Vauxhall Gardens was an extensive pleasure garden on the south bank of the Thames. It is now a (relatively bare) public park.
“A General Prospect of Vaux Hall Gardens” (1751) by Samuel Wale, sourced on Wikimedia Commons.
The Keats Connection
Vauxhall Gardens has a long history, with the park dating back to c.1660. It was developed into a pleasure garden during the period 1785-1859, and boasted a risqué reputation. In his biography of Keats, Andrew Motion observes that “the Vauxhall Gardens epitomised the style as well as the tawdriness of Regency London”.
Keats visited the Gardens in August 1814, and spied a beautiful woman – the fairest form he’d ever seen or imagined. He didn’t approach her, but wrote the poem “Fill for me a brimming bowl” describing the torment of being caught between the distractions of his attraction to women and his desire to concentrate on “The Classic page, or Muse’s lore”. Motion describes it thus: “He longs to push women to the side of his mind; he cannot resist pulling them towards the centre.”
Keats is still thinking of this woman in February 1818 when he writes the poem beginning “Time’s sea hath been five years at its slow ebb”, which is dedicated “To a Lady Seen for a Few Moments at Vauxhall”.
Obviously this glimpse of a woman he never knew embodied some ideal sense of beauty for him. We can try to imagine her for ourselves, with “the melting softness of her face” and her “bright eyes”, but we’ll never know what Keats himself saw – or what his memory later conjured.
It’s a tantalising prospect!
Today
The pleasure gardens were permanently closed in 1859, and were built over. However, a slum clearance in the 20th century opened up the area again, and there is now a public park taking up much of the same space as the gardens Keats would have known.
With thanks to the Layers of London site, overlaying “The Royal Gardens Vauxhall” (1841) by John Grieve on today’s Google Maps.A close-up of the above, showing how today’s green space overlaps with the Gardens as they were in 1841.
Keats visited Winchester from mid August to early October 1819, and famously wrote his ode “To Autumn” there.
Winchester High Street, with the City Cross visible in the centre. This is taken from a plate in the book “Hampshire” (1853) by Robert Mudie, artist unknown, and sourced on Wikimedia Commons.
The Keats Connection
John Keats travelled to Winchester from the Isle of Wight with his friend Charles Brown in mid August 1819. Keats was in need of a library while he and Brown were labouring over their play Otho the Great. In a letter to Fanny Brawne, he says, “This Winchester is a fine place; a beautiful Cathedral and many other ancient buildings in the environs.”
On 28 August, Keats writes to his sister saying Winchester “is the pleasantest town I ever was in”, and “the whole town is beautifully wooded”. Unfortunately he had not found a library tolerable enough to satisfy him.
When writing to his publisher, John Taylor, on 5 September, Keats recommends the location: “Since I have been at Winchester I have been improving in health – it is not so confined – and there is on one side of the city a dry chalky down where the air is worth six pence a pint.”
Apart from the play, Keats has been writing “Lamia” and revising “The Eve of St Agnes”, among other poems. He seems to have found some genuine peace and happiness while staying in Winchester.
Unfortunately for such a creative period, Keats is prompted to leave abruptly for London on 10 September 1819, having received a letter from his brother George. Having done what he can about their difficult financial situations, however, Keats returns to Winchester on 15 September.
Keats was in the habit of taking a regular walk down through the Itchen’s water meadows to the Hospital of St Cross, and then back up over the downs. This walk – and in particular the view from St Giles Hill – inspired him to write “To Autumn” on his return to his lodgings on Sunday 19 September.
Charles Brown re-joined Keats in Winchester on 1 October, and they expected to return to London a week later.
Winchester Cathedral’s west façade, taken by Antony McCallum in 2012, and sourced on Wikimedia Commons.
Today
I seem to have lost my own photos of Winchester – which is both strange and ironic, as it was perhaps the place I revisited most in England. My first trip was taken in order to follow Keats down along the Itchen to St Cross (though I came back the same way rather than over the hills). I deliberately went in autumn, of course! But I returned time and again, in all seasons.
The building in which Keats and Brown lodged has been demolished, but is thought to have been very near where the Visitor Information Centre is, on the ground floor of the Guildhall.
My other writerly hero is Jane Austen, who now rests in Winchester Cathedral. Indeed, the “Keats Walk” takes you along College Street past the house in which she lived her last months.
As Keats noted, the Itchen is indeed “a most beautiful clear river” – though I understand there was a serious effort taken in modern times to clean it up. The effort was perfectly successful! The water in the little stream one walks beside is as pure and clear as crystal.
I particularly fell in love with the Hospital of St Cross and Almshouse of Noble Poverty (to give it its full name). The historical buildings preserved here are remarkable, and the Norman/Gothic-style church is both beautifully sturdy and elegant.
Apart from all these delights, Winchester boasts remnants of the Saxons and the Romans, a ruined castle, a medieval hall (with a 13th century mock-up of Arthur’s Round Table), the 15th century City Cross, surviving portions of the city walls and gates, a Gothic-revival style Guildhall, and more. With all that and its beautiful setting in the Hampshire countryside, to me it feels as if it’s a quintessential piece of England.
Westminster Abbey is a significant and central part of British history, and its Poets’ Corner includes a memorial to Keats.
Before
A monastic community was established in this location in c.960, with a stone church named St Peter’s Abbey being built by King Edward and completed in c.1065. Edward was buried there not long afterwards in 1066, and on his canonisation the site became a place of pilgrimage. St Peter’s and the adjacent Palace of Westminster are depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry.
The current church dates back to the 13th century and King Henry III.
Many of Britain’s royals are buried in the Abbey. It has been used for coronations since 1066, and also for many royal weddings.
Poets’ Corner began haphazardly. Chaucer was buried elsewhere in the Abbey in 1400, due to his place in the royal household rather than his reputation as a poet. In 1556, fellow poet Nicholas Brigham installed a marble tomb for Chaucer in the Abbey’s south transept, and had his bones moved there. Edmund Spenser was interred near Chaucer, as he wanted, in 1598.
From there, burials and memorials accumulated. Over 100 poets, dramatists and prose writers are now buried there, with memorials to many others who are interred elsewhere. The name “Poets’ Corner” is first documented in 1733.
The Keats Connection
The Keats-Shelley Association paid for memorials for both poets, which were installed on the Shakespeare wall, and unveiled in 1954. The tablets are simple and elegant, with a carved marble “swag” of flowers and foliage uniting them. The inscription reads:
Keats 1795-1821
Today
The Abbey and Poets Corner are well worth visiting. The latter includes memorials to William Shakespeare and George Frederic Handel, as well as Keats’ contemporaries William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Lord Byron, Jane Austen, John Clare, and Sir Walter Scott.
Keats himself predicted – or at least hoped and trusted – “I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.”
Details
Address: The Chapter Office, Westminster Abbey, 20 Dean’s Yard, London SW1P 3PA
Tube: Westminster on the Jubilee, and District & Circle Lines
St James’s Park on the District & Circle Lines
London Victoria or London Waterloo on National Rail
Opening hours: currently only open for religious services due to the pandemic
Some of John Keats’ most significant family members were re-buried in Brookwood Cemetery in 1959-1961. Keats wouldn’t have known the cemetery at all, as it only dates back to 1854, but I am sure he would want us to honour it as a Keats Location.
The Keats Connection
John Keats lost a number of significant family members over the years 1804-1818: his parents, his maternal grandparents, and his younger brother Tom. They were all buried at the St Stephen Coleman Street church in London.
The church was destroyed by enemy bombing in World War II, on 29 December 1940, and it was not re-built. When the land was eventually sold (to the Swiss Bank Corporation), the new owners were required to exhume and move the remains – a procedure to be “carried out with all due reverence”.
The exhumation and reburial was undertaken by the London Necropolis Co Ltd, starting in July 1959, and completed by September 1961. The remains were reburied at Brookwood Cemetery in Woking, Surrey.
In Between
Brookwood Cemetery, also known as London Necropolis, was opened in 1854. It was served by the London Necropolis Railway, with a dedicated railway station for departure in Waterloo, London. (You can still visit the Cemetery care of Brookwood station today.) The Cemetery is a huge site, covering 500 acres – the largest cemetery in the world at the time, and still the largest in the UK – and was intended to serve as London’s first choice of burial site for centuries to come.
It is no coincidence that burials at St Stephen Coleman Street were discontinued in 1853, at the time Brookwood Cemetery was being planned and developed. London was dealing with a “burial crisis”, as the growing population and consequent increasing need for burials were overwhelming the resources of churches and cemeteries within the city.
While Brookwood Cemetery never really dealt with as many new burials as hoped, the site was used for mass reburials. The large-scale engineering works in London taking place in the mid-1800s – the railways, the sewer system, the Underground, and so on – necessitated the relocation of a number of burial grounds. The first such relocation took place in 1862, when the development of the Charing Cross railway station and associated railway lines prompted the removal of the Cure’s College burial ground in Southwark; this involved almost 8000 bodies.
Eventually, when it came time to relocate the remains belonging to St Stephen Coleman Street in the mid-1900s, I assume that Brookwood Cemetery was the obvious (perhaps even the only) choice.
It was requested that the Rural Dean read a service over the re-interred remains.
Today
I discovered this information about the fate of the St Stephen Coleman Street remains care of a visit to the London Metropolitan Archives. I then requested a Grave Search at Brookwood Cemetery. My thanks are due to staff at both these locations for their friendly assistance!
It took some searching, but the Senior Administrator at the Cemetery was able to confirm the reburial and its location:
I can confirm St. Stephen Coleman Street reburials are buried at Brookwood Cemetery; the location of the reburials is on the South side on Plot 70 St Agnes Avenue behind what was known as the old Masonry Yard (now known as Beard Constructions). Behind and beyond the Masonry works is one of several areas in this section of the cemetery used for reburial of human remains from churches and churchyards in London.
Correspondence received 30 July 2019
The specific grave number is 219773.
A copy of the relevant line in the burial records.
The Senior Administrator goes on to say that there would not have been any records of the deceased individuals, nor would a marker have been placed on the plot at the time. If there has been a memorial raised since then, it is not currently visible due to the area being overgrown. (The maintenance team will be clearing it in due course.)
Plot 70 in its currently overgrown state (July 2019).
In Memoriam
It does seem a bit sad that these people who meant so very much to Keats are now buried “en masse” with no marker. The specific location makes some amends, with the address recalling his poem The Eve of St Agnes, and we can certainly consider them at rest in this lovely park-like setting. (Personally, I wouldn’t mind a whole swathe of ferns growing over me.)
Looking through the records kept at the London Metropolitan Archives, I found that there was some belated recognition that Keats’ family were involved in the relocation of remains. The London Archdiocese Fund was required to give notice of the re-interment so that any descendants could make suitable / alternate arrangements. There is a copy of a memorandum which refers to “a young lady” of “the Keats-Shelley Society” approaching them with a query about “a family member” of Keats. The general tone is rather unsympathetic, and she was told she was too late – though it seems she was less than a month past the deadline. My instinctive thought was that surely some efforts could have been made, but the note ends with the remark that perhaps it’s just as well she was too late, as what could be done? {virtual shrug} It hardly needs saying that this attitude rather undermines the “all due reverence” requirement.
There are later written queries from a London chap, dated 1969 and 1970, asking what would have become of the Keats family remains. While his query was referred to someone whose name I recognised from earlier related records (and who would have known the answer), there was no copy of any information being sent to the enquirer.
Which leaves the question open as to what, if anything, might be done now to honour John Keats’ family. They were good people, but not famous in their own right. Is it enough to know where they are, and to go pay our respects if we feel so inclined? On one hand, I am sure he would care deeply about them not being lost entirely to us. On the other, perhaps even he would consider a memorial of some kind to involve money better spent on the living. And after all, perhaps it is more a matter to be decided by the descendants of John Keats’ brother George and sister Frances.
So, for now … Rest in Peace: John Jennings; Alice Jennings (nee Whalley); Thomas Keats (father); Frances Rawlings (formerly Keats, nee Jennings); and Thomas Keats (brother).
Annotated map of Brookwood Cemetery (South side) showing the route to take to Plot 70.
Following his medical training, John Keats applied for a licence to practice as an apothecary. He was examined at Apothecaries’ Hall and the licence was granted.
The Keats Connection
An apothecary in Keats’ time was equivalent to our general practitioners today, so when he applied for and was granted a licence – the LSA (Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries) – this enabled him to practice medicine as a doctor.
The Apothecaries’ Act governing this licencing had only been introduced in August 1815, just under a year before Keats made his application; he was the 189th candidate to apply, and the 168th to pass. The licencing was administered by The Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, a City Livery Company incorporated in 1617. The Society has occupied the Hall in Blackfriars since 1632.
To qualify, Keats had to provide testimonials proving his medical training, including:
his apprenticeship for five years with Thomas Hammond in Edmonton;
the lectures he had attended at Guy’s Hospital; and
his six months of work on the wards at Guy’s Hospital.
Keats attended Apothecaries’ Hall on 25 July 1816, along with six other candidates. In his biography of Keats, Andrew Motion tells us that Keats would have sat for four papers: a translation of the pharmacopoeia (Latin); the theory and practice of medicine; pharmaceutical medicine; and materia medica. Keats appeared before the Court of Examiners, with all twelve of the Court present, and was verbally examined by one of them – the Royal Apothecary, Everard Brande. His application was duly approved.
The examination would have taken place in the Great Hall. Any subsequent ceremony in which he was given the award would have taken place in the Court Room.
The Great Hall, where Keats would have been examined. (The Court Room is shown in the main picture.)
The LSA certificate allowed Keats to practice “in the country”, which meant he could not practice in the City of London nor within ten miles of it. He couldn’t have practised in Edmonton, for example, as that’s only about nine miles from the city.
Andrew Motion gives the context for this as Keats already experiencing doubts about his future in medicine. The fee of six guineas to practice in the country was cheaper than the fee of ten guineas to practice in the city, and so he chose the less expensive option so as not to risk wasting any more money than he had to. Whether he meant it or not, he announced that he would prefer to practice in the country outside London.
Keats took a holiday in Margate with his brother Tom after qualifying, and then continued to work and train at Guy’s Hospital for a few months. If he wanted to pursue a career in medicine, he could have gone on to qualify as a surgeon as well. However, towards the end of 1816 he finally decided to quit medicine and concentrate on poetry instead.
History
The Society has a fascinating history, with links to other notable people such as Nicholas Culpeper (an independent practitioner, often at odds with the Society!) and Agatha Christie (who passed the Assistants’ Examination in 1917, having learned much about poisons). Christopher Penfold, who passed the LSA in 1833, went on to found Penfolds Wines in Australia. The Society’s dinners are greatly enhanced by this connection! Significantly, in 1865, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson qualified as an apothecary, thereby becoming the first woman to receive a medical qualification in the UK.
The Society made and sold medicines at the Hall, with a shopfront on Black Friars Lane, between 1672 and 1921. There is still a doorway, to the right of the main entrance, labelled “Warehouses”. The Society founded the Chelsea Physic Garden, and supplied medicines to the East India Company and to the First Fleet.
And those are only a few highlights!
The Hall itself has plenty of history, too, dating back before the Society bought it in 1632. The Court Room, for example, was where Catherine of Aragon was examined (in 1529) about her marriage to Henry VIII, after he’d sought an annulment. There is a small painting of the scene on the wall between the two windows.
Today
The Worshipful Society of Apothecaries continues as busy as ever, and is still licensing doctors to practice medicine. The Society has founded two Faculties – one in the History and Philosophy of Medicine, and the other in Conflict and Catastrophe Medicine – and can award eight different Diplomas.
While the Hall is not generally open to the public, you can contact the Clerk’s office and ask about tours. When I did so during a recent trip back to England, they very obligingly let me tag along with a group who had booked a tour one morning. Thanks are due to the Society and to the tour group itself for their kind welcome!
Details
Address: Black Friars Lane, London EC4V 6EJ
Tube: Blackfriars on the Central and District Lines
Blackfriars for National Rail
Opening hours: The Hall is not open to the public without prior arrangement.
The pathway leading up from just to the left of the hotel. I assume this is where Keats started up that evening.
The reverse angle shot: From Box Hill, looking down on the hotel. You can spy the bright blue of the swimming pool in the centre of the photo.
Me on top of Box Hill! (Unlike the fit young Keats, I drove up...)
The comfy chairs featuring Keats' Endymion.
From the garden, looking up to Box Hill.
The building on the right is the back of what Keats would have known. However, the extensions with sandstone-pillared windows date from after his time.
John Keats stayed at the Fox and Hounds (now the Burford Bridge Hotel) at the foot of Box Hill while finishing his poem “Endymion”.
The Keats Connection
Keats needed to write another 500 lines to finish his epic poem “Endymion”, and at the time London was both boring and too distracting. His brothers Tom and George planned to travel to Teignmouth in Devon for the sake of Tom’s health. In the meantime, John travelled alone to Burford Bridge, near Dorking in Surrey.
He seems to have been immediately invigorated by the lovely location. In his biography of Keats, Andrew Motion tells us:
When [Keats] climbed down from the Portsmouth coach on the evening of Saturday 22 November [1817], he immediately liked what he saw: a low, white-washed building fronted with a row of elms; the river Mole winding nearby; woodland stretching to the horizon. Renting a small room overlooking the stable yard, he climbed the twilit hill – Box Hill – beyond the garden, then returned to write ‘some lines’, and letters to Reynolds and Bailey.
I am not sure where Motion got the information about Keats’ room overlooking the stable yard (and I don’t know where the yard was, though one assumes at the side or rear of the inn). Having dug around in plans and reports and whatnot, I can say that the inn was considerably smaller than it is now. All kinds of extensions have been added over the years, and the original building(s) have been almost swallowed up.
In Keats’ time, the hotel basically consisted of the three roofs you see here, forming a joined-up building of two or three storeys. The lower roof and extension along the front, which includes the current reception, is a later addition.
But back to Keats himself. The letters mentioned by Motion include some of Keats’ most moving and significant thoughts. The letter to Bailey includes the lines:
I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections, and the truth of Imagination. What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth — whether it existed before or not — for I have the same idea of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.
In the letter to Reynolds, he seems bubbling over with happiness at being where he is. His twilit hunt for the Moon was particularly relevant, as she was both his muse and Endymion’s love.
I like this place very much. There is Hill and Dale and a little River. I went up Box hill this Evening after the Moon — ‘you a’ seen the Moon’— came down, and wrote some lines.
To Reynolds he talks of “the fine point of his soul”, which I borrowed as a title for my novel on Keats’ last months:
… why don’t you, as I do, look unconcerned at what may be called more particularly Heart-vexations? They never surprise me — lord! a man should have the fine point of his soul taken off to become fit for this world.
Keats did indeed finish off his poem “Endymion” while staying in Burford Bridge – and he must have written at a great rate, as he finished the first draft on 28 November, less than a week after he arrived.
He was back in Hampstead, London by 5 December.
Before and In Between
This beautiful area has attracted many visitors, including some of note. Jane Austen visited friends who lived near Burford Bridge, and crafted a key scene of her novel Emma (1816) around a picnic on Box Hill. Apparently Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson and Emma, Lady Hamilton stayed in the hotel itself, and it is claimed that Nelson spent his last night in England here.
Other names associated with the area include John Evelyn, Celia Fiennes, M d’Arblay (who married Fanny Burney), RL Stevenson, George Meredith, John Stuart Mill, William Wordsworth, and William Hazlitt.
Today
Burford Bridge Hotel is now a four-star hotel owned by the Mercure chain. Suffice to say, I suspect Keats would hardly recognise it!
I am pretty sure that if you’re staying in rooms 200-207, you’ll be in the part of the hotel that Keats would have known. More detail than that I cannot provide!
Severe flooding in December 2013 brought forward the hotel’s renovation plans, and they made the most of their literary heritage. A quote from Austen’s Emma now adorns a wall in the restaurant, and two chairs in the foyer are upholstered with lines from Keats’ “Endymion”.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever …
Details
Address: Burford Bridge Hotel, London Road (A24), Dorking RH5 6BX
John Keats stayed in Margate twice, partly for relaxation and health reasons, and partly as a writing retreat.
The Keats Connection
After passing his apothecary’s examination, John Keats felt he had earned a holiday. Also, his younger brother Tom was increasingly unwell, with symptoms indicating consumption. The seaside town of Margate in Kent was an obvious choice of resort for these Londoners, as it was readily and cheaply accessible via steamship down the River Thames. (In his biography of Keats, though, Andrew Motion suspects that John and Tom travelled there by coach.)
John and Tom stayed in Margate for a number of weeks from August through September 1816. We don’t know the exact dates – and we don’t know where they stayed, though Motion says “probably in rooms overlooking Hawley Square in the centre of the old town”. (The featured image for this post was taken in Hawley Square on a summer’s day.)
Keats wrote several poems and letters while he was there that were important to his development as a poet. He was obviously influenced by the sea and the cliffs; his sonnet “To My Brother George” includes the lines:
The ocean with its vastness, its blue green, Its ships, its rocks, its caves, its hopes, its fears,— Its voice mysterious, which whoso hears Must think on what will be, and what has been.
In the following year, John Keats set himself the task of writing the epic poem “Endymion”. He went to the Isle of Wight in order to write in seclusion, but this proved an unsatisfactory location for the purpose. Within a week or so he had travelled to the familiar Margate instead, and stayed there from late April to mid May 1817.
His brother Tom joined him again in Margate, and from there they moved to Canterbury.
“Margate from the Sea, Whiting Fishing” (1822) by J.M.W. Turner
Today
While Margate has become a tad shabby following a decline in local industry and tourism, there is still much to attract here – and there is a whole heap of history and lovely countryside in the near vicinity. As someone might have already observed, Kent is always a good idea. Even where there is no precise Keats location to visit.
Details
Address: Hawley Square, Margate, Kent CT9 1PF
Opening hours: There’s no denying that the summer holidays are the only busy season, but the seaside is intriguing in any weather. And you can enjoy the pleasant park of Hawley Square at any time, while respecting the rest and privacy of the inhabitants.
Canterbury: John and Tom moved from Margate to Canterbury in mid May 1817, and stayed there for a week or a little longer, before finally returning to Hampstead, London in June. We don’t have any details about exactly where they stayed, so I don’t anticipate creating a separate post for Canterbury.
Keats seemed to move to a new location whenever he got stuck with writing “Endymion”. In a letter of 16 May to his prospective publishers Taylor and Hessey, Keats says, “At Canterbury I hope the remembrance of Chaucer will set me forward like a Billiard Ball.”
John Keats was staying with the parents of his friend Charles Dilke in their house on Eastgate Square, Chichester, when he began writing his poem The Eve of St Agnes.
The Keats Connection
John Keats joined Charles Brown in Chichester in January 1819, to stay with the elderly parents of their friend Charles Wentworth Dilke. Keats and Brown were only there for a few days before moving to nearby Bedhampton to stay with the Snook family, parents-in-law to Charles Dilke’s sister Letitia.
During this time, Keats was writing the first draft of his poem “The Eve of St Agnes”. The poem’s medieval setting was influenced by the beautiful old architecture of Chichester.
The Dilkes’ home was just outside the city walls, facing the East Gate. Keats visited the Gothic cross in the town square, and took a letter from Fanny Brawne to the 12thC cathedral so he could read it in privacy.
Today
There is a plaque on the building commemorating Keats’ stay, directly above what is now St Wilfrid’s Hospice Retro and Vintage Store at 11 Eastgate Square. It reads:
Here John Keats began to write The Eve of St Agnes 1819
There is also a statue of Keats, sitting on a bench just over the road, created by sculptor Vincent Gray and unveiled in August 2017. Behind it, a low stone wall winding along the roadside bears a quote from his poem, “When I have fears that I may cease to be”:
When I behold, upon the night’s starred face, Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance
Chichester is an idyllic English city, surrounded by beautiful countryside, and well worth a visit in its own right.
Details
Address: 11 Eastgate Square, Chichester, PO19 1JH
Opening hours: The plaque and sculpture can be viewed at any (reasonable!) hour
