LONDON IN THE 18TH CENTURY / PLEASURE GARDENS, SPAS AND WATERING PLACES

The recovery of London expanded at a rapid pace after the Great Fire. As the city at the heart of the Age of Enlightenment, it was a consumer society par excellence with wealth and squalor side by side. It was a rough and ready time, elegant and refined: a time of passionate preaching and riotous disorder. This is the time of Robert Adam, Canaletto, William Hogarth and the Mob, and the course will illustrate the life that Londoners lived in every stratum of society.

Vauxhall and Ranelagh were famous for cultural evenings for the well-to-do, where supper boxes and music by Arne and Handel could be enjoyed. There was also a plethora of spas where the middle classes could take healing waters in assembly rooms such as Hampstead, Islington, Richmond and St. Pancras – all developed by shrewd entrepreneurship and the marketing of questionable medicinal spa waters.

Register to tell a friend about this lecture.

Comments

If you would like to comment about this lecture, please register here.

©2003-2006 Niminim Limited. Created by

Any ad revenue is entirely reinvested into the Lecture List's operating fund