Week 1. 1 March. From Naumachia to Naval Warfare: Nautical Frolics in British Parks with Patrick Eyres

“Look Out Behind You!!” The audience shouts out warnings to the ‘actors’ in the aquatic and pyrotechnic panto that is performed three afternoons a week each summer in Peasholm Park, Scarborough. The excitements of ‘Naval Warfare’ are unique. It is the last of the Naumachia, or mock naval battles, that have been ‘fought’ on the lakes of European gardens and parks since the Renaissance. Naumachia is the Romanised Greek word that described gladiatorial sea fights in the flooded Colosseum. When revived in the Renaissance, they became frolicsome pageants. For Georgian Britons, they combined ‘messing about in boats’ with re-enactment of the latest naval victory. Manned miniature warships, fortlets and docks adorned parkland lakes. Victorians paid to attend these spectacles. The lecture will romp its way through these frolics to highlight the cultural significance of Scarborough’s ‘Naval Warfare’, which was launched in 1927 in Britain’s only public park designed exclusively in the Japanese style.

Dr Patrick Eyres has, since 1981, created 54 editions of the unique, artist-illustrated New Arcadian Journal, which engages with the cultural politics of designed landscapes. Naumachia (1995) is a history of Peasholm Park, Naval Warfare and the Naumachia tradition. He has published extensively, most recently on the poetic gardening of Ian Hamilton Finlay in Penny Florence (ed.), Thinking The Sculpture Garden: Art, Plant, Landscape (2020), and in the 40th anniversary edition of the New Arcadian Journal, Atlantic Flowers: The Naval Memorials of Little Sparta (2022), as well as in the 50th anniversary issue of Garden History (2022). For many years he served on the boards of the Little Sparta Trust, Garden History Society, Leeds Art Fund, and Wentworth Castle Heritage Trust. On behalf of The Gardens Trust, he set up and chaired for ten years the annual New Research Symposium in Garden History.

Image: Chris Broughton, detail, Naval Warfare in Peasholm Park, NAJ 39/40 (1995)

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Unforgettable Gardens - From Naumachia to Naval Warfare