Open FOR Pleasure

A series of letters from a London-based writer who called himself “S Toupee” appeared in The Scots Magazine in 1739. “Your distance from a kind of entertainment so new amongst us, and so much approved, especially by the Ladies, may make an account of it acceptable,” he wrote, before offering a detailed description of a visit to “Vaux-Hall gardens” – a “melodious grove” that had been, he said, “the great resort of personages of the first rank… for the last five years”.

His “Vaux-Hall” was not a completely new form of entertainment. Since the 1660s (at least) there had been a public park on the same site near Lambeth, south of the Thames. “It is very pleasant and cheap going thither,” diarist Samuel Pepys wrote in 1667. “To hear the nightingale and other birds… and [to see] there fine people walking, is mighty