From charter to carnival: the medieval beginnings

A fair was never just a bit of fun. In medieval England it was a legal privilege, granted by the Crown and worth good money. The right to hold a market or fair on set dates drew traders from miles around, and it came with exemptions from the tolls and restrictions that applied everywhere else. In this corner of north-west London that tradition goes back a long way. Pinner Fair was granted a royal charter in 1336, during the reign of Edward III, and was held in Whitsun week — late spring, when the roads were dry and the days long enough for the journey home.

Harrow on the Hill had its own calendar of gatherings, tied to the feast days of the church. The pattern repeated across Middlesex: a saint's day, a market cross, a few days of buying and selling, and a crowd to feed. The fair was less a pleasure ground than a piece of local infrastructure — a place where the year's business could be done in one go.

The working fair: hiring, livestock and wages

For most of its history, the fair existed to do work. The Whitsun and Michaelmas fairs were hiring grounds. Farm servants, dairymaids, shepherds and labourers would stand in the market place with a token of their trade — a whip, a crook, a straw in the hat — hoping to be taken on for the year. A handshake and a shilling sealed the bargain.

A fair day in the eighteenth century looked and smelled nothing like a modern funfair. You would have found:

• Pens of cattle, sheep and pigs, with deals argued over and struck on the spot;
• Stalls of cheese, butter, eggs and bacon sold direct from surrounding farms;
• Hiring stands, where servants and masters sized each other up;
• Gingerbread, ale and hot pies, sold from temporary booths;
• Cheapjacks and pedlars with tools, ribbons, pots and patent medicines;
• A showman or two — a puppet booth, a fiddler, a man with a performing dog.

The entertainment was there from the start, but it was the sugar on the pill. People came to trade, to be hired, to meet neighbours and to hear the news.

Victorian thrills and the great suppression

Industrialisation broke the old bargain. As railways and newspapers spread, farmers could advertise for workers and buy stock without travelling to a fair, and the hiring tradition faded. What remained was the pleasure side — and it grew quickly. Steam power arrived in the fairground in the Victorian period, driving roundabouts, switchbacks and the first mechanical rides. Coconut shies, penny shows, waxworks and shooting galleries lined the streets. The fair became loud, brightly lit and unashamedly commercial.

Not everyone approved. Magistrates worried about drunkenness and disorder, and the Fairs Act of 1871 gave the Home Secretary power to suppress fairs on the petition of local authorities. Hundreds closed across the country. Some survived by reinvention; others, like several Middlesex livestock fairs, disappeared altogether. Pinner's fair held on, becoming more of a pleasure fair and a fixture in the calendar, but the older, working fair was gone.

Steam, electricity and the travelling showmen

The twentieth century brought electricity, and with it the rides many readers will remember from childhood: the waltzer, the dodgems, the helter skelter, the ghost train, the big wheel turning against the dusk. Fairground families — travelling showmen who moved from town to town on a fixed circuit — became the custodians of the tradition. Their lorries and generators replaced horses and steam engines, and their painted trailers became part of the summer landscape.

In Harrow, as across London, the fair also moved to new ground. Recreation grounds and parks took over from the old market squares, because they had space for generators, caravans and crowds. School fetes, church summer fairs and charity carnivals took on the old fair's social role — a date in the year when the whole community turned out.

The fair today: heritage with candy floss

Pinner Fair still runs, an annual reminder of that fourteenth-century charter. The High Street and nearby lanes close to traffic for the day, and the fair takes over. It is a pleasure fair now, with rides and stalls rather than cattle and cheese, but the shape of the event — a fixed date, a closed street, a crowd of neighbours — is recognisably the one our ancestors knew.

Elsewhere in the borough, the fair's descendants are the summer festivals, the school fêtes and the community days held on recreation grounds and in church halls. They may not have a charter, but they do the same job: they mark the season and bring people together.

Keeping the story alive

If you want to dig into Harrow's fair heritage, you do not need to be an academic. Start with the obvious places and work outwards.

• Visit Headstone Manor and Museum, where the borough's local history collections are held, and ask to see photographs and cuttings of fairs and street parties;
• Look at old Ordnance Survey maps and trade directories to find where markets and fairs were held, and what has replaced them;
• Read local newspaper archives for accounts of fair days — the rides, the crowds, the complaints about noise and parking;
• Talk to older residents. Oral history is where the detail lives: which ride you queued for, what the fairground families were called, which street was closed;
• Go to the fair itself, and take photographs. You are recording the next chapter.

The fair has changed beyond recognition from the charter days, and it will change again. But the instinct behind it — a fixed date, a shared place, a reason to gather — has proved remarkably durable.