Note 59b — THE EAGLE AND GRECIAN SALOON

Now No. 128, Pentonville Road. Till about the seventies it had a garden space beside it, facing the road. Another place in the City Road, the Green Gate Tavern (now No. 220), preserved almost up to the nineties a small garden with its boxes and ‘a few old trees that still, in spite of fog and smoke, struggled into life as the summer came round, and formed a pleasant contrast to the dingy neighbourhood by which they were surrounded’ (H. Fancourt in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, May 9, 1891). In the early fifties the Green Gate had a concert-room and a stage. A rough woodcut in the Paul Pry journal for 1854 shows a theatrical performance going on. Tall-hatted gentlemen are seated in the stalls, but in the pit or ‘promenade’ behind the audience is of a coster character. There is a water-colour drawing of the Green Gate by T. H. Sheperd, 1852, in the Crace Collection, Catalogue, p. 607, No. 4.