A cultural history of Parson’s Pleasure

Townsend, George Jack Nairne (2022) A cultural history of Parson’s Pleasure. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This thesis provides the first social, material and cultural history of Parson’s Pleasure, a male-only nude bathing place on the river Cherwell, northeast of Oxford city centre. Parson’s Pleasure was active from the seventeenth century until its demolition in 1992, undergoing commercialisation and enclosure in the nineteenth century and substantial expansion in 1933, followed shortly by the addition nearby of a women and children’s bathing place that became known as Dame’s Delight. Bathers included William Morris, C. S. Lewis and Oliver Sacks, among many others. Drawing on a wide range of sources including minute books, maps, guidebooks, newspapers, photography, painting, poetry, fiction, memoirs, letters and the findings of site visits by land and water, the thesis argues for the wide-ranging cultural significance of this physically small and materially humble place. In relation to histories of gender and sexuality, I consider homosocial and queer space in a semi-rural context, building on the work of scholars around urban bathhouses. In relation to histories of physical culture, the thesis advances a holistic account of bathing that encompasses practices of swimming and hygiene, emphasising in addition social, aesthetic and ludic dimensions of the bathing place. In the context of environmental history, the thesis engages Ivan Illich’s proposition that water has become in post-industrial countries symbolically aseptic ‘stuff,’ showing that at Parson’s Pleasure bathers maintained a rich relationship with water over time, albeit in a context transformed by social exclusion and a changing river economy. The thesis also intervenes in social history, providing a corporeal history of intellectual, elite men, and highlighting the social-reproductive labour of the attendants and ‘swimming professors’ who served and supervised them. Reconstructing Parson’s Pleasure through time in vivid, fine-grained detail, this thesis illuminates an extraordinary space of social interface, cultural inspiration and intimate entanglement with the natural environment.

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