Pleasure Gardens

I've been having lessons in classical singing for several months now, and I had a lesson today. Afterwards I dropped in at Kate's house, which is round the corner from my singing teacher. We had a cup of tea and chatted about the upcoming 'Danger' exhibition - she was working on a scale drawing of the space, for planning purposes, which was rather impressive.
We also talked about the Market Estate Project, taking place on March 6th, which we will both be performing at, in a piece of work devised by another of our regular collaborative partners, Joanna Austin. I'd been reading about the history of Market Estate - a 1960s housing estate in Islington which is due to be demolished and redeveloped. Jo's work for it is based on its past as, amongst other things, a 'pleasure garden'. I thought I'd better read a bit about pleasure gardens as well - from what I can summise, they seemed to involve both tea and debauchery. When Kate and I were discussing our costumes for it today, which I think will involve a mixture of modern and historical outfits, and I dropped in the idea of wearing our corsets (which we got for the 'Voyeur' performance we did at a Red Velvet Curtain Cult night back in December) over hoodies. This reminded Kate of how, on a visit to Berlin, she had seen ladies in certain areas of the city wearing corsets over the top of winter coats, presumabley to alert potential clients to their profession. While we clearly don't want to cause any confusion by dressing in this way for a night out in Berlin, this does seem like it could be an interesting thought for the Market Estate costume.