Note 319 — VI SOUTH LONDON GROUP

The place was at first generally called The New Spring Garden. Cunningham (Handbook of London, s.v. “Vauxhall Gardens”) and other modern writers suppose that it was called New to distinguish it from the old Spring Garden at Charing Cross, and this view seems to receive some countenance from a passage in Evelyn’s Fumifugium, 1661, quoted by Cunningham. It must be borne in mind, however, that there existed at Vauxhall shortly after the Restoration, two Spring Gardens which seem to have been distinguished as the Old and New. This appears very distinctly from the following passage in Pepys, under date 29 May, 1662:—“Thence home and with my wife and the two maids and the boy took the boat, and to Foxhall, where I had not been a great while. To the Old Spring Garden, and there walked long, and the wenches gathered pinks. Here we staid, and seeing that we could not have anything to eate but very dear, and with long stay, we went forth again without any notice taken of us, and so we might have done if we had had anything. Thence to the new one, where I never was before, which much exceeds the other; and here we also walked, and the boy crept through the hedge and gathered abundance of roses, and after a long walk, passed out of doors as we did in the other place.”

Somewhat earlier (2 July, 1661), Evelyn in his Diary has the entry “I went to see the New Spring Garden at Lambeth, a pretty contrived plantation.” This probably, if not quite certainly (for compare the mention in Evelyn’s Fumifugium noticed above), refers to Vauxhall Gardens. Monconys, the French traveller (1663), briefly describes “Les Jardins du Printemps” at Lambeth, but it can hardly be made out whether he is alluding to the garden called by Pepys the Old Spring Garden at Vauxhall or to the New Spring Garden, i.e., Vauxhall Gardens (cp. Tanswell’s Lambeth, p. 181). The supposed site of the Old Spring Garden at Vauxhall (or Lambeth) is indicated in a map in Manning and Bray’s Surrey, iii. p. 526 (cp. Walford, vi. 340). The statement of Aubrey and Sir John Hawkins, usually accepted by modern writers, that Sir Samuel Morland occupied in 1675 a house on the site of Vauxhall Gardens, is evidently erroneous (cp. Vauxhall Papers, No. 4, p. 28).