All the Fun of the Fair!
There is something about a fairground that never quite leaves you. The smell hits first — fried dough and burnt sugar and diesel from the generators, all mixed together in a cloud that drifts out across the car park and reaches you before you’ve even paid to get in. Then comes the sound: the overlapping music from half a dozen rides, each one competing with the others in a cheerful, tuneless war. And then, when you round the corner and the whole thing opens up in front of you, the lights. Strings and strings of bulbs blinking in patterns, neon tubes tracing the edges of rides, the slow hypnotic spin of the Ferris wheel against the darkening sky.
The fair has been a part of human life for centuries, and yet every time one arrives in town it feels like a small miracle. A whole world has been built overnight in a field or a car park or the middle of the high street, and in a week or two it will be gone again, leaving nothing behind but a few scorch marks in the grass and the memory of a particularly good toffee apple.
Whether you’ve been going to fairs since you were a child or you’re planning your first visit with your own kids, this guide will take you through everything that makes the fairground one of life’s great pleasures — the rides, the games, the food, the history, and the little tricks that help you get the most out of every visit.
A Brief History of the Fairground
The modern travelling fair has its roots in the medieval market fairs of Europe, which were granted by royal charter and served as major trading events for entire regions. People would travel days on foot or horseback to buy and sell livestock, cloth, and spices, and naturally, where there are crowds, there will always be entertainment. Jugglers, acrobats, fortune tellers, and showmen of every variety set up on the fringes of the market, and gradually the entertainment element grew to rival the commerce.
By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, events like Bartholomew Fair in London had become legendary — vast, noisy, occasionally dangerous celebrations that mixed theatre, freak shows, bear baiting, prize fighting, and dancing into one gloriously chaotic spectacle. Daniel Defoe and Ben Jonson both wrote about them; they were as much a part of the cultural calendar as the theatre season.
The Industrial Revolution transformed the fair in ways that would make it recognisable to us today. Steam power meant that rides could be mechanised. The steam-driven roundabout, which first appeared in Britain in the 1860s, was a revelation — a machine that moved people for pleasure, not transport, simply because the movement itself was fun. Steam organs meant that music could accompany the rides automatically, and the showmen who built and operated these machines were genuine engineers and artists, decorating their rides with hand-carved wooden horses, painted panels, and gleaming brasswork that turned a simple circular ride into a work of moving, spinning, musical art.
The travelling showmen’s families — names like Thurston, Collins, Murphy, and Botton — built dynasties around their rides and equipment, passing them down through generations. Many of the fairground families operating today can trace their lineage back to those Victorian showmen, and there is a proud, close-knit community of people who still live the travelling life, moving their equipment from town to town following the seasonal circuit of fairs.
The Rides: From Gentle to Heart-Stopping
One of the great things about a fair is that it caters to absolutely everyone. You can spend a gentle afternoon drifting around on the carousel with a toddler on your knee, or you can spend the evening being flung upside down at sixty miles an hour on something called the Vortex Destroyer. There is no wrong answer.
For the youngest visitors, the children’s rides are often the most charming things on the ground. Miniature trains that chug slowly around a track, tiny teacups that spin at a child-friendly pace, little cars and fire engines on a gentle circular ride — these are the rides where you will see the most concentrated expressions of pure joy on small faces. Do not underestimate them.
The classic rides that appeal to almost every age include the carousel, or gallopers as they are traditionally known, which remains one of the most beautiful objects in motion that you will ever see up close. The traditional British carousel moves in a counterclockwise direction (the opposite of European carousels, a fact that will delight anyone who enjoys a good piece of useless trivia) and the horses rise and fall on a gentle wave while the rounding boards — the decorative panels around the top — show painted scenes of countryside, seaside, or mythology. If you ever get the chance to ride a fully restored Victorian carousel, take it without hesitation.
The Waltzers occupy a middle ground between gentle and terrifying that is somehow perfect. You sit in a circular car with a partner, and as the whole structure rotates, fairground attendants lean over and spin your car manually, adding extra speed and unpredictability to the ride. The Waltzer is a great social leveller — it doesn’t matter how cool you think you are, being spun faster and faster while a grinning attendant watches your face for maximum effect will reduce you to a helpless, laughing wreck every time. The music on a Waltzer is always loud, always slightly behind the current charts, and somehow exactly right.
At the far end of the spectrum, the modern travelling fair often carries large thrill rides that wouldn’t look out of place in a permanent theme park. The Gravitron, the Pirate Ship, the Extreme Swing, and any number of variations on the theme of “going upside down while a hydraulic arm extends to its maximum range” — these rides are engineering achievements as well as experiences, packed down onto trailers and reassembled in a matter of hours. The people who build and operate these machines know them intimately, and the safety record of the UK travelling fair is, contrary to popular anxious mythology, extremely good.
The Games: Strategy, Luck, and the Art of the Coconut Shy
The fairground games are as much a part of the atmosphere as the rides, and they have a long and occasionally chequered history. The classic games — hook-a-duck, the coconut shy, the rifle range, the high striker, roll-a-penny, the tombola — each have their own rules, rhythms, and very often their own dedicated strategies that can be argued about at length.
Hook-a-duck is perhaps the most reliably accessible game on the fairground, and for a very good reason: there is essentially no skill required. You simply choose a duck from the slowly circling stream of rubber ducks, turn it over, and read the number on the bottom to see what prize you’ve won. Every duck wins something, even if that something is a sheet of temporary tattoos. Hook-a-duck may be the most honest game on the ground.
The coconut shy, meanwhile, rewards strength and accuracy, though the experienced fairgoer will tell you that the key is to aim for the base of the coconut rather than the top, and to keep your throwing arm level rather than arching the ball. Whether the coconuts are actually more firmly seated than the laws of physics would suggest is a question that has been debated since at least the Victorian era, and we are not going to resolve it here.
The high striker — the machine where you swing a mallet and try to drive a puck up to ring the bell at the top — is a test of technique more than raw strength. The common misconception is that it rewards the biggest person with the biggest swing. In fact, the trick is to keep the mallet close to your body as you swing, driving it down in a clean vertical line rather than swinging it in an arc. A small person with good technique will regularly outperform a much larger person who simply tries to hit it as hard as possible. This is one of the small, satisfying truths of the fairground.
Darts at a card board, shooting galleries, and the hook-a-ring game all require genuine aim and practice, and there is real satisfaction in getting better at them as the evening goes on. Nobody says you have to win a prize. Sometimes the game is the point.
The Food: The Real Reason You Went
Let’s be clear about something. For many people, the fair is primarily a food event with rides attached. And this is a completely defensible position.
The doughnut stand is usually the first smell to reach you. Hot ring doughnuts, fried fresh and tossed in a bag of caster sugar, are one of the great foods of the world. They are at their absolute peak in the thirty seconds after they come out of the fryer, and the combination of the hot fat, the yielding dough, and the gritty sweetness of the sugar is something that no patisserie in the world has ever improved upon. Eat them standing up while they’re still warm. There is no other way.
The candy floss stall offers one of the most visually theatrical foods imaginable. The machine spins sugar at high speed, and the operator winds the resulting threads around a paper cone in large, improbable clouds of pink or blue. Candy floss is simultaneously enormous and weightless, and it disappears to almost nothing the moment it touches your tongue. This is either a cruel disappointment or one of the most interesting textural experiences in food, depending on your perspective. Children universally love it, which settles the debate.
Toffee apples have been part of the fair since the late nineteenth century, and a good toffee apple is a serious thing. The toffee should be glossy and dark, cracking cleanly when you bite it, and the apple beneath should be sharp enough to cut through the sweetness. The wooden stick should be the kind that doesn’t wobble in your grip. There are sub-standard toffee apples in the world, and you will know them when you find them, but a properly made one is a small masterpiece.
The hot dog van, the burger stand, the chips with vinegar, the jacket potato with cheese — the fair has always understood that people who have been walking around for hours and riding things that spun them upside down need to eat, and the food is designed accordingly. It is not delicate. It is not nuanced. It is hot and filling and tastes better in the open air than it would anywhere else, because the combination of the cold night, the smell of the ground, and the general atmosphere of mild exhilaration makes everything taste better.
Tips for Getting the Most Out of Your Visit
Go in the evening if you can. The fair is a daytime venue for children and an evening venue for everyone, and while both are perfectly valid, there is something specifically magical about the fairground at dusk, when the lights start to make their proper impact against the darkening sky and the whole place becomes more vividly itself.
Bring cash. Many fairground rides and games still operate on a cash basis, and even those that take cards will often have a minimum spend or a slow card reader that creates a queue behind you. A roll of coins and a few notes in your pocket means you can move from ride to game to food stall without friction.
If you’re going with children, let them lead. Adults tend to have a plan — a route through the ground, a set of things they want to do. Children operate differently, stopping to watch a game for five minutes, circling back to the same ride three times, being mysteriously fascinated by the generator. The child’s approach to the fair is actually the correct one.
Arrive early to get the best experience of the quieter rides and the food stalls before the evening queues build up, but stay for the atmosphere that develops later in the night when the crowd thickens and the music gets louder and the lights seem brighter because the sky is darker.
If you haven’t been on the carousel in years, go on it. There is a particular kind of happiness available on a carousel that doesn’t diminish with age. The slow, stately rise and fall, the painted horses, the calliope music — it is a direct line back to the simplest possible experience of pleasure, and it costs the same as everything else.
The Fair and the Community
In many towns, the arrival of the annual fair is a genuine community event. The same families have brought their rides to the same town for generations, and the people who run the fair know their regular visitors and their regular visitors know them. There is a warmth to this familiarity that sits oddly but pleasingly against the transient nature of the whole enterprise.
Chartered fairs — those operating under ancient charters granted by kings and queens — are still held in towns across Britain, some of them continuous for seven hundred years or more. The Goose Fair in Nottingham, the Mop Fair in Stratford-upon-Avon, the Priddy Sheep Fair in Somerset — these events connect the present directly to the medieval past, in the most cheerful and practical way imaginable.
The travelling showmen who operate the fair are a community with their own culture, vocabulary, organisations, and history. The Showmen’s Guild of Great Britain has represented them since 1889, and the Guild has played an important role in maintaining safety standards, protecting traditional sites, and preserving the history of the trade. The next time you’re on a ride, it’s worth remembering that the family operating it has likely been doing exactly this — bringing exactly this kind of machine to exactly this kind of field — for more generations than most businesses manage to survive.
Why the Fair Matters
In a world of curated experiences and screens and digital entertainment available at any hour, the fair remains stubbornly, triumphantly analogue. It is in a specific place. You have to go to it. You have to stand in a field in the dark and eat a doughnut and queue for a ride and lose your money on a game that you suspected was unwinnable. None of it can be streamed or downloaded.
And there is something in that physical, shared, slightly chaotic experience that still speaks to something deep in us — the old human love of gathering, of noise and light and movement, of the temporary city that appears in a field and disappears like a dream.
All the fun of the fair. It’s more than just a phrase. It’s a reminder that some of the best things in life are still found outside, in the cold, among strangers, under a string of lights that someone has spent three hours hanging from a pole. Go while it’s in town. You won’t regret it.
