The Architecture of Pleasure

Originating in New York’s Coney Island, the early twentieth century witnessed a boom in the emergence of amusement parks in Britain, with nearly forty major new parks appearing between 1900 and 1940. Josephine Kane’s monograph offers the first comprehensive historical account of this thrill-based pleasure culture, which she compares with other forms of newly emerging commodified leisure pursuits. Like the cinema, by 1939 amusement parks attracted millions of visitors from a variety of class backgrounds and Kane paints an engaging image of ‘corseted ladies’ and ‘buttoned-up businessmen’ who visited parks ‘in search of escape and excitement’ (p. 2). Unlike the cinema, however, amusement parks have largely been neglected in historical accounts of leisure, which Kane explains by their relative transience. By focussing on the growth and technological innovations of Britain’s major amusement parks, including Blackpool Pleasure Beach, Manchester’s White City, and Margate’s Dreamland, Kane focusses on two key issues. First, the monograph asks how ‘the design of amusement parks and mechanical amusements held historically specific cultural meanings’. Secondly, it considers how the ‘interaction between individual and architectural landscape played a pivotal role in determining those meanings’ (p. 2)

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