By Shafik Meghji
10 May 2021
A flash of green amid traffic-choked roads, elevated railway lines and anonymous high-rise apartment and office blocks, Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens is a well-kept but unremarkable south London park. When I visited on a sunny spring afternoon, wildflowers dotted the grass and shouts sounded from the football pitch. At the edge of the seven-acre park, mesmerised children gazed at a trio of freshly trimmed alpacas, residents of Vauxhall City Farm. In the distance loomed the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service, an ironically distinctive green-and-cream hulk on the south bank of the Thames.
It may not look it now, but this area was once home to the greatest entertainment venue in Georgian London. The original Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens was a centre of culture, spectacle, intrigue and scandal during the 18th and 19th Centuries, immortalised in paintings by artists such as Canaletto and William Hogarth and in novels like William Thackeray's Vanity Fair, which noted that "there is no headache in the world like that caused by Vauxhall punch". Frequented by everyone from Charles Dickens to Venetian playboy Giacomo Casanova, Vauxhall transformed the capital's nightlife and helped Londoners shake off some of the shackles of everyday life.