Whether we look to them for evidence of a rising ‘middling rank’, an ‘urban renaissance’, an emergent ‘public sphere’ or a ‘separate sphere’ for women, scholarly interest in pleasure gardens has blossomed over the past two decades. Seasonal (as in summertime) commercial resorts, pleasure gardens such as Spring Gardens, Vauxhall and Cremorne offered Caroline, Georgian and Victorian Londoners a place to escape the confines of the city. For the price of a shilling one entered another realm, one in which fantasies of Edenic equality and exotic locales came to life in the glittering grove. Displays of painting and sculpture, musical performances and the crowd itself fostered a playful spirit of the sort that would later be associated with theme parks. Though separated by a century, both types of resort provided paying visitors with the expected unexpected. Similar pleasure gardens sprang up across Britain in the course of the eighteenth century, as well as on the Continent and in North America.

Given how widely the fame of its transparent ham and ‘Dark Walks’ spread, it is unsurprising that a good deal of myth should have grown up around the most important pleasure garden, Vauxhall Gardens in south London, which operated for almost two centuries before closing in 1859. Scholars in search of a reliable history have relied on works by the Victorian numismatist and British Museum curator Warwick Wroth, such as The London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century (1896). Aided by his brother Arthur, Wroth collated accounts of pleasure gardens from earlier parish histories with topographical prints, published diaries and literary accounts to produce a garden-by-garden survey with details of admission charges and opening times, layout, ownership and musical performances.

Later studies of London pleasure gardens offered little more than reheated versions of Wroth. Richard Altick's The Shows of London (1978) integrated both Georgian and Victorian pleasure gardens into a survey of parks, panoramas, circuses and other resorts, but did little to analyse their significance. Though Lewis Mumford briefly discussed the pleasure garden in his landmark book The Culture of Cities (1938) as ‘an attempt to supply the pleasures of the palace to the commonalty at a reasonable price per head’ otherwise these suburban resorts were left out of more analytical discussions of urban history. All too often they have been overlooked in favour of publicly funded parks: a type of urban greenspace which provided a more sober and ‘improving’ (if less exciting and fun) atmosphere.

Alan Borg and David Coke's exhaustive and rigorously researched volume will be welcomed, therefore. A collector of Vauxhall ephemera as well as creator of the valuable website (www.vauxhallgardens.com), Coke curated an exhibition on Vauxhall held at Gainsborough's House museum in 1978, as well as contributing an important essay on the Gardens to the catalogue of the 1985 V&A exhibition ‘Rococo: Art and Design in Hogarth's England’. The present volume is the product of a lifetime's research. In the preface, the authors state that their aim was ‘to produce a comprehensive but straightforward and accessible history, entirely based upon new research and using what may be termed an updated antiquarian approach’ (p. ix). This approach seems to involve writing in something of a historiographical vacuum, unfortunately, without reference to concepts of ‘politeness’, the ‘middling rank’, ‘public sphere’ or other terms familiar from previous work on pleasure gardens, London, musical performance and related topics by the likes of Peter Borsay, John Brewer, Larry Klein, Simon McVeigh, Miles Ogborn, Roy Porter and David Solkin.

At times, this refusal to engage with scholarship merely seems eccentric. The apparent success of the 1749 ‘rehearsal’ of Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks (a ‘rehearsal’ in name only, as Tyers charged admission) was a striking contrast to the official premiere in Green Park, where George II was treated to the unedifying sight of the firework pavilion failing to light, then burning down. Coke and Borg devote little more than a page (pp. 150–1) to this highly significant and much debated episode. The ‘Macaroni Affray’ of 1773 is another moment in the resort's history that prospective readers of this book will be curious about, thanks to discussion of it in works such as Miles Ogborn's Spaces of Modernity: London's Geographies, 1680–1780 (1998). It receives just over a page. In dismissing a cultural phenomenon with so much to teach us about the city, gender, class and politeness (as countless prints by Matthew Darly indicate, macaronies seemed to be everywhere in the 1770s, not just at Vauxhall) as ‘insignificant’ and the ‘Affray’ as a ‘wretched affair’ (p. 235) the authors’ antiquarian approach ceases to be quaint, and becomes almost petulant.

In keeping with their ‘antiquarian’ approach, the authors express a hope ‘that these pages will provide a mine of detailed information . . . the essential building blocks from which future scholarship may be constructed’ (p. ix). Now the antiquarians have rounded up the facts, as it were, the historians can do whatever it is that they do. This is to posit a false distinction between archival research and historical interpretation. In writing a history of Vauxhall Gardens, Borg and Coke have indeed presented ‘an abundance of facts’ (p. ix), in those areas that they consider ‘significant’, but (as we have seen) not in others. In the process, they have advanced their own interpretations. That is both necessary and inevitable: a history of an institution like Vauxhall Gardens should offer something more than ‘building blocks for future scholarship’. Unfortunately, large chunks of this book, particularly the sections on music, read like a gazetteer. There is much here (text as well as images) that would have been better placed on the authors’ excellent website.

There is no gainsaying the many years of painstaking effort that has gone into collating the material for this volume and its several appendices, which include detailed maps allowing the reader to track changes in layout with unprecedented detail and accuracy. After more than a century, we at last have an illustrated and expanded study of one of London's most important leisure resorts, a study that Warwick Wroth would have been proud of. While the authors may consider that a compliment, urban historians may find themselves wondering if a more open-minded and self-aware approach would not have been welcome.