The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century

Strombolo House and Gardens, Chelsea

Strombolo House241 was a minor place of entertainment, dating from 1762, or earlier, with tea-gardens and “a fine fountain”242 attached to it. The gardens243 are said to have been most frequented about 1788. They were open chiefly in the afternoons of week-days and Sundays for tea-drinking during the summer season. The house, opposite the famous Royal Bun House, Chelsea, in Jew’s Row (now Pimlico Road), was still standing in 1829, when Faulkner’s Chelsea (second edition) was published, but it appears to have been disused as a place of amusement long before that date.

The ground was afterwards occupied by the Orange Tavern and tea-gardens to which was attached the Orange Theatre, a small private playhouse, where local geniuses performed (1831–32). St. Barnabas Church, Pimlico, built 1848–1850, standing off the south side of Pimlico Road (entrance in Church Street) is now nearly on the site.

[O’Keefe’s Recollections, i. p. 88; Faulkner’s Chelsea, ii. p. 357; Davis’s Knightsbridge (1859), p. 263; Wheatley’s London P. and P. s.v. “Strombello”; Timbs’s Club Life (1866), ii. p. 260.]