Leisure

_{In 1840 Kew Gardens was opened to the public. © Getty Images}

Leisure was still not widely available to all: the working-classes still worked a twelve-hour day, with Sunday as their only free day and just eight statutory half-days a year.

The government worried that workers were spending what leisure time they had in the pub. In Edinburgh there was one pub for every 30 families and in London pubs considered themselves fortunate if they had the trade for 100 yards in either direction before the next pub appeared.

In 1840, the government set aside £10,000 to buy up land to turn into parks for ‘rational recreation’, and some magnates followed suit. In West Bromwich the Earl of Dartmouth ‘lent’ 4 acres ‘for the use of the poorer inhabitants’, the manufacturer Jedediah Strutt donated an arboretum to Derby, and Kew Gardens was opened to the public.

Otherwise, there were always sights to see. For monarchists, George IV’s coronation robes went on display at Madame Tussauds, while in October the Armoury at the Tower of London burnt down – going to see the damage became popular. Nearly 5,000 visitors paid 6d. each in the first fortnight.

The growth of the railways also made days out possible. When the Bristol-Bath line opened in 1840, there was so much interest that 20 round-trips were scheduled for the very first day.

Thomas Cook’s first excursion, a temperance trip from Leicester to Loughborough, took place in 1841 and the Brighton-London line was opened, marking the rise of the seaside excursion. For those of a sporting temperament, there was also plenty to do.

Just two years earlier, the first Grand National had been run at Aintree, and the first Henley Regatta was held. Entry was restricted to the wealthy – ‘any crew composed of members of a College of either of the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, or London, the schools of Eton or Westminster, or the officers of the two brigades of the Household Troops’.

For the working-classes, football was operating via the pubs. Advertising in sporting papers announced various challenges: Bell’s Life noted that the Drover’s Inn, Openshaw, was offering a pig to the winners of one match. Less genteel sports were being suppressed.

This year, The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals finally managed to get the annual bull-run through Stamford stopped.