The Map→Bohemian & Libertine→Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens (the Dark Walks)

Bohemian & Libertine · London, Greater London

Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens (the Dark Walks)

For two centuries London's great pleasure garden, where ten thousand a night promenaded by lamplight — and the unlit 'Dark Walks' at the garden's edge were the most notorious assignation spot in Georgian England. Pepys complained as early as the 1660s that one could not walk them without hearing what he ought not.

StatusDocumented history

Date1661–1859

The peopleSamuel Pepys, the Georgian demi-monde

The siteSpring Gardens site, now Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens park

Coordinates51.48750, -0.12083 (confidence 4/5)

The story

For most of two centuries Vauxhall was the most famous pleasure garden in the world. It opened as the New Spring Gardens before the Restoration — Pepys was there in 1662 — and became something extraordinary after 1729, when Jonathan Tyers took the lease, staged a masked ridotto al fresco in 1732 before the Prince of Wales, and filled twelve acres on the Thames with supper boxes, an orchestra, a Rotunda, a statue of Handel and thousands of oil lamps.

Its genius was the mixing. Admission was one shilling for most of the eighteenth century, and a shilling admitted everyone — royal dukes, duchesses, servants, apprentices, soldiers, pickpockets and prostitutes, all on the same gravel walks. The food was a joke: the ham sliced so thin you could read a newspaper through it. The arrack punch was not a joke, and explains much.

At the far edge lay the Dark Walks — tree-lined avenues Tyers left deliberately unlit, and the reason a certain sort of person came. Fanny Burney set a near-assault there in Evelina (1778); the German traveller Karl Philipp Moritz recorded the "boldness of the women of the town" importuning diners for wine. Prostitutes certainly worked the gardens, and around 1764 the management tried lighting the Lovers' Walk — only for the lamps to be resisted by patrons who had paid precisely for the dark. The scholarly authority is David Coke and Alan Borg's Vauxhall Gardens: A History (Yale, 2011). Much of the Dark Walks' fame, though, rests on fiction and rumour as much as on record: the reputation for transgression was itself the attraction. Vauxhall closed in 1859; a Lambeth park called Spring Gardens keeps the name.

More stories at this spot

The ham you could read through

Vauxhall's catering was legendarily bad and dear. The ham was carved so fine that a diner claimed to be able to read a newspaper through a slice, and wits reckoned one ham could cover all twelve acres. In 1817 a small dish of it with two tiny chickens cost eleven shillings — a scandal that became, perversely, part of the fun of the place.

The lamps that were torn down

By the 1750s the Dark Walks were generating complaints of screams and "dangerous terrors", and around 1764 the proprietors lit the main Lovers' Walk. It did not take. Many visitors had paid their shilling precisely for the darkness, and the new lamps were resented and, by some accounts, pulled down — a rare instance of customers rioting for less illumination.

A wilderness of lamps

The young William Wordsworth visited Vauxhall at eighteen and never forgot the twenty thousand oil lamps twinkling in the trees — "a wilderness of lamps, dimming the stars". For a Georgian Londoner stepping off the river into that glow, the gardens must have felt like walking into another world. The magic and the menace were the same darkness, only differently lit.

Sources

Nearby on the map

Royal LiaisonBanqueting House, Whitehall (Charles II's court)London, Greater London · England

The last standing fragment of Whitehall Palace, the sprawling warren where the Merry Monarch kept his court and his mistresses — Barbara Villiers chief among them — sometimes within corridors of the Queen's own apartments. The palace burned in 1698; the gossip proved more durable.

Documented historyHot spot Royal LiaisonNell Gwyn's house, 79 Pall MallLondon, Greater London · England

The house Charles II gave his best-loved mistress — the orange-seller turned actress Nell Gwyn — and the only freehold on the south side of Pall Mall not owned by the Crown, because Nell reputedly refused to live in a house she did not own. John Evelyn's diary records the King chatting to 'Mrs Nelly' over her garden wall in 1671.

Documented history Notable LandmarksShaftesbury Memorial Fountain ('Eros')London, Greater London · England

London's classic lovers' meeting point — 'meet me under Eros' — though the statue is actually Anteros, the god of mature, requited love, chosen to commemorate the philanthropist Lord Shaftesbury (Gilbert called Eros/Cupid 'the frivolous tyrant').

Documented historyHot spot

Spotted an error, or hold a better source? Write to marquis@marquisdemayfair.com — corrections are made, never defended. Our methodology.