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Edwardian amusement parks: the pleasure garden reborn?

This book is published in Britain and the US as part of the Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture series. Kane’s chapter was commissioned by the editor to complement a collection of papers presented at ‘Vauxhall Revisited: Pleasure Gardens and their Publics, 1660-1880,’ an interdisciplinary conference hosted by Tate Britain, July 2008.

This edited volume provides a study of the attractions and interactions of the pleasure garden on both sides of the Atlantic, from the opening of Vauxhall in the seventeenth century to the amusement parks of the early twentieth. The nine essays bring together the work of musicologists, art historians, and scholars of urban studies and landscape design to explore the interaction between human behaviour and the pleasure garden environment.

Focusing on their Edwardian heyday, Kane’s concluding chapter considers the extent to which amusement parks preserved the legacy of earlier pleasure gardens. Kane’s chapter looks in detail at the originals of the first amusement parks, situating their development firmly in the context of the Victorian pleasure garden. The combination of spectacular entertainment and social mixing that characterized the delights of Vauxhall all found their counterparts in early parks such as Manchester’s White City.

In terms of the designed landscape, however, Kane suggests that the amusement parks represented a distinct form of visual and physical encounter from the commercial gardens of the previous century. Drawing on the legacy of modern spectacle inaugurated by exhibitions, department stores, and Coney Island, the amusement parks in Britain created their own eclectic and highly popular formula of fantasy, noise, color, and movement. Kane demonstrates how the new parks were defined by their machine landscapes and the technologically-produced sensations they offered, and argues that it was this dependence on mechanical thrills which marked the most significant break with the past.