3-028-122 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

A Saturday Half Holiday, 1871. 'There are many places to be visited, and many sports or active exercises to be practised, in the neighbourhood of this great city [ie London], which may be found satisfactory for the purposes of holiday enjoyment......some well-known river-side places of entertainment...invite the favoured cockney to delightful lounges in the open air, with more beautiful and interesting objects in view than lie so near the dweller in any provincial town. Go which way you please in the vicinity of London...you will come to something worth looking at, before you have sat half an hour in the railway train...when you have passed below Woolwich, by train upon the iron road or by steam-boat on the tidal river, you come to one after another pleasant little place, where the half-private, half-public festivity of friendly or family parties, at the tea-gardens, is permitted to those who like it. This may not be genteel, but is by no means the worst thing in the world for a holiday afternoon'. Engraving shows day-trippers at the Belle Vue tavern in Gravesend, Kent, which had a windmill and observatory. The building burnt down during celebrations of the relief of Mafeking, which would have taken place around May 1900. From "Illustrated London News", 1871.