Public Pleasure

An excerpt from the essay Public Pleasure: Notes on the Privatisation of Peace, Pleasure & Politics in the Public Realm written with Ruth Pilston for How to Sleep Faster #15. Published in 2024 by Arcadia Missa Publications.

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For several summers now—both before and after the COVID-19 lockdowns—large sections of London’s parks have vanished behind hoardings. These otherwise ‘public’ spaces have been closed off for weeks at a time as festivals like All Points East and Brockwell Live take over, damaging green areas and restricting free access during the summer holidays, a time when these spaces are needed most. Writing for The Guardian in May 2024, poet Rebecca Tamás highlights the issue in her local Brockwell Park: “Urban parks are our community’s lungs, where children and teenagers can explore, be with their friends, and connect with nature in some of the last free, shared spaces that exist in neoliberal Britain.” Yet, Tamás observes, these parks “are being privatised, with access to their spaces sold to promoters in what amounts to a new form of enclosure—as all over the UK, huge areas of parks are cordoned off for music festivals.”¹

Indeed, discussions of a “new enclosure” abound in debates over public spaces in both London and the UK as a whole. As Brett Christophers writes in The New Enclosure, since 1979, around 2 million hectares of public land – about half of all land in public ownership when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher took office² – have been systematically sold off. Under Thatcher, public space became just another utility to be privatised, in a period that also saw the denationalisation of water, energy production, British steel manufacturing, and the early dismantling of public mail services.

Why it is that public land has been thought appropriate for sale differs across historic periods and geographic contexts. Between 1750 and 1830, some 5000 “acts of enclosure” privatised approximately 21% of England – primarily common farmland – transforming the agricultural landscape to benefit landowners at the expense of the rural poor; “reducing farmworkers to waged labourers with little or no access to their own land or common rights.”³ For Thatcher, schemes such as denationalisation and ‘right to buy’ transferred communal property into private hands through a similar logic of ‘liberalisation’ – seeking to shift people away from so-called ‘state dependency’, encouraging homeownership and reducing the influence of local authorities.

In each case, schemes of enclosure operate as ‘biopolitical technologies’,⁴ producing new forms of subjectivity that align with emergent modes of governance. The 18th century enclosures didn't just transform land ownership – they recast the rural poor as disciplined wage labourers whose bodies and time could be more efficiently marshalled for agricultural production. Similarly, Thatcher's privatisation policies weren't simply economic reforms, but interventions aimed at producing self-governing property-owners, whose aspirations would be shaped more by mortgage repayments than collective utility provision. This foreclosure of certain types of people, certain possibilities or ‘futures’ – a cultural hallmark of Thatcherite policy making – was grounded in the enclosure of collective space. Enclosure is, in this way, a psychogeographic act – one that reconstructs not just physical landscapes but the ways in which populations understand themselves and their relationship to power.

It is also – as in the case of All Points East and Brockwell Live – a means of transforming a population’s relationship to fun, to joy and to pleasure in the broadest sense. Literary historians Peter Stallybrass and Allon White explore similar dynamics in their book Politics and Poetics of Transgression, describing “literally thousands of acts of legislation” that aimed to eliminate or reshape carnival and public festivities across Europe from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.⁵ They argue that this “demonization of the carnivalesque” was spurred by a rising bourgeois culture, whose “practices and languages” cast carnival in a “negative, individualist framework,” reframing it as something chaotic or even threatening.⁶

Footnotes

1. Rebecca Tamás, Britain’s public parks are a green lifeline (2024), The Guardian ↩

2. Estimated to be worth at least £400 billion. Brett Christophers, The New Enclosure (2018) ↩

3. Past Tense, Stealing the Commons (2016), p.4 ↩

4. Biopolitics, a concept developed by Michel Foucault, describes how modern power operates by managing populations through interventions in collective life. Such power works not through force, but by shaping how populations understand and govern themselves. ↩

5. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p.176 ↩

6. ibid. p.176 ↩