The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall to Coney Island

Chapter 2. Pleasure Gardens and Urban Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century

Chapter  Pleasure Gardens and Urban Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century peter borsay For well-off visitors to London in the eighteenth century, a trip to one or preferably both of the great pleasure gardens of Vauxhall and Ranelagh was de rigueur. Dazzling and vibrant, particularly once illuminated at night, they were among the top tourist attractions of the capital; in 1772 M. Grosley thought them ‘‘finer in appearance than the Houses of Parliament, Courts of Justice or the King’s Palace.’’1 However, their very brilliance, reported in coruscating prose by contemporary observers, has emphasized their individuality, encouraging commentators to investigate them as oneoff phenomena. This has obscured the extent to which the great gardens were part of a movement—which was not confined to London but swept across Britain as a whole in the long eighteenth century—toward introducing green spaces and leisure services into the town. This chapter seeks to place the pleasure gardens in the context of this wider cultural transformation . It does so initially by exploring separately the ‘‘pleasure’’ and ‘‘gardens ’’ elements in eighteenth-century urban culture; it then investigates the way space and time were deployed in pleasure gardens and walks to construct , challenge, and ultimately reinforce the social norms that underpinned the dynamic growth of polite urban leisure. Pleasure Contemporaries may not have used the term ‘‘pleasure gardens,’’ but pleasure was undoubtedly what the spaces were about. On crossing the boundaries of the gardens, visitors (though, of course, not those for whom it was 50 Peter Borsay a site of employment, such as waiters, musicians, thieves, and prostitutes) entered a special zone of unmitigated leisure, in which all notions of work and toil were banished, as the emphasis was on play, symbolism, and otherness .2 Lewis Mumford, whose The City in History (1961) is cited by the OED for the use of the term ‘‘pleasure garden,’’ states of the best-known establishments in Europe, ‘‘these gardens consisted of a large central building , often gaudily decorated, where dances and routs could be held, and where great feasts could be given; surrounded by gardens with recessed arbours and woods where people might roam on a fine evening, eating, drinking, flirting, copulating, watching fireworks or lantern displays: the gaiety and licence of the carnival offered daily.’’ Mumford argued that ‘‘the pleasure garden grew on one stem of the palatial baroque life’’ disseminated from the palace and court to the city in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.3 However, in Britain this simple line of transmission was less than clear. Lawrence Klein has argued that ‘‘in the course of the seventeenth century the tripartite model [court, country, and city] broke down and was replaced by a new and more integrated model and practice of élite culture, centred on the Town,’’ so that by the early eighteenth century ‘‘the Town had taken over the central space occupied previously in elite culture by the Court.’’4 John Brewer has contended that in the late seventeenth century the court and church were declining as sites and sources of cultural leadership , leaving a vacuum whose spaces were rapidly colonized by a new type of intensely urban, public, accessible, profit-driven, and pleasure-seeking culture; and that this ‘‘mix of commerce and hedonism promoted by cultural middlemen was embodied in the chief cultural sites of eighteenthcentury London.’’5 The pleasure garden thus has to be seen alongside the assembly room, theater, concert room, circulating library, exhibition hall, and coffeehouse, as part of a broader movement delivering commercialized urban public culture on an unprecedented scale. Moreover, it is clear that this movement and culture was not confined to London, or even to the metropolitan centers of Dublin and Edinburgh, but permeated at varying rates and intensities much of the urban system of Britain.6 If the pleasure garden was part of a bigger picture, where exactly did it fit into the composition as a whole? Did it simply replicate the services being offered in other types of entertainment facilities? In the case of the larger gardens it could be argued that their special qualities lay not so much in that they provided any pastime different from that which could be found elsewhere but that they brought together in one place a uniquely varied Pleasure Gardens and Urban Culture 51 combination of entertainments. Thus Vauxhall, when fully developed, possessed an ornate saloon or rotunda, a picture gallery, a...