Ranelagh Gardens

In 1741, the house and grounds were purchased by a syndicate led by the proprietor of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and Sir Thomas Robinson MP, and the gardens opened to the public the following year.

Horace Walpole wrote soon after the gardens opened, "It has totally beat Vauxhall... You can't set your foot without treading on a Prince, or Duke of Cumberland."

Ranelagh Gardens introduced the masquerade, formerly a private, aristocratic entertainment, to a wider, middle-class English public, where it was open to commentary by essayists and writers of moral fiction.

It had a diameter of 120 feet (37 metres) and was designed by William Jones, a surveyor to the East India Company.

Such was the renown of the gardens and the vogue for music in the open air (the eight year-old Wolfgang Mozart played a charity performance there on 29 June 1764) that a New York Ranelagh Gardens was opened in New York, in the former Rutgers house,[7] as a rival to the New York Vauxhall Gardens; its proprietor John Kenzie posted an advertisement for it during the occupation of the city in the American Revolution, in hopes of attracting the British soldiers, as well as "the Respectable Public",[8] and a Jardin Ranelagh was created in Paris' fashionable 16th arrondissement in 1870.