I’m writing this during Chelsea Week which is quite appropriate because the famous marquee is usually put up on the site of the long demolished Rotunda in what was once Ranelagh Gardens.
There have been commercial pleasure gardens in London since the 17th century, many having started life as private gardens around great houses. One of the best known was Ranelagh which opened next door to Chelsea Hospital in Chelsea in 1742, as a direct but usually more respectable [but be prepared to be shocked by a risqué future Duchess] rival to the older and even better-known Vauxhall Gardens across the Thames in Lambeth.
Once the height of fashion, patronised by royalty and painted by Canaletto, Ranelagh closed its doors after about 60 years, while the amazing buildings were demolished and the site built over or incorporated into the hospital grounds.
Charles II had founded the Hospital in 1682 and Ranelagh House was built next door by Richard Jones, Earl of Ranelagh, the first Treasurer of the Hospital, as his official residence. The grounds, which he leased from the crown, extended to over 22 acres, and were laid out with lawns, an orchard and gardens with gravel walks lined with yew and elms.
His heirs sold off large parts of the estate in 1735, with the house itself and about 13 acres surrounding it being bought by developers led by Benjamin Timbrell, a master carpenter, who planned to build on some of the land but then leased the mansion and gardens for 21 years at £130pa to William Crispe and James Myonet. As part of the deal Timbrell agreed to construct a large building in the gardens for them according to an agreed design at a cost of £300: this was the famous Rotunda based on the design of the Pantheon in Rome, one of the most celebrated buildings of the ancient world.
The Rotunda was vast, and despite its seemingly solid appearance was actually made entirely of wood. It was 555ft round with an interior diameter of 15oft, and had 60 windows. Its four entrances had grand Doric porticoes, with steps leading up to an outside gallery on top of an arcade leading to 52 boxes each of which could accommodate 7-8 people and their refreshments. Inside another circle of another 52 boxes ran round the wall.
The Rotunda was designed for musical entertainments, indeed it was probably Europe’s first purpose-built concert space. It’s amazing it didnt burn down since the central column which supported the roof also contained an open fire with a chimney! Music on this scale was expensive and its financing, and indeed the whole set-up was complex. In the end Crispe and Myonet had to seek subscribers for their concert programme. This still didn’t raise enough cash so they issued 36 shares of £1,000 each with Sir Thomas Robinson, the architect and an MP becoming the principal shareholder and taking over the management of the whole project. Robinson then built himself a house, Prospect Place in the grounds where he lived until his death in 1777.
Interior of the Rotunda, Canaletto, 1754, Compton Verney
Although the Rotunda was still unfinished Ranelagh finally opened its doors to the public in 1742 and quickly became one of the most fashionable resorts around London. Access by both road and river was easy but from the outset it was very different to its rival over at Vauxhall. It’s usually described as more respectable and attracting an older clientele.
Entertainment was limited largely to music, food and promenading both in the gardens- which were illuminated at night – and walking round and round in the Rotunda itself. There was generally no gambling and no strong alcohol and because it was quite expensive – in the early days admission was sometimes 1s. sometimes 2s., including the breakfast and morning concert – it was more exclusive with little of the “unseemly” behaviour that was common at Vauxhall. However that wasn’t always the case as we’ll see shortly.
Even so Vauxhall’s owner Jonathan Tyers was worried sufficiently by the competition to buy the adjacent field so that his rival couldn’t expand further.
Horace Walpole reported that he breakfasted at Ranelagh on 22nd April 1742 before it had officially opened, along with another 379 people who paid 18d a head. It was the king, George II, who visited and opened the gardens at 11.00 on May 24th 1742 with the Daily Advertiser claiming that some 6000 people were there. Certainly Walpole noted that ” the Prince, Princess, Duke, much nobility, and much mob besides, were there. There is a vast amphitheatre, finely gilt, painted, and illuminated, into which everybody that loves eating, drinking, staring, or crowding, is admitted for twelvepence. The building and disposition of the garden cost sixteen thousand pounds. Twice a-week there are to be Ridottos, at guinea tickets, for which you are to have a supper and music.”
However he wasn’t initially that enthusiastic: “I was there last night, but did not find the joy of it. Vauxhall is a little better ; for the garden is pleasanter.”
Over time though he warmed to the place and and by midsummer 1744 wrote that “Nobody goes anywhere else; everybody goes there. My Lord Chesterfield is so fond of it, that he says he has ordered all his letters to be directed thither.” In short Ranelagh “has totally beat Vauxhall … the floor is all of beaten princes―that you can’t set your foot without treading on a Prince of Wales or Duke of Cumberland.”
Both the king and Walpole continued to visit regularly.for many years although in the early days the gardens were not always busy even when it was known George would be there. Walpole reported one masquerade attended by him later in 1742 which was “miserable, 100 men, six women and two shepherdesses.”
In May 1749, Walpole went to “what was called ‘a jubilee-masquerade in the ‘Venetian manner’ … it had nothing Venetian in it, but was by far the best understood and the prettiest spectacle I ever saw: nothing in a fairy tale ever surpassed it.” Apparently this had been requested by the king himself and was to celebrate the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle at the end of the War of the Austrian Succession.
“It began at three o’clock, and, about five, people of fashion began to go. When you entered, you found the whole garden filled with masks and spread with tents, which remained all night very commodely. In one quarter, was a May-pole dressed with garlands, and people dancing round it to a tabor and. pipe and rustic music, all masqued.”
The canal was taken over by “a sort of gondola, adorned with flags and streamers, and filled with music, rowing about.” Not content with that the area around the amphitheatre became a consumer opportunity with ” shops, filled with Dresden china, japan, &c., and all the shopkeepers in mask”. Inside it was lit up with ” in the middle a circular bower, composed of all kinds of firs in tubs, from twenty to thirty feet high: under them orange-trees, with small lamps in each orange, and below them all sorts of the finest auriculas in pots ; and festoons of natural flowers hanging from tree to tree. Between the arches too were firs, and smaller ones in the balconies above. ”
Walpole estimated there were about 2,000 people there that afternoon enjoying “tea and wine, gaming-tables and dancing” so perhaps its not surprising that there were often traffic jams of carriages and coaches on the road from the city. He’d also changed his mind completely because “In short, it pleased me more than anything I ever saw.”
You can check out many other visits and comments by Walpole to Ranelagh in his voluminous correspondence freely available via the Walpole Library at Yale.
Having said Ranelagh was for the more respectable members of society it was not like that all the time. At one masquerade “Miss Chudleigh was Iphegenia but so naked you would have taken her for Andromeda”. As you can see this was picked up not just by the press but artists too, with several prints being issued of the event.
Elizabeth Chudleigh was a lady in waiting to the Princess of Wales, but she was also well-known for her adventurous and colourful life style. She had secretly married the future Earl of Bristol although later, with his agreement, swore she was unmarried so was legally declared a spinster by the church courts. This meant she could marry the Duke of Kingston whose mistress she had been. After the duke’s death she inherited his estate but was then tried for bigamy and found guilty. She quickly fled abroad with the money!
Read more about her on Wikipedia or in Catherine Ostler’s,The Duchess Countess, [2022].
A few years later the editor of The Connoisseur, a short-lived satirical magazine in the 1750s tried to get Ranelagh to repeat what happened when “a celebrated lady… stripped to the character of Iphigenia undrest for the sacrifice.” He thought it hadn’t caught on because “bashfulness, had not yet been banished from the female world” but ” the present enlightened times” should have ” the honour of introducing a NAKED MASQUERADE.”
“As soon as the hot days come in” he suggested “the whole company is to display all their charms in puris natura∣libus.”
“One set of ladies intend to personate Water-Nymphs bathing in the canal: three sisters, celebrated for their charms, design to appear together as the Three Graces; and a certain lady of quality, is now practising from a model of the noted statue of Venus de Medicis, the most striking attitudes for that character.”
“Gentlemen, may most of them represent very suitably the half-brutal forms of Satyrs, Pans, Fauns, and Centaurs: our beaux may assume the semblance of the beardless Apollo, or may admire themselves in the person of Narcissus: and our bucks might act quite in character, by running about stark-naked with their mis∣tresses, and committing the maddest freaks…”
Of course “Persons of fashion cannot but lament, that there are no diversions allotted to Sunday, except the card-table; and they can never enough regret, that the Sunday evening tea-drinkings at Ranelagh were laid aside, from a superstitious regard to religion. They therefore intend to have a particular sort of Masque∣rade on that day, in which they may shew their taste by ridiculing all the old womens tales contained in that idle book of fables, the Bible; while the vulgar are devoutly attending to them at church.”
Special events like this pushed admission prices up. A fireworks display cost at least 3 shillings while masquerades were anything from half a guinea to as much as two guineas a ticket.
Ranelagh was not open all the time, after all who’d want to promenading outside in winter. It usually opened for three days a week – Monday, Wednesday and Friday – from Easter onwards although the proprietors were keen to lay on dances and other entertainments inside the Rotunda during the winter.
On a typical open day there would be breakfast and a morning concert, which would be followed by an evening concert. These had long intervals where visitors could take the air in the gardens, and from 1767 onwards listen to more music performed outside. Music greeted new arrivals at the river stairs or at the entrance gate beforehand, although the range and quality of the concert programme varied considerably!
There was everything from opera and chamber music to the equivalent of music hall songs. Books were published containing the latest offerings at Ranelagh and its competitors, but as Smollett has one of his characters in Humphry Clinker say sometimes “it is well for the performers that they cannot be heard distinctly.” To be fair that might have been because the acoustics of the vast Rotunda were probably not that good.
On the other hand there were favourable reviews of many fine singers and instrumentalists with, for example, the Public Advertiser or 26 June 1764 reporting that “the celebrated and astonishing Master Mozart, lately arrived, a Child of 7 Years of Age … will perform several fine select Pieces of his own Composition on the Harpsichord and on the Organ.”
All this and more was described in various guides to London for visitors, and Ranelagh was even the subject of its own book.
For the next 30 years or so Ranelagh remained highly fashionable, although inevitably rivals sprang up. Apart from Vauxhall and the other various commercial garden venues a new indoor dance and music space – The Pantheon – opened on what is now Oxford Street. Calling it “a winter Ranelagh” Walpole took the French ambassador to see it : “Imagine Balbec in all its glory! The pillars are of artificial giallo antico. The ceilings, even of the passages, are of the most beautiful stuccos in the best taste of grotesque. The ceilings of the ball-rooms and the panels painted like Raphael’s loggias in the Vatican. A dome like the pantheon, glazed. It is to cost fifty thousand pounds.” In fact with the expense of buying the land and clearing the existing buildings the bill probably came in at over £300,000.
For more on the Pantheon [now the site of a branch of M&S] follow this link
As a result, by the late 1770s, Ranelagh began to lose its fashionable cachet. The value of its shares dropped sharply and the management sought new forms of entertainment. They held all-night masquerade parties, tried shooting matches, and laying on ever-more extravagant firework displays, as well as opening “Mount Etna”. This exhibition showed the Cyclops forging armour for Mars in the Cave of Vulcan complete with lots of smoke and noise, and accompanied by music “compiled from Gluck, Haydn, Giardini, and Handel.”
They also organised regattas. The first of these was in 1775 which turned the whole of the Thameside into a fairground with boat races on the river and stalls and amusements on the banks, reportedly watched by hundreds of thousands of people. It was followed by a ball with dancing at and around a temporary Temple of Neptune, seen in the background on the ticket above.
Unfortunately nothing stopped the decline and in 1803 the pleasure gardens closed after sixty one years of operation. The contents were auctioned off and the Rotunda demolished shortly afterwards. Much of the site was eventually added to the grounds of The Royal Hospital. It was a sad end to what Dr Johnson had called “the finest thing he had ever seen.”
For more information a good place to start is Warwick Wroth’s encyclopaedic The Pleasure Gardens of London, first published in 1896 but still unsurpassed.
The Gardens Trust 
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