Secrets of the Pleasure Garden

In Georgian London

Pleasure gardens were a remarkable eighteenth-century innovation and vogue. The enclosed and landscaped grounds of the most sophisticated resorts boasted promenades, follies, sculptures, water features, illuminations and painted transparencies, as well as all manner of evening entertainments. Music and masquerades, dining and drinking, fireworks and acrobatics were all on offer to entertain a paying public.

Dr. Hannah Greig (Senior Lecturer in History, York and historical adviser for period film and television including The Duchess, Death Comes to Pemberley and Poldark) revisits these exotic places of spectacle and distinctively Georgian grounds of entertainment, taking a tour through London’s most famous gardens to reveal the pursuit of pleasure al fresco.