Inside the Rise and Fall of London’s Pleasure Gardens

In 18th-century London, one of the most popular summertime activities—for those who could afford it—was spending an evening at a pleasure garden. Royals, celebrities and commoners gathered at these open-air venues to drink, dance and maybe meet up with a paramour (or attractive stranger). Early pleasure gardens dazzled visitors with thousands of artificial lights, masquerade balls, fireworks and live music under the stars, and later ones introduced novelties like hot-air balloons and tightrope walkers.

The first and most famous pleasure garden was Vauxhall Gardens, which held its first major masquerade ball in 1732. By the late 18th century, there were at least 60 pleasure gardens in and around London. However, their popularity declined during the 19th century as new public entertainment venues opened, older pleasure gardens lost their luster and London’s growing metropolis squeezed the remaining ones out.

By the late 19th century, all of London’s pleasure gardens had closed. Still, their legacy lives on in literary works such as John Keats’ sonnet to a lady he saw once at Vauxhall, and even the archival records of the Old Bailey, London’s historic criminal court.

The man responsible for launching the pleasure garden trend was Jonathan Tyers. In the late 1720s, Tyers leased a 12-acre site called New Spring Gardens, located in the Lambeth borough on the south side of the River Thames. The area was already a leisure spot for Londoners, but Tyers turned it into something new: a paid-entry venue that became known as Vauxhall Gardens. He installed “supper boxes” where guests could eat and drink while viewing enormous oil paintings; constructed an elaborate bandstand where orchestras played music by George Frideric Handel; and hung thousands of glass oil lamps in the trees.

The oil lamps were a key part of Vauxhall’s magic. When the sun set, Tyers blew a whistle alerting the lamplighters to go to their stations. At his second whistle, they lit the lamps “with so astonishing a rapidity,” wrote Jakob Friedrich von Bielfeld, an advisor to Prussia’s Frederick the Great, in 1741, “that in less than two minutes the whole garden appears as light as a noon day.” In pre-electricity London, this was quite a spectacle.

Vauxhall was open to both royals and commoners—one frequent guest was Frederick, Prince of Wales—but the entry fee kept many low-wage workers out. For most of Vauxhall’s 18th-century run, entering the gardens cost a shilling. This could be a steep price depending on a person’s salary.

“As a comparison, in the 1760s when it was one shilling, a housemaid would’ve earned two shillings a week,” says Beatrice Behlen, a senior curator of fashion and decorative arts at the London Museum. “It’s half her weekly wages, so that’s quite a lot of money to spend to go out in the evening.” There were other costs to consider, too. Before Westminster Bridge opened in 1750, guests traveled to Vauxhall by paying for boat rides across the Thames. Once inside, they paid for their food and drink.

Luckily, if a housemaid did save enough to get into Vauxhall, she didn’t necessarily need an expensive outfit to attend a masquerade ball, also known as a ridotto. Some guests wore masks paired with long cloaks, called dominos, that covered their clothes. This made it harder for others to judge if the wearer was rich or poor based on her attire, Behlen says. A ridotto was also a chance to play with gender norms. An Old Bailey court record from a 1732 theft trial mentions a man who “dress’d in Woman’s Cloaths at the last Masquerade (Ridotto al Fresco at Vaux Hall).” Popular costume themes at these balls included milkmaid, harlequin, priest and nun. 

Vauxhall’s masquerade balls took place under the tree lights, but there was another part of the pleasure garden that Tyers purposefully left wooded and unlit. This area was known as the “dark walks,” and it was rumored to be a place where guests, including sex workers, liaised. It’s unclear how much of the dark walks’ reputation was based in fact, but it had a powerful hold on the public imagination. In Frances Burney’s 1778 novel Evelina, the titular heroine is nearly sexually assaulted in Vauxhall’s dark walks. This reflected the popular perception that men went there looking for carnal relations, making it a dangerous place for women to go alone.

Whether or not people actually hooked up in the dark walks (which also doubled as an open-air latrine), Vauxhall was certainly a hotspot for making romantic and sexual connections that might continue elsewhere. This was true both before and after Tyers took over the site. During a 1745 theft trial at the Old Bailey, multiple men accused a witness named Mrs. Moore of prostitution, and one of them did so by bringing up Vauxhall.

“I knew Mrs. Moore twenty years ago,” claimed the man, according to the court proceedings. “She walked in Spring Gardens at Vaux Hall, and picked up men there.”

“Pray,” Mrs. Moore asked, “did you pick me up, or did I pick you up?”

“She asked almost every one to give her a glass of wine,” the man continued. Seemingly unfazed, Mrs. Moore responded, “You know VauxHall is a very pleasant place; I know you very well, for I remember you picked me up there once.”

Vauxhall was a huge success, and it prompted other Londoners to open their own pleasure gardens. By the 1740s, Vauxhall had two main competitors: Marylebone Gardens and Ranelagh Gardens. Like Vauxhall, these venues charged an entry fee for an evening of food, drink and entertainment. Ranelagh was more expensive and exclusive than Vauxhall, and its main attraction was an enormous rotunda for music and balls. In 1764, the 8-year-old music prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart performed there.

Yet by the early 19th century, Marylebone and Ranelagh had both closed, and pleasure gardens were entering a new era—specifically, the Victorian era. Compared to the pleasure gardens of the 18th-century Georgian era, London’s Victorian pleasure gardens had far more circus-like attractions. Cremorne Gardens, which opened in the 1840s, booked entertainer Pauline Violante, who was famous for walking a tightrope while wearing a suit of armor, pushing a wheelbarrow or performing some other dangerous task. Vauxhall changed with the times, too: It acquired a hot-air balloon and began hiring performers like “Lion King” Isaac Van Amburgh, known for putting his head inside a lion’s mouth.

London’s pleasure gardens also inspired similar (or at least similarly-named) gardens abroad. New York City had multiple venues named Vauxhall Garden, and Paris had several Jardin de Tivoli, or Tivoli Gardens. In 1843, Copenhagen opened an amusement park called Tivoli & Vauxhall. Later renamed Tivoli Gardens, the park featured concerts, flower gardens and a roller coaster.

While Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens is still open today, none of London’s pleasure gardens survived to see the 20th century. Vauxhall closed in 1859, and Cremorne closed in 1877. Several factors likely contributed to their decline, including an increase in London’s public entertainment options. When Vauxhall opened, there weren’t many public venues for art and music. By the time Vauxhall and Cremorne closed, London had new art galleries and concert halls for pleasure gardens to compete with.

At the same time, Vauxhall was becoming increasingly run-down, and London’s growing housing and industrial sprawl put pressure on its owners to sell, says David Coke, co-author of Vauxhall Gardens: A History.

“It took up about 12 acres of south Lambeth, and by the time it closed, those 12 acres had become enormously valuable for development for housing,” he says. “When the Vauxhall owners couldn’t find a lessee who was prepared to take on the gardens, the easy decision was for them to sell it to a developer so that they could build houses on the site.”

Today, all that physically remains of Vauxhall Gardens is a small park in Lambeth commemorating the historical site. But modern readers can still travel to Vauxhall through Georgian and Victorian literature. In William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, serialized in 1847 and 1848, the characters spend an eventful evening at the famous pleasure garden.

“To this truth I can vouch as a man,” the narrator declares, “there is no headache in the world like that caused by Vauxhall punch.”