The Museum of London has summarised perfectly London’s pleasure gardens of the Georgian and Regency years – part art gallery, part fashion show and part brothel.
The gardens were designed purely for entertainment, featuring whimsical architecture, miniature waterways, and extensive shrubberies that provided opportunity for all sorts of visitors. The gardens swiftly developed a reputation for being debauched places, with one visitor wishing “there were more nightingales and fewer strumpets”.
Below: Vauxhall Gardens 1809
That didn’t stop the cream of society from visiting, though! Anyone who was anyone might be seen at one, promenading in their finery, dancing, listening to concerts (Handel was practically artist in residence at Vauxhall Gardens in the 1730s and 1740s), and eating and drinking in the booths where art by Hogarth and others was displayed,
As the disgruntled visitor’s complaint suggests, the entry fee designed to exclude the riff raff had little effect on the number of prostitutes who congregated at Vauxhall, and who, by all accounts, found it a lucrative hunting ground. The main walkways through the trees were lit by lamps, but there were also the dark walks. These were unlit and so provided cover for any number of private activities. Early in the eighteenth century, magistrates enforced the lighting of the coyly named Lovers’ Walk in an attempt to deter wanton behaviour. Their insistence sounds rather Canute-like to me – one might as well try to hold back the sea as to deter lovers from seeking places to be private together.
You might think it’s a perfect place for clandestine assignations, and that’s precisely what the rakish Duke of Arden concludes in my forthcoming book The Earl’s Awakening. It’s released on 8th September and can be pre-ordered from Extasy Books, Amazon, or your favourite online bookseller.
Vauxhall Gardens in 1751, showing the extent of the shrubberies and the opportunities for assignations.
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