Sports & Loisirs

Saratoga Springs and Ballston Spa are representative of the diffusion of spa culture and sociability to the former British colonies of North America. While Ballston, like many other attempts, faded into obscurity, by the early nineteenth century, Saratoga had grown into a thriving centre for fashion and sociability among elites from across the young United States.

The upper class of Philadelphia—a political, economic, and cultural center in eighteenth-century British North America—followed English patterns of sociability in order to distinguish themselves in colonial society and to mix in British circles.

Vauxhall was one of the major pleasure gardens in London from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. Its architecture and spatial organization allowed for various types of social interaction, which encouraged different types of sociability.