Vauxhall

Two centuries of pleasure gardens, then a gyratory, a spy headquarters and Nine Elms.

The name belonged to a man. Falkes de Bréauté was a mercenary of King John's who married into land on this bank in the 1200s, and the hall he built on it is what the place is called after. From 1661 the ground behind it was a pleasure garden, and for two hundred years it was the most famous in Europe. People came over by boat to walk lit avenues, listen to music and eat the notoriously thin ham; the public rehearsal of Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks drew twelve thousand in 1749 and stopped the traffic on London Bridge for three hours. Roubiliac carved his Handel for the gardens in 1738 and it is in the V&A now. The gardens closed in 1859 and streets went over them, but one field is still open and still called Spring Gardens. The Royal Vauxhall Tavern opened in 1863 and in 2015 became the first building in Britain given historic protection for its place in gay history. The first bridge here, of 1816, was the first iron bridge over the Thames in London; the one standing now replaced it in 1906, and the bronze figures along its piers were added the year after, one of them holding a model of St Paul's. West of the gyratory is Nine Elms, a goods yard and a gasworks until the 1970s and now flats, the American embassy that opened in 2018, and the market that supplies most of London's kitchens.

Photo by Fred Romero, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons