This is a topography of the open-air leisure industry within fifteen miles of Georgian London, amply illustrated by contemporary views and advertisements. Some of these were pirated from other establishments, which is hardly surprising; one spa is much like another. It will have begun with the stage-managed discovery of a well, where the waters are extolled with preposterous claims and promptly ignored by most visitors. For a few years it is the only place to be seen; then the spa clientele begins to slip down the social scale. The rich and fair move on, while bookings for funambulists and monster balloons can only stave off the inevitable decline. Eventually, even the mothers of large families have abandoned its peeling bowers, and a London antiquary stops by to sketch the old pump room weeks before the site is developed for housing.

In their first phase, the London spas were places exempted from social protocol. The ideal of a polite, egalitarian public sphere was tried out here before being let loose on the world, just as the flimsy follies in their gardens experimented with new architectural forms. It is not surprising that these early spas inspired much versified mockery on the risible attempts of the lower bourgeoisie to emulate their betters. Satire of this sort projects contemporary anxieties about the power of commodity capitalism to subvert a rank-based society; whether it actually reflects spa life is another matter. The proportion of what magistrates called ‘loose, disorderly people’ is just as contentious. You could go to pleasure gardens to hunt for sex, and some did, but there seem to have been just as many young couples walking out together, or families with young children. The suppression of any popular entertainment is accompanied by the rhetoric of vice, which should not be taken at face value.

Vauxhall and Ranelagh were commercial, public versions of the gardens that you might expect around any ducal mansion. They had the classical statuary and spectacular waterworks, the fêtes and fireworks to music by Arne and Handel. These places abound in picturesque incidents, and James Stevens Curl makes much of them. The flow of social history is interrupted by his little roguish asides, many of them signalled by an unsettling use of Capital Letters. But a century has passed since Foord and Sunderland pioneered the topography of individual spas, and the time is surely ripe for a study of the industry as a whole. The Long or Assembly Rooms, a building type now almost completely lost, seem to have been particularly consistent in their design. Systematic plans of these gardens and elevations of their buildings would allow for an intelligent comparison of the facilities that were offered at different venues. What were the start-up costs and the profit margins for these establishments? What constituted a good attendance, and what was their spend per head? Figures like these would shed some light on the baffling tendency of spas – unlike, say, racecourses or theatres – to flourish and wither in quick succession.