Pleasure Gardens (ETW building)
| Pleasure Gardens | |
|---|---|
| Category: | Entertainment |
| Level: | 3 |
| Turns to build: | 5 |
| Building cost: | 3000 |
| |
| Requires | |
 Theatre | |
An ornamental garden, laid out in a formal style with pleasant walks to show off horticultural wonders and the fashionable elements of society equally.
Public gardens are for the enjoyment of the leisured classes, and this usually means the moneyed classes. The chance to wander through a carefully tended landscape, enjoy a rural idyll and, possibly, a fashionable “pique-nique” while being seen by one’s peers is definitely a pleasure of the rich.
Historically, pleasure gardens often catered to a wide clientele, not all of whom came to enjoy the flowers. Visitors who stayed after dark could enjoy entertainments of a very non-horticultural, though similarly earthy, nature. The character of the gardens changed as night fell: they became the haunt of prostitutes, gamblers, mollies and the foully debauched. Vauxhall Gardens in London, for example, were notorious as playgrounds of vice and disgusting iniquity, where a meal, a whore (of any kind) and a drunken evening of sin were available to anyone with sufficient funds, if they could avoid a mugging. The elaborate theatricals and fireworks staged at Vauxhall were merely a bonus for watching revellers!