Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens

'the illuminated walks, and the lamps and the fireworks'

At its height in the 18th and early 19th centuries, Vauxhall’s Spring Garden was London’s pleasure ground: opposite the present Tate Britain and connected by boat to Tate Modern. Orchestras played around a statue of Handel and the site was decorated with paintings by Hogarth; a recreation of the Battle of Waterloo was staged for the Duke of Wellington. The gardens were ‘enclosed with hedges of gooseberries, within which are roses, beans, and asparagus’ and, among the fountains and Chinese Pavilion, nightingales sang to Pepys, Fielding, Goldsmith, Dr Johnson, Walpole, Byron and many others who wrote of the experience.

Chinese Pavillion in Vauxhall Gardens
www.british-history.ac.uk

The present Spring Garden is an open, green space created by slum clearance of heavily bomb-damaged Victorian streets in the 1970s, displacing a vibrant, multi-cultural community to which I belong into surrounding areas of Vauxhall, Kennington and the Oval. The area continues to be a centre of London night-life with gay pubs, Portuguese cafes and Vauxhall City Farm providing day-time continuity. The area has busy rail, tube and bus connections and several landmark buildings from the London Fire Brigade and MI6 headquarters to the World Maritime Organisation and Lambeth Palace.

Development of the site: installations, performances, community out-reach

I am developing a project to recreate a 21st Century, high-tech Vauxhall Pleasure Garden in time for the 2012 London Olympics to include:

• a recreation of the earlier market-garden with hedges of gooseberries, roses, beans and asparagus to reflect the proximity of New Covent Garden market
• a collaboration to redesign the original Chinese Pavilion using lights and lamps in acknowledgement of the Beijing Olympics
• a corrugated iron surround to a reconstructed bomb-site from the blitz with the collaboration of the nearby Imperial War Museum in Kennington
• sound installations of nightingales, ‘the choirs of birds that sang upon the trees’, incorporating
  • contemporary young voices and oral histories from the local community in dialogue with recordings of the poets, writers and diarists who visited the gardens
  • commissioned musical responses, in collaboration with Raw Material, from local rap and grime artists to the literary and musical history of the gardens
• club nights and live events in the adjacent railway arches recording and celebrating the presence of British writers, artists and musicians, then and now, alongside the music and dances of local popular culture from Doing the Lambeth Walk! to Do the Rolex!
• a firework display and pageant to recreate the recreation of the Battle of Waterloo and open the installation

As lead artist on the project, I am collaborating with Jagtar Singh of The Change Institute to provide research, outreach, management and logistical support.

Potential collaborators include: Alvise Marsoni (MM Architects) and Francis Archer (Ove Arup) for the Chinese Pavilion; Diane Lees (Imperial War Museum) and James Gardner (Design Consultant) for the installation of the bomb-site; Tom Stuart-Smith (Landscape Design) for the market garden; Raw Material (Music and Media) for sound installations; and Akim Mogaji (New Media Networks) for events management.

[June 2009]