Cremorne Pleasure Gardens

In a major interpretation project, Dr James Lesh, Founding Director of Heritage Workshop, reconstructed the Cremorne Pleasure Gardens, gold-rush Melbourne’s premier leisure attraction. This involved extensive archival research and a global literature review. Cremorne Gardens was located in south of Richmond on the Yarra river. For ten summer seasons, from 1853 to 1863, Cremorne welcomed thousands of visitors. Cremorne’s three proprietors, including the prominent businessman and politician George Coppin, carefully arranged this commercial venture. Cremorne became an alluring urban space that produced new social experiences and provoked contested responses, inflected by contemporary standards of social etiquette and public morality. Cremorne thus reflected broader urban, social and cultural patterns of the era.