The Invention of the Park: Recreational Landscapes from the Garden of Eden to Disney's Magic Kingdom

Abstract

Here we have the Garden of Eden, the royal hunting park, the gentleman's pleasure ground, the City Park, the National Park, the Amusement Park, the Baseball Park, the Safari Park, the Science Park, and even the indoor shopping mall in West Edmonton, gathered together under the one term, and the only park Jones and Wills hesitate to adopt is the car park. Approximately sixty per cent of their evidence comes from North America (including a generous allowance to Canada), twenty per cent from Britain (but with no reference to Battersea Park), fifteen per cent from other European countries (no mention of Legoland), and five per cent from the rest of the world. After a short canter through ‘Ancient Groves to Versailles’ and a more sedate trot around ‘The English Landscape Park’ (once, as the authors approvingly remind us, described by Tom Williamson as the English gentleman's exclusion zone), three informative chapters deal with City Parks, National Parks, and Amusement Parks and Theme Parks. Here North American sources come into their own. Frederick Law Olmsted's Central Park scarcely brought ‘the country to the Metropolis’, as the authors would like us to believe, but it did bring semblances of some of the things that can be found in the country into the city—space, trees, the opportunity to sit on the grass—and New Yorkers make sure it remains the most famous city park in the world to this day. Next, the National Park was an American idea, conceived by George Catlin in the 1830s as ‘a prairie reserve containing free-roaming bison and Indian hunters, a snapshot of pre-Columbian life preserved for all time’, and ultimately carried into effect (with some change of emphasis) with the creation of the Yellowstone National Park in 1872. Bakken Park and Tivoli in Denmark were the first amusement parks, but Coney Island surpassed them before it went into decline during the Depression and yielded pride of place to Disneyland in 1955. With the opening of Disney World, Jones and Wills's work becomes more challenging. They reinterpret Versailles as a prototype Disneyland, and the gardens at Stourhead and Stowe as early examples of modern theme parks. They argue persuasively that the rituals performed at the French court, the celebration of Whig politics and English liberty by Lord Cobham's guests, and the tour round Henry Hoare's lake, following, in imagination, in the wake of Aeneas, were not really very different from what goes on in Disneyland. They disarmingly concede that an artificial park with vinyl leaves, where computer glitches are ‘the only weeds’, is as phoney as the Mouster and Ductorate ‘degrees’ awarded to the staff. But Disney's ‘Imagineers’ with their five themes, Frontierland, Adventureland, Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, and Main Street USA, did encapsulate the American Dreams of the white middle-class (though not, as they point out, of blacks and Hispanics). ‘Adults reverted to a childlike state on entering the park’, and ‘dying children made it their last wish to see Mickey Mouse in his home park’. The themes have changed since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the audiences are different, but the essence remains the same. Disneyland Paris was condemned, when it opened, as ‘a cultural Chernobyl’ and ‘America's cultural Vietnam’, but Louis XIV, the implication is, would have envied the perfectly marshalled environment and might well have imitated Disney's methods. Readers who appreciate a well-researched and fairly presented argument, will want to work all this out for themselves before deciding whether technology can offer more ‘reality’ than nature. But doubters, who hold that the word ‘park’ is being stretched here beyond its useful meaning, may take heart, for my computer has queried Mouster, Ductorate, Imagineers, and the names of three of Disneyland's five themes. Disney may have pioneered the techniques of modern ‘de-differentiated’ marketing (together with MacDonalds), but it looks as though he never quite managed to sell his vocabulary to Bill Gates.