Vauxhall & We
Private pleasure gardens attached to noble houses and royal courts have a long history, but Vauxhall Gardens, which opened on the South Bank of the Thames in 1661, might well have been the first commercial pleasure garden in Europe. The business flourished for two centuries, finally closing in 1859. Vauxhall’s special status, Alan Borg and David Coke argue in this hefty antiquarian tome, lies in its originality as a commercial venture, the changes it triggered in the social and cultural life of London, the extreme heterogeneity of the mingling crowds, the mass audience the gardens gave to modern music and popular song, and the revolution it triggered in mass catering and outdoor lighting. In the architecture of the garden buildings, the design of the interiors and the painting and sculpture it showcased, Vauxhall was, they claim, ‘the first true public gallery of modern British art’. It was also the site of patriotic pageants and jubilees, offering damp, chilly Albion its version of the carnivalesque: ‘anarchic, tumultuous, youthful, thrilling, kaleidoscopic and, for most people, totally foreign to their day to day lives’. Venice-on-Thames.
The royal parks, such as St James’s and Hyde Park, began opening to the public in the 17th century, while places like the Bear Gardens south of the river offered food and music, as well as bear-baiting, to more unruly customers. But the observant would have noticed something rather different about the Spring Gardens, as they were originally known, at Vauxhall. John Evelyn, an early visitor, described the site in July 1661 as ‘a pretty contriv’d plantation’. The trees there were said to be a hundred years old in 1661. The gardens offered ‘a universal withdrawing room for the city’, as Borg and Coke put it, the impression of separateness emphasised by the fact that until Westminster Bridge opened in 1750 most visitors got there by boat. The site was carefully chosen: the South Bank had a long history as a site of commercial entertainments; the river was the chief thoroughfare in the city; and Vauxhall was conveniently close to the market gardens of South London and safe from the stink of the city. Pepys mentioned Vauxhall in his diary 23 times between 1662 and 1668. He wrote about the arrival by river, the expensive food, the nightingales singing, the acrobats and fiddlers and the entertainers who made animal sounds, the arbours for romance and the drunken groups of men pestering pretty women.
The sexual opportunities associated with the gardens were well established by the early 18th century. Addison and Steele had their loveable curmudgeon Sir Roger de Coverley harrumph that he would be a better customer if Vauxhall offered more nightingales and fewer strumpets. A Virginian gentleman called William Byrd was matter of fact about the amenities in June 1718:
We went to Spring Gardens where we picked up two women and carried them into the arbour and ate some cold veal and about 10 o’clock we carried them to the bagnio, where we bathed and lay with them all night and I roger’d mine twice and slept pretty well, but neglected my prayers.
