Conduit Fields.”
Earlier, they were famous for their peaches and their snipes; but in about 1800 they were mainly waste ground, where brawling and disorderly sports took place, and where superst.i.tion a.s.serted that, two brothers having fought there about a lady, the footsteps they made in their death-struggle would never again grow gra.s.s or herb! ”The Brothers' Steps,” the place was called, or, ”The Field of the Forty Footsteps.” The present Gordon Square is said to be built upon the exact spot. The place had, however, always been rife with superst.i.tion; for here, on Midsummer-Day, in the 17th century, young women would come looking for a plantain leaf, to put under their pillows, so that they should dream of their future husbands. From these fields could be seen, in 1746 and far later, but two or three n.o.bles' mansions, enclosed in their gardens,--such as ”Bedford House,”
pulled down to build Bedford Square,--”Baltimore House,” long since built into Russell Square,--and ”Montague House,” now rebuilt as the British Museum;--with the old ”Whitefield's Tabernacle” appearing through the trees towards the gardens of the ancient manor of ”Toten Court,” which gave its romantic name to the essentially unromantic Tottenham Court Road. (The ugly ”Adam and Eve” public-house, at the junction of Euston Road and Tottenham Court Road, now occupies the place both of the old tavern of that name, and the older manor-house.)
The name ”Bloomsbury” is, however, of more remote date; it is, like most London appellations, a ”corruption,” and comes from ”Blemundsbury,” the manor of the De Blemontes, or Blemunds, in the reign of Henry III. Later, the manor of Bloomsbury came, together with that of the neighbouring St. Giles, into the possession of the Earls of Southampton, till in 1668 it pa.s.sed with Lady Rachel,--daughter of Thomas Wriothesley, last Earl, by her marriage with Lord William Russell,--into the family of the Dukes of Bedford, the present owners.
Lord William Russell,--who was beheaded, without a fair trial, in Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1683, for supposed connection with the famous Rye House Plot,--lived in Bedford House (formerly Southampton House), on the northern side of Bloomsbury, originally Southampton, Square.
(The house occupied the whole north side of the square until pulled down in 1802, after the ill.u.s.trious Russells had lived there for more than 200 years.) This was the house admired by Evelyn, in an entry in his diary of February 9, 1665: ”Dined at my Lord Treasurer's, the Earle of Southampton, in Blomesbury, where he was building a n.o.ble square or piazza, a little towne; some n.o.ble rooms, a pretty cedar chapel, a naked garden to the north, but good aire”. It was at first intended that Lord William Russell should suffer in Bloomsbury Square, opposite his own residence; but this was apparently opposed by the King as too indecent.... Poor, heroic Lady Rachel Russell! She lived here in retirement till her death, at the age of 86, in the reign of George I. She had, indeed, like Polycrates, given her treasured ”ring”, and could fear no more from fate. The great landlords of London may get their ”unearned increment” easily enough now, yet they had to pay the penalty of greatness in the past!
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