Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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despite Sunday’s relative liberalisation, ‘most people [spent] . . . the entire day
either in or around the home’.
11
In the aftermath of the war, trade unions shaved a further hour off the
normal working week by ; national industrial bargaining also minimised
earlier discrepancies between hours in different cities (Figure .). Economists
have stressed fear of unemployment as the key factor interesting trade unions
in reductions of hours, and the maintenance or improvement of money
incomes as a more powerful influence on their members than dreams of
increased leisure. However, this is unconvincing in relation to demand for
Saturday half-holidays. Certainly, shorter Saturdays were sometimes ‘earned’ by
rearrangement of working hours on the other days of the week, but the popular
insistence on a block of leisure on Saturdays indicates that it was highly valued
for its own sake.
12
This point is even clearer regarding the history of annual
holidays.
Modern urban holiday-making was established within the annual framework
of festivity derived nominally from the ecclesiastical calendar but also from cen-
turies-old ‘carnivalesque’ traditions marking the turning points of the solar (and
hence the agricultural) year. In England Christmas, Easter and Whitsuntide, and
fairs and wakes, were the main occasions. Although Calvinism had proscribed
the celebration of Christmas in Scotland, Hogmanay soon filled its place in
popular esteem. Calvinists also abjured Pentecost, but its English namesake –
Whitsuntide – was England’s chief holiday, especially in cities like Manchester
where there were no wakes. Commerce vied with community: fairs and races
abounded; friendly societies feasted and paraded; northern and Midland Sunday
Schools promoted highly popular ‘Whit Walks’ (and Whit ‘Sings’ in Sheffield
parks); brass bands competed; railway excursionists en-trained. Such feasts as
Whitsun, and Christmas and New Year’s Eve, also tended towards extra-ordinary
jollity, bawdiness and aggression as the pubs turned out. But the ‘high point of
mass drunkenness’ in s Bolton was during the main annual holiday in
Blackpool. Gregarious – particularly youthful – heavy drinking was characteris-
tic of festival life throughout history; however, it should also be interpreted as a
Douglas A. Reid
11
Mass-Observation (ed. Gary Cross), Worktowners at Blackpool: Mass-Observation and Popular Leisure
in the s (London, ), p. ; Mass-Observation, The Pub and the People (London, ), p.
; Mass-Observation, File Report , ‘Saturday night’, April , passim (I should like to
acknowledge the permission of the Trustees of the Mass-Observation Archive, University of
Sussex to quote from this report); Zweig, Women’s Life and Labour, p. ; [Political and Economic
Planning], ‘Freedom and opportunity’, Planning, , June , ; Mass-Observation, Meet
Yourself on Sunday (London, ), p. .
12
M. A. Bienefeld, Working Hours in British Industry:An Economic History (London, ); G. Cross,
Time and Money (London, ), pp. –, , nn. –, n. ; K. Hinrichs, W. Roche
and C. Sirianni, eds., Working Time in Transition:The Political Economy of Working Hours in Industrial
Nations (Philadelphia, ), pp. –, –; Jones, Workers at Play, p. .
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
reaction to modern urbanism – above all to oppressive discipline and repetitive
monotony at work.
13
The developing holiday patterns of urban regions were differentiated by their
economies, by related popular cultures, and by their accessibility to the coast.
Where de-centralised (and workshop) production meant slacker industrial dis-
cipline, especially in smaller towns working less intensively, economic horizons
were relatively low and customary holidays tended to flourish in traditional
ways, with neighbourly hospitality, courtship customs and carnivalistic celebra-
tions in streets, pubs and fairgrounds – as at the summer wakes of the Black
Country and Potteries, and the parish feasts of the West Riding woollen dis-
trict. However, despite factory discipline in Lancashire cotton towns, their
wakes were stubbornly defended, and employers compelled to accept them – a
few days in the s became a week by the s. Moreover, the high family
wages of cotton workers channelled through mutual-saving ‘going-off clubs’
enabled these wakes to be utilised for seaside holidays on nearby coasts, espe-
cially at Blackpool, New Brighton and Rhyl. Although the textile towns of the
West Riding had the same thrifty traditions as Lancashire they were further from
Playing and praying
13
Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, ), pp. –; Christopher A.
Whatley, ‘“The privilege which the rabble have to be riotous”: carnivalesque and the monarch’s
birthday in Scotland, c. –’, in Ian Blanchard, ed., Labour and Leisure in Historical Perspective,
Thirteenth toTwentieth Centuries (Stuttgart, ), pp. ‒; M. Macleod Banks, British Calendar
Customs:Scotland (London, ), vol. , pp. –; Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun (Oxford,
), pp. –, , –ff; Reid, ‘Labour, leisure and politics’, pp. –, ; Martin Gorsky,
‘Mutual aid and civil society: friendly societies in nineteenth-century Bristol’, UH, (), ,
; City News Notes and Queries (Manchester, ), p. ; John Bragg, ‘Autobiographical notes’
[], p. (Birmingham Reference Library, ); A. J. Ainsworth, ‘Religion in the working
class community, and the evolution of socialism in late Victorian Lancashire: a case of working class
consciousness’, Histoire Sociale, (), –; R. Poole, Popular Leisure and the Music Hall in
Nineteenth-Century Bolton (Lancaster, ), pp. , ; E. Roberts, AWoman’s Place (Oxford, ),
p. ; Davies, Leisure,Gender and Poverty,pp., –; Joyce, Work,Society and Politics,pp.–;
Dave Russell, ‘“What’s wrong with brass bands?” Cultural change and the band movement,
–c. ’, in Trevor Herbert, ed., Bands:The Brass Band Movement in the th and th Centuries
(Milton Keynes, ), p. n. ; A. Elton and E. Foster, eds., Yorkshire Piety and Persuasion:A
Social History of Religion from to (Leeds, ), pp. –; McLeod, ‘New perspectives on
Victorian working-class religion’, , ; R. H. Trainor, Black Country Elites (Oxford, ), p.
;C.J.Binfield et al., eds., The History of the City of Sheffield, – (Sheffield, ), vol. ,
pp. –, , p. ; Steve Fielding, ‘The Catholic Whit-Walk in Manchester and Salford
–’, Manchester Regional History Review, (), –; Alec Greenhalgh, ‘Hail Smiling
Morn’: Whit Friday Brass Band Contests to (Oldham, ), pp. –, ; S. J. D. Green,
Religion in the Age of Decline (Cambridge, ), pp. –; Mass-Observation, The Pub and the
People,pp., , , ‒, –; Mass-Observation (ed. Cross), Worktowners at Blackpool,
pp. – (cf. pp. –); J. K. Walton, ‘The demand for working-class seaside holidays in Victorian
England’, Ec.HR, (), –; C. B. Hawkins, Norwich:A Social Study (London, ), p.
(cf. p. ); D. V. Glass, TheTown and a Changing Civilisation (London, ), pp. –; Robert
Sinclair, Metropolitan Man:The Future of the English (London, ), pp. –, –; Durant,
The Problem of Leisure,pp.–, ; cf. McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class,pp.–.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
the sea, and had lower family incomes, so their mass trek to the coast (especially
to Scarborough and Morecambe) lagged about a decade behind Lancashire’s.
Elsewhere – as on Derby Day – the holiday focus of less-well-off families was
on fairs or races. In Glasgow, in the s the July fair was a ‘Saturnalia’ of cir-
cuses, ‘free and easies’, freak shows, ‘penny reels’, penny theatres and sundry
showmen. From the s it developed as the occasion for Glasgow artisans to
steam ‘doon the watter’ to the Clyde coastal resorts, getting ‘steaming drunk’ in
the boats’ bars. By the corporation offered trips to poor mothers and chil-
dren to ensure that they were not excluded. Meanwhile, poor families from the
Black Country towns or London’s East End took their children fruit or hop
picking to get a rural break.
14
The Factory Act stipulated that Good Friday and Christmas Day should
be mandatory holidays. In London, however, the vast and growing population
of clerks received few holidays: from even the Bank of England closed for
only four working days. The situation was recognised by the Bank
Holiday Act which protected bank clerks’ ability to holiday at Christmas, Easter
and Whit, and instigated a secular holiday on the first Monday of August.
‘Bank Holiday Monday’ was an immediate success in London, and in heavily
commercial Liverpool businesses followed the Bank’s lead; by the later seven-
ties it had achieved much the same impact in more industrial cities where
wakes and fairs had been curtailed, like Birmingham and Leeds. Thus the Bank
Holiday Act legitimated the notion of uniform popular holidays. By
Seebohm Rowntree noted working men from among the better-off half of the
Douglas A. Reid
14
Walton, ‘The demand for working-class seaside holidays’, –, ; Alan Kidd, Manchester
(Keele, ), pp. –, ; Derek Beattie, Blackburn: The Development of a Lancashire Cotton
Town (Halifax, ), pp. , ‒; Paul Wild, ‘Leisure in Rochdale’, in John Clarke, Chas
Critcher and Richard Johnson, eds., Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory
(London, ), p. ; Mark Judd, ‘“The oddest combination of town and country”: popular
culture and the London fairs, –’, and Robert Poole, ‘Oldham Wakes’, both in Walton
and Walvin, eds., Leisure in Britain,pp.–, , –; Shani D’Cruze, Crimes of Outrage:
Sex, Violence and Victorian Working Women (London, ), pp. –; H. Cunningham, ‘The
metropolitan fairs: a case study in the social control of leisure’, in A. P. Donajgrodzki, ed., Social
Control in Nineteenth Century Britain (London, ), esp. p. ; H. Cunningham, ‘Urban fairs
and popular culture in nineteenth-century England’, in L. H. van Voss and F. van Holthoon,
eds., Working Class and Popular Culture (Amsterdam, ), pp. , ; D. A. Reid,
‘Interpreting the festival calendar: wakes and fairs as carnivals’, and J. K. Walton and R. Poole,
‘The Lancashire wakes in the nineteenth century’, in R. D. Storch, ed., Popular Culture and
Custom in Nineteenth-Century England (London, ), pp. –, –; Hippolyte Taine,
Taine’s Notes on England, ed. Edward Hyams (London, ), pp. –; E. King, ‘Popular
culture in Glasgow’, in R. A. Cage, ed., The Working Class in Glasgow – (London,
), pp. –, –, , –; Robert Machray, The Night Side of London (London,
), pp. ff; Kathleen Dayus, Her People (London, ), pp. –, cf. Raphael Samuel,
‘Comers and goers’, in H. J. Dyos and M. Wolff, eds., The Victorian City (London, ), vol.
, pp. –.
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working-class population of York crowding into Scarborough during the
August Bank Holiday week.
15
In the Trades Union Congress (TUC) began lobbying for holidays with
pay – a benefit which, except in a few progressive firms, had hitherto been a
privilege of status of superior salaried clerks. Again, progress followed the First
World War. Public opinion sympathised with demands ‘for more human condi-
tions’, agreeing that ‘the working class were entitled to the same sort of leisure
as the middle class’, and trade unionists pressed their advantages. In holiday-
with-pay agreements benefited about million, and, by , a further half a
million non-unionised workers had agreements negotiated through Whitley
Councils (established to defuse post-war social unrest). Further progress was
halted because of the decline of labour bargaining power wrought by the Slump
– Manchester Chamber of Commerce sought the curtailment of Whit walks,
and in Blackburn holiday weeks gave way to day-only excursions. But economic
recovery allowed the Labour movement to press the issue successfully. The inves-
tigative Amulree Committee () proved an important goad to employers.
Within a year the number of workers receiving paid holidays had doubled, as
employers sought to pre-empt the twelve working days which the TUC advo-
cated – by granting a week. The subsequent Holidays-with-Pay Act ()
applied only to workers whose conditions were regulated by agencies such as
Agricultural Wages Boards. Thus trades unionism benefited urban workers more
than government, though, between them, million workers – per cent –
received paid holidays by . Bevin’s wartime Ministry of Labour pressured
employers into universalising one week’s holiday, and the buoyant post-war
labour market facilitated the achievement of paid Bank Holidays. Research in
urban areas in suggested that whereas before the war two-thirds of the pop-
ulation stayed at home during their holidays, the position was now reversed.
Moreover, by two-thirds of all workers were estimated to receive two weeks
paid summer holidays – non-statutory for the most part, but well established, as
a result of labour market pressures, and because more employers now appreciated
the importance of the well-being of labour.
16
Playing and praying
15
J. A. R. Pimlott, The Englishman’s Holiday:A Social History (London, ; Hassocks, ), pp.
‒, ‒. The act did not apply in Scotland, but, judging by Dunfermline, the relig-
ious fast-days before twice-yearly communions began to perform a similar function as they gave
way to the secular – in the form of holidays for railway excursions – during the third quarter of
the nineteenth century: Fraser, ‘Developments in leisure’, pp. , ; Birmingham Daily Gazette,
June ; Birmingham Daily Post, Aug. , Aug. , Aug. , Aug. , May
; P. Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England (London, ), p. ; Walton, ‘The demand
for working-class seaside holidays’, –; Booth, Life and Labour, Final Volume, pp. ‒;
Rowntree, Poverty, pp. –, .
16
P. J. Waller, Town, City and Nation (Oxford, ), pp. –; Simmons, Victorian Railway,
pp. ‒; Lloyd George cited in Keith Middlemass, Politics in Industrial Society (London, ),
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
(ii)
Gradually, then, more leisure time was secured, but how did the physical growth
of towns affect leisure activities? It is too simple to regard town and country
entirely in antithesis, particularly the further back we go, and the further down
the scale of size and function from capital to country towns. Even London’s
popular culture was long reminiscent of rusticity, from the early spring concen-
tration of its fairs, to sports and pastimes such as cock fighting, bullock running,
pigeon flying and flower growing; further down the scale working-class
Blackburn raced whippets, Norwich workers bred canaries and slum dwellers in
York trapped cock-linnets for pub competitions. Yet there is no doubt that
increased urbanisation did blight open-air recreations: growing towns meant
overbuilding of gardens, crofts and paddocks, enclosure of commons and traffic
congestion on bustling streets. Where in Manchester was there for the people to
go, asked Leon Faucher in ; he saw ‘no public promenades, no avenues, no
public gardens, and no public common’. By mid-century in Birmingham
‘guinea gardens’ were sprouting houses. At Coventry and Portsmouth enclosure
led directly to the demise of popular sports. It was no accident that cock fighting
survived more readily amidst the waste land and rural enclaves of the Black
Country than in more densely urban (and numerously policed) Birmingham.
17
Take the most popular street recreations. Fairs and sports undoubtedly became
Douglas A. Reid
Footnote (cont).
p. ; Forman, Industrial Town, p. ; Beattie, Blackburn, p. ; G. C. Cameron, ‘The growth of
holidays with pay in Britain’, in G. Reid and D. Robertson, eds., Fringe Benefits, Labour Costs and
Social Security (London, ), pp. n. , –; Jones, Workers at Play,pp.–, –, –;
Stephen Jones, ‘The Lancashire cotton industry and the development of paid holidays in the nine-
teen-thirties’, Transactions of the Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, (), , –;
Report of the Committee on Holidays With Pay, Cmd (), pp. , ; Mass-Observation [File
Report ], Voluntary Social Service Report no. : A Report on Holidays, August , pp. –;
James Walvin, Leisure and Society (London, ), pp. –, .
17
Judd, ‘“The oddest combination of town and country”’, pp. –; Jim Mott, ‘Miners, weavers
and pigeon racing’, in Michael A. Smith, Stanley Parker and Cyril S. Smith, eds., Leisure and
Society in Britain (London, ), pp. –, cf. ; New Survey of London Life and Labour, , pp.
–; Van Wilson, Rich in All but Money: Life in Hungate ‒ (York, ), pp. –;
Hawkins, Norwich,pp., , –; Beattie, Blackburn, p. ; R. W. Malcolmson, Popular
Recreations in English Society, – (Cambridge, ), pp. –, ; Anthony Delves,
‘Popular recreation and social conflict in Derby, –’, in Stephen Yeo and Eileen Yeo, eds.,
Popular Culture and Class Conflict –: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure
(Brighton, ), p. . See also J. L. Hammond and B. Hammond, The Age of the Chartists,
– (London, ), pp. –, for the effects of enclosure; Faucher, Manchester in ,
p. ; Morning Chronicle, Jan. ; D. A. Reid, ‘Beasts and brutes: popular blood sports c.
–’, in Holt, ed., Sport and the Working Class, pp. ‒; for debate about the impact of the
new police on leisure, see R. D. Storch, ‘The plague of blue locusts. Police reform and popular
resistance in northern England, –’, International Review of Social History, (); R. D.
Storch, ‘The policeman as domestic missionary: urban discipline and popular culture in northern
England, –’, Journal of Social History, () –; Russell, ‘The pursuit of leisure’,
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
increasingly more obstructive to the business of towns and more obnoxious to
unsympathetic or hostile observers. Sports played en masse could damage prop-
erty, and boisterous throngs of fair-goers intimidated the genteel. The rich,
respectable and religious found fault with ‘improvident’ absences from work,
‘debauchery’, gambling, intemperance and cruelty. Thus the s saw bullock
hunting and fairs repressed in London; in the later s and early s it was
the turn of bull running, bull baiting and the occasional fair elsewhere, and in
the mid-forties of mass football – ‘rude and brutal barbarism’ – notably at Derby.
It was not accidental that these were also decades of high anxiety about popular
radicalism: events from Peterloo to Chartism encouraged a repressive mind-set.
‘Fear and disgust’ eased by the mid-fifties and mid-sixties; however, the jugger-
naut of urban modernity continued to roll over originally rural customs and
institutions. Central London lost all its fairs, and set-piece street football was
abolished even on the capital’s periphery. Seemingly symptomatic of this process,
white-pinafored milk-maids were displaced from their leading role in the cele-
bration of London’s May Day by chimney sweeps, potent symbols of urban dirt.
Elsewhere, in the s, ‘intensely modern’ towns felt they were being ‘invaded’
by Bohemians and nomads at their fairs. Unsurprisingly, an act of declared
them ‘the cause of grievous immorality’ in towns, and they were abolished at
Blackheath, Charlton and Harrow in , and in a clutch of provincial cities in
–.
18
Yet more urban fairs survived than were suppressed (the reverse of the situa-
tion with street-football). Indeed, Londoners flocking out to Croydon, Barnet
and Hampstead made minor fairs major. Moreover, cities grew patchily over the
countryside, and private, unlicensed, fairs – with shows and gambling booths –
Playing and praying
pp. –; S. J. Davies, ‘Classes and the police in Manchester, –’ in A. J. Kidd and
K. W. Roberts, eds., City, Class and Culture (Manchester, ), pp. –; M. Hewitt, The
Emergence of Stability in the Industrial City (Aldershot, ), pp. –.
18
Cunningham, ‘The metropolitan fairs’, pp. –, ; Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial
Revolution, p. ; Reid ‘Interpreting the festival calendar’, pp. –, , , ; Walton and
Poole, ‘The Lancashire wakes’, pp. –, –; Cunningham, ‘Urban fairs’, pp. –; D. A.
Reid, ‘Folk-football, the aristocracy and cultural change: a critique of Dunning and Sheard’,
International Journal of the History of Sport, (), –; Malcolmson, Popular recreations, pp.
, ‒, ; Steve Poole, ‘“Till our liberties be secure”: popular sovereignty and public space
in Bristol, –’, UH, (), ; Brian Harrison and Barrie Trinder, Drink and Sobriety
in an Early Victorian Country Town, Banbury: – (English Historical Review, Supplement, ,
London, ), p. ; Derby Mercury, Feb. , cited in Delves, ‘Popular recreation’, p. ;
R. D. Storch, ‘The problem of working-class leisure: some roots of middle-class moral reform in
the industrial north: –’, in Donajgrodzki, ed., Social Control, p. ; Morris Marples, A
History of Football (London, ), p. ; Judd, ‘“The oddest combination of town and
country”’, p. ; Roy Judge, The Jack-in-the-Green (London, ); Charles Phythian-Adams,
‘Milk and soot’, in D. Fraser and A. Sutcliffe, eds., The Pursuit of Urban History (London, ),
pp. –; Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, May ; Walton, ‘The demand for working-class
seaside holidays’, ; see also J. N. Morris, ‘A disappearing crowd? Collective action in late nine-
teenth-century Croydon’, SHist., (), –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
were ‘almost incessantly’ sprouting up. Even in towns where fairs were formally
abolished the shows and crowds very often migrated to private ground, out of
reach of their opponents. There was thus continuity as well as change.
19
What factors helped fairs flourish? Economic arguments were important: live-
stock dealers valued fairs, as did many municipalities, citing stall rents and crowds
of customers for ratepayer publicans and shopkeepers. Furthermore, travelling
showmen developed business reputations as their menageries grew larger, and
capital investment greater – especially for traction engines to drive ever-more
elaborate roundabouts and generate electric light. Fairs became harbingers of
modernity: Hull fair had cinematograph tents from , and was called ‘Light
City’in . Consequently, many towns compromised on fairs’ locations: Hull’s
was moved five times between and rather than abolished by the econ-
omistic Council – despite a strong nonconformist lobby. By contrast, Birming-
ham’s nonconformist-dominated, but consciously modernising, Council
proscribed its fairs. Furthermore, experience taught the police that fairs were not
a significant threat to public order, and that many of the objections emanated
from middle-class, particularly Quaker, prejudice. By , the home secretary
was not prepared to interfere in what he considered ‘innocent amusements of
the poorer classes’. This toleration – now quite widely shared – represented an
important shift from the alarmism of earlier generations. Contrariwise, ordinary
people were increasingly able to make their voice effective against undue inter-
ference in their recreations at later-nineteenth-century municipal elections in
smaller towns, like Walsall, Newcastle-under-Lyme and Canterbury. Numbers
counted, and excursionists facilitated flourishing fairs even in some larger cities
or on central sites (Glasgow, Hull, Newcastle, Nottingham, Oxford). Blackpool
Pleasure Beach was successor to fairs at many Lancashire wakes.
20
By contrast, folk football was too anarchic, had few business connections and
few politically articulate defenders; in Derby in trade unionists rejected it
as an impediment to moral and political progress. It survived only in small towns
like Ashbourne (Derbyshire) – after it retreated to their outskirts. Out-of-the-
way Workington (Cumberland) proved an exception because its Easter game
Douglas A. Reid
19
F. M. L. Thompson, Hampstead (London, ), pp. , ; Cunningham, ‘The metropolitan
fairs’, pp. , –, –; Select Committee on Public Houses, Report, – (), ,
qq. –; Birmingham Council Proceedings, –, p. ; Birmingham Morning News, June
.
20
Cunningham, ‘Urban fairs’, pp. , , –; David Braithwaite, Fairground Architecture
(London, ), pp. , ; Vanessa Toulmin, Randall Williams.King of Showmen: From Ghost Show
to Bioscope (London, ), pp. –; Stephen Smith and Kevin Scrivens, Hull Fair:An Illustrated
History (Cherry Burton, ), pp. –; Cunningham, ‘The metropolitan fairs’, pp. , ,
–; Michael E. Ware, Historic Fairground Scenes (Ashbourne, ), p. ; Machray, The Night
Side of London, pp. –; Walton and Poole, ‘The Lancashire wakes’, p. ; Poole, ‘Oldham
Wakes’, p. ; Reid, ‘Interpreting the festival calendar’, pp. , ; Sally Alexander, St Giles’s
Fair, –: Popular Culture and the Industrial Revolution in th Century Oxford (Oxford, ).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
became as much tourist attraction as community celebration, which compen-
sated shopkeepers for the occasional damage – , railway excursionists
arrived in . Guy Fawkes commemorations, on the other hand, enjoyed
middle-class patronage until quite late in the century, for reasons of Protestant
politics, and thus the popular ‘bonfire gangs’ who organised events with carniv-
alesque exuberance often successfully resisted attempts to police them off the
thoroughfares. Their celebration of November was strongest in towns with
little modern industry and correspondingly closer social relations (southern and
Cumbrian towns show this). Nevertheless, cultural and economic modernisa-
tion prompted a decreasing middle-class readiness to tolerate their disorderly
vigour. Where police action proved ineffective a new solution was developed
from the s – subsuming the bonfire gangs within large official masked torch-
lit parades. Thus social (and political) considerations were as important as restric-
tions prompted by physical urbanisation.
21
Nevertheless, despite various restrictions and losses endured by popular
culture as towns grew, people made the best of the street space that was available
to them, for before the s dangers from vehicular traffic were few outside
main thoroughfares, leaving side streets available as key social arenas. In the
streets of Manchester were ‘one swarming buzzing mass of people’: it could
hardly have been otherwise given the huge proportion of the population in
major towns which was youthful, and the cramped, garden-less, condition of
most housing (until interwar estate developments). Children’s street games were
seasonal, many representing a remarkable continuity from pre-modern times,
ranging from singing and dancing, through scratch football with any object
which would roll across cobblestones (and lamp-post cricket), to more boister-
ous games and tricks against adults. Adolescent boys, in particular, were much
criticised for their activities on street corners and waste ground, including gang
fighting, foot racing, stone throwing and ‘pitch and toss’gambling. On the other
hand, the constructive vigour of nineteenth-century street culture was
exemplified by the impromptu dancing witnessed in alleys and courts: a barrel
organ would strike up a waltz tune, and girls, children and sometimes ‘two young
men together’, soon began ‘to foot it merrily’ in their clogs. Their elders gos-
siped on front doorsteps or joined the street corner gamblers. Everywhere streets
were enlivened (or made cacophonous, according to taste) by ballad singers and
Playing and praying
21
Delves, ‘Popular recreation’, pp. –; F. P. Magoun, History of Football from the Beginnings to
(Bochum-Langendreer, ), pp. , , –; Percy M. Young, A History of British Football
(London, ), pp. ‒; Lyn Murfin, Popular Leisure in the Lake Counties (Manchester, ), pp.
–, –; R. D. Storch, ‘“Please to remember the fifth of November”: conflict, solidarity
and public order in southern England, –’, in Storch, ed., Popular Culture and Custom, pp.
–, , –, –; David Cressy, ‘The fifth of November remembered’, in Roy Porter, ed.,
Myths of the English (London, ), pp. –; Hutton, Stations of the Sun, pp. –; Morris, ‘A
disappearing crowd?’, –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
fiddlers – up to about the s – and German and Italian bands thereafter.
Remarkably, on Sunday evenings in many cities young men and women
effectively took over some of the main streets to promenade – all dressed in their
best for these ‘monkey parades’ – swapping badinage, showing off, ‘sky-larking’,
‘clicking’ together. In Newcastle in ‘hundreds’ danced the Charleston ‘on
the public highway’. The police periodically arrested youngsters for traffic
obstruction, but the custom was well entrenched and flourished until after the
Second World War, by which time it seems to have been diminished by Sunday
cinema.
22
The politics of urban blight eventually resulted in one of the most character-
istic features of modern townscape – the public park, a form of civic space with
very different meanings to the unruly spaces of the street. Concern had been
raised in the s on grounds of public health and moral well-being, but action
only came in the s, warmed by the thought that parks would encourage the
‘kindly intercourse . . . of all classes’, and thereby, it was hoped, draw the sting
of Chartism. Thus, ‘demoralisation, disease and death’ in dangerously combust-
ible densely developed east London in led the government to promise
£, for Victoria Park, Bethnal Green. In pointed contrast the rest of the
country had to make do with a mere £, – turbulent Manchester was the
main beneficiary, in .
23
Douglas A. Reid
22
A. B. Reach, Manchester and the Textile Districts in , ed. C. Aspin (Helmshore, ), p. ;
Forman, Industrial Town,pp.–; Bill Bramwell, ‘Public space and local communities: the
example of Birmingham, –’, in G. Kearns and C. W. J. Withers, eds., Urbanising Britain
(Cambridge, ), p. ; Stephen Constantine, ‘Amateur gardening and popular recreation in
the th and th centuries’, Journal of Social History, (), –; S. Martin Gaskell,
‘Gardens for the working class: Victorian practical pleasures’, Victorian Studies, (), ‒;
James Walvin, ‘Children’s pleasures’, in Walton and Walvin, eds., Leisure in Britain, pp. , –;
Mason, Association Football and English Society, pp. –; D’Cruze, Crimes of Outrage,pp.–;
S. Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? (Oxford, ), chs. and ; C. E. B. Russell and E. T.
Campagnac, ‘Poor people’s music-halls in Lancashire’, Economic Review (), (for clog
dancers); Jones, ‘Working-class sport in Manchester’, pp. –; James McGurn and Robert
Poole, eds., Tyneside Memories (York, ), pp. ‒, ; Richard Middleton, ‘Popular music of
the lower classes’, in Nicholas Temperley, ed., Music in Britain: The Romantic Age –
(London, ), pp. –, –; Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty, pp. –; Roberts, A
Woman’s Place, pp. –, ; Richards, ‘The cinema and cinema going in Birmingham’, pp. –;
J. Winter, London’s Teeming Streets, – (London, ), pp. , ; John Collier and Iain
Lang, Just the Other Day: An Informal History of Great Britain since the War (London, ), p.
(for Charleston); Richard Evans and Alison Boyd, The Use of Leisure in Hull (Hull, ), p. ;
New Survey of London Life and Labour, , p. , , pp. , ; Mass-Observation (ed. Cross),
Worktowners at Blackpool, pp. , –.
23
Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, Jan. ; W. H. G. Armytage, ‘James Minter Morgan’s schemes,
–’, International Review of Social History, (), ; R. J. Morris, ‘Middle-class culture,
–’, in D. Fraser, ed., A History of Modern Leeds (Manchester, ), p. ; J. Reynolds,
The Great Paternalist (London, ), pp. , , ; Reid, ‘Labour, leisure and politics’, pp.
‒; cf. Thompson, Hampstead, pp. – re Primrose Hill; A. Fein, ‘Victoria Park: its origins
and history’, East London Papers, (), –.
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Public parks were preferred to the earlier ‘public walks’in securing urban open
space for several reasons: because of the idea (born of the miasmatic theory of
disease causation) that it was necessary to create large sanitary ‘lungs’ to stem the
progress of epidemics; because of the realisation of the need for space for the
young to run around safely; because of aristocratic example such as Sheffield’s
Norfolk Park (); and because parks so much raised the value of surround-
ing land that they could act as foci for development and pay for themselves, as
Birkenhead showed (-). However, subsequent progress usually came about
in spite of small ratepayer-dominated corporations – reluctance to undertake
expensive projects left them mainly dependent on benefaction. By contrast,
Glasgow and Liverpool (whose large corporate estates lessened the grip of the
small ratepayer) provided extensive parks in the s to s – though often
with subtle prompting from estate developers. Big cities felt congestion, pollu-
tion and population growth all the more, and a new civic religious idealism
helped inspire the necessary fiscal generosity – led in Glasgow by Robert
Buchanan, in Birmingham by George Dawson and Robert Dale, in Bristol by
followers of Matthew Arnold. Furthermore, as towns became cities civic pride
burgeoned: in Leicester rejected the idea of going ‘cap in hand’ to local
landowners to ask for gifts of land, and raised loans instead.
24
Park creation, then, was part of a process in which municipalities discovered
both the desire and the means to act for themselves to civilise their populations;
the provision of libraries, art galleries and museums represented a parallel
process. The one was ostensibly about public health, the other about education
and culture; both can also be seen, however, as attempts to facilitate a predom-
inantly (though not wholly) bourgeois ideal of ‘rational recreation’, shorn of the
temptations and malign consequences they associated with street pastimes.
Visitors to parks usually found formally designed landscapes, fenced around with
Playing and praying
24
Fein, ‘Victoria Park’, –; [Anon.],‘The lungs of London’, Blackwood’s Magazine, (),
; [Anon.], ‘Parks and pleasure grounds’, Westminster Review, (), –, n; Sheila
Metcalf, ‘The idea of a park: the Select Committees and the first public parks’, Journal of Regional
and Local Studies, (), –, ; Hazel Conway, People’s Parks (Cambridge, ), pp. –,
, , ; C. Stella Davies, A History of Macclesfield (Manchester, ), pp. –; Reid,
‘Labour, leisure and politics’, pp. –, ‒; cf. Hammond and Hammond, The Age of the
Chartists,p.; D. McClellan, Glasgow’s Public Parks (Glasgow, ), pp. –, –, –,
–; M. A. Simpson ‘The West End of Glasgow, –’, in M. A. Simpson and T. H.
Lloyd, eds., Middle Class Housing in Britain (Newton Abbot, ), p. ; Hamish Fraser, ‘From
civic gospel to municipal socialism’, in Derek Fraser, ed., Cities, Class and Communication: Essays
in Honour of Asa Briggs (Hemel Hempstead, ), esp. –; Maver, ‘Glasgow’s public parks’,
–; Brian D. White, A History of the Corporation of Liverpool – (Liverpool, ), pp.
–; G. F. Chadwick, The Park and the Town (London, ), p. ; C. G. Brown, The Social
History of Religion in Scotland since (London, ), p. ; Russell, ‘The pursuit of leisure’,
pp. –; E. P. Hennock, Fit and Proper Persons (London, ), p. ; H. E. Meller, Leisure and
the Changing City, – (London, ), pp. –, –, –; Malcolm Elliot, Victorian
Leicester (Chichester, ), p. .
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