The earliest reliable record is in Samuel Pepys's diary for 29 May 1662. The Spring Gardens, as they were then known, had opened just before the Restoration of Charles II two years earlier. The site occupied several acres of trees and laid-out walks on the south bank of the Thames at Lambeth, accessible only by boat. Entrance was free; the proprietors made their money on food and drink. In 1667 Sir Samuel Morland built a fine pavilion at the centre, faced inside with looking-glass and decorated with fountains, surmounted by a carved punchinello with a sundial that the wind eventually demolished. John Evelyn called it a 'very pretty contrived plantation.' For seventy years the place ran as a quiet, slightly raffish, mostly aristocratic resort on the city's southern edge.

Around 1729 a young entrepreneur named Jonathan Tyers took over. What he did next is one of the great untold stories of British commerce. Tyers turned Vauxhall into a mass-entertainment business. He installed an orchestra. He commissioned painters from William Hogarth's St Martin's Lane Academy - Francis Hayman led the team, with designs from Hubert Gravelot and Hogarth himself - to decorate the supper boxes. He invented the public 'ridotto al fresco,' a term so novel he had to advertise its meaning. He lit the walks at night with thousands of oil lamps. At a precise hour, all the supper-box paintings were dropped at once to reveal the diners. He charged a silver guinea for the privilege, then dropped it to a shilling, then raised it as fashion required. He built modern advertising, modern mass catering, modern logistics, decades before anyone else thought to. By the 1780s the gardens drew 61,000 people for a single jubilee night.

Vauxhall was where the rococo - then a new continental fashion - took public root in Britain. The 'Turkish Tent' arrived in 1744. By the late 1740s the Rotunda had been built, its interior the most-seen rococo decoration in England, designed by George Michael Moser and decorated, as the engraver George Vertue noted, 'by French and Italians.' A Chinese pavilion. A gothic orchestra holding fifty musicians. Statues, ruins, arches, a cascade. Frederick, Prince of Wales, took such an interest he had his own pavilion built from the start. And then there were the dark walks. The unlit paths through the wilderness sections were where, as one observer put it, 'the windings and turnings are so intricate that the most experienced mothers have often lost themselves in looking for their daughters.' Boswell wrote that the place suited 'the taste of the English nation.' Handel's statue stood in a prominent corner - the same statue that now stands in Westminster Abbey.

By the early nineteenth century the entertainment had escalated. Hot-air balloon ascents over the Thames. Tightrope walkers. Concerts and fireworks every night of the summer. In 1813 the gardens threw a fete to celebrate Wellington's victory at Vitoria. In 1817 - and again on a larger scale in 1827 - the Battle of Waterloo was re-enacted with a thousand actors playing soldiers. Charles Dickens visited in 1836 and was, by daylight, disappointed. He wrote in Sketches by Boz that the place stripped of its lamps was 'nothing more nor less than a combination of very roughly-painted boards and sawdust' - the wooden firework tower like 'a gigantic watch-case.' That was the problem of Vauxhall by then: it had been a night place too long, and the daytime world was catching up with what its illusions cost.

The owners went bankrupt in 1840. The gardens reopened in 1841, changed hands again in 1842, and closed permanently in 1859. Most of the land was sold for building. The legacy was vast and largely invisible: Vauxhall's name borrowed by railway stations across Russia and parts of Poland; its model copied in pleasure gardens around the world; its memory preserved in Thackeray's Vanity Fair, where a scene at Vauxhall is a hinge in Becky Sharp's fortunes, and in Frances Burney's Cecilia, where a character commits suicide there. Slum clearance in the 1970s freed a piece of the old site, and in 1976 it opened as Spring Gardens public park. In 2012 the name was restored: Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. Today it is an inner-city park with grass, dog-walkers, and trees - quiet in a way Jonathan Tyers would not recognise. The Victoria Line tube station at Vauxhall features a tile motif by George Smith depicting the gardens at their height. Some things outlive their structures.