What did Elizabeth I of England Samuel Pepys do at Bear Gardens?

The Story

# Bear Gardens, SE1 Standing on this weathered Bankside corner, you're positioned at the epicenter of early modern entertainment and royal spectacle—a place where the roar of baited bears once rivaled the applause in nearby playhouses. Queen Elizabeth I herself walked these grounds in the mid-16th century to witness the savage spectacle of bear-baiting at the original Bear Gardens, a sport that thrilled monarchs and commoners alike, before the site transformed into The Hope Playhouse in 1614, where Ben Jonson's *Bartholomew Fair* premiered to audiences hungry for both theatrical drama and animal bloodsport. Two decades later, Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, those meticulous diarists who documented the pulse of Restoration London, visited the Davies Amphitheatre that rose here from 1662-1682, the last gasping breath of Bankside's bear-baiting tradition—Pepys recording the spectacle in his diary with the mixture of fascination and moral ambivalence that defined his age. This single address thus became a living timeline of changing tastes: from royal blood sports under the Tudors, through theatrical innovation under the Stuarts, to the final twilight of a brutal entertainment that would soon vanish entirely, taking with it a chapter of English cultural life that only these witnesses and their words would preserve for posterity.