Here: a fair resting place

Montgomery, D. and Townsend, George (2023) Here: a fair resting place. [Show/Exhibition]

Abstract

Here: A Fair Resting-Place presented artwork and archival material relating to Parson's Pleasure, a male-only nude bathing place situated on the River Cherwell in Oxford from the early seventeenth century until 1992. Presented in the Peltz Gallery vitrine 14 March – 28 April 2023. Parson's Pleasure lived many lives. It was part of a local, socially mixed network of 'open' bathing places until the early nineteenth century. It was commercialised in the 1830s and then enclosed with wooden screens in 1865. Around this time it became linked to 'muscular Christianity'; as well as swimming, bathers boxed and wrestled on the grass. By 1900, the site was dominated by members of Oxford University, its communal, clandestine roots all but erased. Writers and artists began re-figuring it as a throwback to Arcadia — the imagined origin-point of a homosocial university elite. A generation of bathers was decimated in the First World War. But before long another phase of forgetting drifted through. 'A beautiful bathe ... but very crowded,' wrote C.S. Lewis in 1922, 'Amid so much nudity I was interested to note the passing of my generation: two years ago every second man had a wound mark, but I did not see one today.' As the 1930s sunbathing craze took hold, the riverbank was quadrupled in size to make way for more reclining bodies, and a family equivalent opened next door, called Dame's Delight. Then, in the Second World War, the site again reconfigured itself, with soldiers posted in Oxford gaining leave to bathe there in their time-off. By the postwar period Parson's Pleasure was known as a cruising spot, featuring as a 'swimming place' in the 1962 edition of the Guide Gris, an early gay travel guide. Parson's Pleasure was demolished and a bonfire made of its sheds and screens in January 1992. Duncan Montgomery's new series of wood engravings and the contextual material provided here by George Townsend represent work in progress in a project to illustrate and enrich the findings of Townsend's recent doctoral thesis, A Cultural History of Parson's Pleasure (2022).

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