ABSTRACT
Between 1900 and 1939 the concepts of pleasure and leisure underwent a cultural and ideological transformation, closely linked with the experience of popular modernity in Britain. This final chapter focuses on the ways in which amusement parks reflected and shaped these wider processes. How did the park landscape change during the first four decades of the twentieth century? And what role did shifting ideas about pleasure and leisure play in determining the material form and meaning of these sites? Changing attitudes towards popular recreation were played out in the amusement park landscape in two distinct phases. During the first phase, Edwardian amusement parks offered an experience – characterised by technologically produced kinaesthetic (multisensory) stimulation – which came to epitomise a newly formulated discourse of respectable pleasure. During the interwar period, however, the most successful parks were those which redefined themselves as sites of ‘new leisure’ by adopting a modernist aesthetic with its associations of ordered and healthy recreation.
