ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the significance of the amusement park experience for Edwardian Britons, focusing on the idea of 'machines for fun' and the crowd itself to explore their enormous appeal. Visual pleasures at the amusement park were a prelude to physical engagement. The North West Film Archive holds a number of home movies from the 1920s and 1930s that attempted to capture the park landscape from within a moving rollercoaster, suggesting that new perceptual experiences formed an important and lasting component of the amusement park pleasure formula. The visitor experienced the park as an ensemble landscape of commodified pleasures, infused with speed: multi-directional crowd flows, the movement of ride machinery, and the body itself in motion. Machines for pleasure were perceived as safe – providing shocks without trauma – and this became a mark of progress itself. By describing new rides as modern wonders, the amusement parks tapped into a general fascination with technology itself and the changes it heralded.
