Places of Pleasure
Where and what are the leisure spaces in our towns today? Do you visit a leisure park complete with cinema, bowling alley and restaurants? Maybe you prefer the theatre district or an art gallery? Or perhaps you love a physical challenge? The Georgian town and city devoted spaces to the pursuit of pleasure – opera houses, theatres, fairs, assembly rooms, coffee houses and pleasure gardens were just some of the places dedicated to leisure and fun. Discover these places of pleasure right here…
Asylums and the Curious Onlooker
Bedlam: tourist attraction? For the price of a penny the curious onlooker could peer into the cells and view inmates in their pitiful misery.
Opera and Music
Music was a pleasurable leisure and communal activity in the Georgian era, enjoyed across the social spectrum. One of the principal ways in which people experienced music was through domestic music-making.
Fairs
The excitement of the fairground, with its diverse attractions and spectacles, refreshment stands and hundreds of stalls, saw a cross section of society join together in the pursuit of pleasure.
From the minuet to waltz
Dancing was an opportunity to display one’s graceful manners, deportment and refined taste. In a society where the inability to dance was associated with vulgarity, rusticity and bad manners, the scrutiny of the crowd could be intense.
Coffee Houses
The Coffee House: a colourful mix of conversation and debate, food and drink, transactions and deals, with a dash of the extraordinary – the perfect recipe for Georgian sociability.
All the World’s a Stage: Georgian Theatres
High and low, polite and impolite: Georgian Theatre brought society across the classes together in one place to experience the magic of the stage.