Whistler and the last days of Cremorne

Posted on 29/01/2022 by The Garden History Blog

In 1863 the American artist James Whistler leased a house in  Chelsea overlooking the Thames. The river, its bridges and boatyards  became one of his principal subjects, and featured in a series of night-time paintings he called Nocturnes.

Whilst most of these are evocative views of the river itself, some of them also captured the ephemeral spirit of the pleasure grounds of Cremorne Gardens in the years just before they closed in 1877. As a result while  the gardens  have disappeared under bricks and mortar,  these paintings,  and others by  Whistler’s  sometime friend and collaborator Walter Greaves, help them live on.

 

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Cremorne Gardens: Drinking, Dancing and Danger!

Posted on 22/01/2022 by The Garden History Blog

Chelsea, nowadays largely the playground of the rich, was in the middle of the 19thc the playground of every class of Londoner, with almost every form of popular entertainment on offer on the banks of the Thames at Cremorne. Whether you liked the circus or carousing, ballooning or ballet,  fireworks or freak-shows,  danger or dancing, Cremorne  became THE place to go.  

Last week we looked at the rather shaky early days of the gardens and today’s looks at what happened after  Thomas Simpson the new lessee took over in 1850. He expanded the site to about 20 acres, investing huge amounts of money  remodelling the gardens, adding new attractions and hiring entertainers from all round the world.  

In the end there was  almost too much to do  and all for one shilling admission.

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The First Chelsea Stadium

Posted on 15/01/2022 by The Garden History Blog

 Say Chelsea Stadium to most people and they’ll think of football but Stamford Bridge wasn’t the first stadium in Chelsea. The earlier one had beautiful gardens and was a  venue for sports of all kinds [apart from football]. Sadly all that’s left of it  is a small patch of public park  sandwiched in between a busy road and the Thames.

Chelsea’s first  stadium later became what Illustrated London News  in 1851  called the “pleasure resort” of Cremorne Gardens.  It soon gained a reputation for being  rather racy where “students and shop girls, soldiers and civilians, dissipated young bloods, paterfamilias with their better halves, schoolboys and children’s nurses” all mixed.    “It is not an edifying place” instead it’s one where  “Londoners leave their prudery at home.” So what’s the story of this unedifying place where prudery was not much in evidence?

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Are there Fairies at the Bottom of Your Garden?

Posted on 08/01/2022 by The Garden History Blog

I thought we should start off the year with something to make us smile and I recalled a line from Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy : “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

Where did that notion of fairies at the bottom of the garden come from?  I suppose I’d always imagined that to be an idea based on mediaeval folk tales, or at the very least something that derived from Shakespeares Midsummer Nights Dream.  But far from it.   Although the idea of garden fairies might go back a long way I think  the phrase  “There are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden” really only dates from 1917… a year which has other fairy and garden significance too as well as having strong connections to Sherlock Holmes.

Intrigued? Read on to find out more

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2021 on the blog…and the Annual Quiz

Posted on 01/01/2022 by The Garden History Blog

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Welcome to the 9th year of the blog.  The numbers reading it  have continued to grow apace with about 129,000 hits over the course of the year, an almost 30% rise on last year’s already record number.  The average daily viewing have been about 350 over the whole year and during the height of the pandemic even passed 400.  There were even 530 views on Christmas Day itself.   There have been about  75,000 visitors, up from 56,000 in 2020 and almost 3 times the number for 2019.

Thanks to the statistics provided by WordPress I’m also able to tell you that this is the 414th post which in total contain 927,657 words, and this year I’ve been a bit more verbose than usual with posts averaging about 2660 words.

As always, thank you  for your loyal support and the nice comments. Please keep  telling your friends about the blog and get them to join the mailing list.  Just  go to the very bottom of any post and  enter an email address and each new post  will appear, as if by magic, early on Saturday morning in good time for breakfast.

And now read on to test your memory with the  annual quiz based on this year’s posts.

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