Pleasure and Fun
By EDWARD HODGKIN
UST to get things straight. The Festival of Britain is some- thing which happens all over the place, and is responsible for the pageant in your village and the concert in your town hall. The South Bank Exhibition is what is called the centrepiece of the Festival, and is a display of patriotic instruc- tion squashed in between Waterloo Station and the ttiver Thames._ The Pleasure Gardens are further up the river, in what used to be (and presumably one day will- again be) Battersea Park. One part of the Pleasure Gardens is the Fun Fair, but you are at liberty to have fun in the rest of the Gardens. The Fun Fair has been open for a fortnight ; the rest of the Gardens opened on Monday this week.
Right. The Gardens may be entered on payment of, two shillings by the gates which used to lead into Battersea Park or they may be entered by boats, which tie up at Pleasure Gardens Pier. Boats leave.for the Pleasure Gardens from South Bank, and South Bank may be conveniently reached by boat from the Pleasure Gardens. So much for the problem of getting to the Gardens. Once you arrive, beautiful young women dressed in the costume of — well, dressed in costume, sell you a programme and usher you through the gates. Anyone who knew Battersea Park before the days of its glory will remember that there was a road which ran through it, parallel to the river and about a hundred yards from it. This road is still there, and it is now called The Parade. This is a convenient landmark to remember, and the visitor is recommended to stroll up and. down The Parade once or twice, because it is a charming walk in itself, and most of the rest of the Gardens look at their best when seen from it. On the river side of- The Parade are small blue and white pavilions which, like most of the other structures in the Gardens, look like tents. In fact to all intents and purposes they are tents, and inside them you can buy such useful things as cigarettes and news- papers, and such useless things as souvenirs. At the west end of The Parade is the Riverside Theatre, a small, circular, pale blue building. Although there are various intimate theatres up and down the country—at Bath, for example, and at the end of quite a number of seaside piers–L. this seems to me the best of them all. It is the right size and shape and, as far as it is possible to judge during the showing of a silent Charlie Chaplin film (which is not very far), its decora- tions are the right colour. Within its circumference will be presented such small-scale activities as puppets and the Victoriana of Mr. Leonard Sachs. A few yards away from the Riverside Theatre is an even smaller-scale, and even more intimate, theatre, to wit, Punch and Judy. This, like almost every other building in the Gardens, has been erected by a commercial firm, in this case a firm of toffee-manufacturers, and I approached it with sonic caution, fearing the effect of industry on the traditional drama. But though I stood through the equivalent of the fourth and fifth acts, 1 heard no commercials. There is also an amphitheatre half way down The Parade on the landward side, known as The Amphitheatre, which is open to the elements, and where, when I passed by on Monday after- noon, Mr. Lupino Lane was ushering off and on the stage to the tune of "The Lambeth Walk" a number of richly over- dressed cockneys, an air force officer and a small dog.
Although the extent of the Gardens is not large, there is a more comfortable feeling of space in them than at South Bank. At one point, at the extreme western end of The Parade, it is possible to look down the whole breadth of the Gardens, and to realise at the same time how narrow they are and how cleverly they can be made to look as if they were part of Ver- sailles. Everything .has to have a name, and if you consult the programme you will find that this is called The Grand Vista. The catalogue will also inform you that the architects of the vista were Messrs. John Piper and Osbert Lancaster, and that " something other than grandeur was their object." What in fact they have produced is a skeletonised parody of grandeur, with gaudy, ribbed arcades, topped by white figures of birdcage men and women. This is exhibition architecture at its best, which makes a virtue of being temporary, and adapts a private joke for public enjoyment. At the bottom of broad steps, grass and ponds lead to a large rectangular lake, where a great many jets of water splash with gusto against the background of a sort of cobweb reredos. Somewhere at the back, near the lake, is a private joke which has not been so well adapted. This is the Emett railway, which has become affectionately known to readers of Punch, but which, translated into, so to speak, the flesh, cannot conceal the fact that it is an ordinary miniature railway traversing a few hundred yards of Battersea Park.
The visitor who turns left at the cobweb reredos will find himself in the Fun Fair. There is no need to say anything about that, because all fun fairs are more or less the same. However, scrupulously conscious of my duty to the public, I did take a quick cross-section poll of a younger-age group I met in the queue for the Giant Racer. Of these thirty-three and a third per cent. were of the opinion that it was all super, thirty-three and a third per cent. thought it was all right, and thirty-three and a third per cent. disappeared in the direction of the Candy Floss stand without recording an opinion. But there is at least one way of making yourself sick that I had never met before. This is a revolving cylinder in which passengers are spun round at such a pace that they become glued to the walls, at which point the floor is removed from under them and they are left glued. The spectacle of these whirling bodies is reminiscent of what, according to Dante and Gustave Dori.... goes on in one of the circles of Hell, and the fact that you pay one shilling and sixpence for the indignity suggests that the damned may quite enjoy themselves.
There is a lot more to the Gardens. which were not by any means completed early this week. But they arc a place that you should arrive at in a crowd, or by hansom-cab, or by parachute, or drunk. or at the age of fourteen. In any of those circumstances, and with the sun shining, it would be easy to enjoy without qualification the gaiety and beauty that have certainly been created in Battersea Park. For' it cannot be denied that the big tents and the little tents, all brightly coloured, set among enormous beds of flowers and under the big trees, are a beautiful sight. Battersea Park has always had the merit of being the only park in the centre of London which makes use of the Thames ; but it has in recent years' become increasingly dis- tracted from its primary properties of trees, grass and flowers by other things, such as allotments, tennis-courts, bowls, boats and wild animals. Now it has been forced, for the time being at any rate, to go the whole hog and cater for entertainment to the exclusion of leisure. If the only result had been to provide a terrace by the side of the river where you can eat and drink and look at the water, the transformation would have been justi- fied. But it has done much more. It has shown that it is possible, in a fairly small space, to create a form of entertainment that is traditional as well as individual, and one that will give pleasure. .
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