The first parks open to the public in Western society date back to the late 18th century, with the Englischer Garten in Munich (1789), named by the renowned Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell, followed by Maksimir Park in Zagreb (1794). Birkenhead Park, described as a “People’s Garden” by Olmsted and designed by Joseph Paxton in Liverpool (1847), is regarded as the first publicly funded park and served as a model for the later Central Park in New York City (1858).

Despite the acknowledgement that public parks were acting as catalysts for gentrification—since the land surrounding parks was often used to raise property values, (and the trend still holds), and other controversies of steeling the Indigenous people’s lands, there was another aspect behind the development of public parks—to teach people about personal and social hygiene (see Hygienic Promenades). Prior to public parks, which promoted leisure, modesty, health and recreation, however, a model of semipublic jardin-spectacles, owned by the elite bourgeois class, was a hit.

They served as entertaining parks featuring fireworks, balloon shows, dance, and music, summed up in the name Tivoli. While Tivoli is a town east of Rome, once a summer residence during Roman times and home to two of the most remarkable landscape and garden heritage sites—Hadrian’s Villa and Villa d’Este—there is an obvious link between the guest-entertaining giochi d’acqua of Renaissance gardens and Tivoli parks around the world. Pleasure gardens were sites of more relaxed social encounters, often associated with debauchery—gardens of earthly delights. The first known public appearance of a gay figure, Princess Seraphina, took place in the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in London in 1732. At the rival Ranelagh Gardens (today the site of the Chelsea Flower Show), Mozart performed at the age of nine. Eccentricity ran through pleasure gardens, which offered sites of entertainment against a “backdrop” of bucolic nature.

Pleasure gardens served as social hotspots for dandyism and as showrooms of a lifestyle for those who could afford the entry ticket. Pinned by pavilions hosting art exhibitions and concerts, they became places for the commodification of culture, eventually evolving into the theme park industry. Susan Taylor-Leduc notes that about twenty Parisian private pleasure grounds opened, closed, and re-opened between 1795 and 1830, as jardin-spectacles quickly shifted from places of gaiety and glory to liminal spaces under the economic and political instability faced by entrepreneurial owners. James Marshall, a theme park enthusiast, notes that the festivities once tied to pleasure gardens began to travel in the forms of festivals, carnivals, and expos (think of Burning Man).

If we compare what remains of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in London since their closure in 1859, we find a public park focused on sports, recreation, and family-oriented programs, such as an urban farm. Squeezed between residential developments, the southern edge at least symbolically maintains a link to the past with the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, one of the best-rated LGBTQ+ friendly venues in the city. The paths carry names like Glasshouse Walk and Vauxhall Walk; there is also the Cabinet Gallery and the Tea House Theatre on site.

This opens the question of pleasure gardens within the public sphere. Public spaces and parks are places of social norms, where codes influence how we behave. It seems inevitable to encounter less formalized conduct at the edges and in liminal spaces—obscure corners of parks, back alleys, and underdeveloped areas. The decadence and opulence of a Lustgarten, the sensuality described in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, are reserved for the private and enclosed. It seems there is a necessary delineation that offers a sense of “being removed from the world” in order to allow immersion, where “a process of world-composition that dissolves the difference between thinking, feeling, and living” can occur, as Rod Barnett writes.

While not confined to a specific era or garden design, following Spinoza, Barnett writes that the “pleasure garden incorporates a social-natural order that invites transgression,” allowing one to act in ways that augment their own nature (and, in turn, contest and understand their limitations). Pleasure denotes an increase in self-actualization and autonomy, where a garden offers an encounter with other humans and non-humans—a place at once removed from, and open to the world. Inducing pleasure by self-actualization, encountering others, facing fears and performing self-becoming—is this not what a public park can offer?