Bartholomew Fair is being re-staged on September 19th and 20th as a family-friendly neighbourhood festival that is part of Open House Festival 2025. It promises to be great fun – but the original Fair provided rather different entertainments that wouldn’t play well today.
Bartholomew Fayre 2025
London Museum promotes this year’s Fayre:
“Across two jam-packed days, we’ll be taking over Smithfield with an exciting mix of hands-on workshops, thought-provoking talks, walking tours and live performances inspired by the anarchic joy of Bartholomew Fair.
“Get stuck into everything including zine-making, puppetry workshops, music, poetry performances, arts and crafts, graffiti art and imaginative play.
“Whether you’re seven or 77, there’s something for everyone – families, friends, solo wanderers, curious minds and seasoned radicals alike. Come to create, connect, share stories, and celebrate the power of our community”.
The reference to “anarchic joy” gives a hint of the rather different Fair that ran from 1133-1855, and was closed down by the City Corporation after years of concern about debauchery and public disorder.
The original Fair
Bartholomew Fair as illustrated in 1808.
City councillor Matthew Bell writes of the Fair at its height in the 17th century:
“To accompany booths and stalls selling foods, fancy and otherwise (with roast pork a must) and of course copious alcohol, there were at various times displays of human strength, acrobatics, tightrope walking, boxing, wrestling, fire-eating and waxworks. There was even a type of Ferris wheel, a precursor of today’s London Eye. Shows featuring ‘beasts’ such as crocodiles as well as human ‘freaks’ were presented to the delight of enthusiastic and often drunken crowds. Anyone who has seen the film ‘The Elephant Man’ will have an idea of this sort of ‘entertainment’. Brothels were also common”.
More here on London’s Raucous Medieval Spectacle in Londonopia:
“While Bartholomew Fair was a source of joy and excitement, it also had a darker side. Drunken revelry was a hallmark of the event, with taverns doing brisk business and fairgoers indulging in excess. Pickpockets thrived in the crowded streets, and the occasional fistfight or scuffle added to the unruly atmosphere.
“The fair’s bawdiness drew criticism from Puritans and civic leaders, who denounced it as a breeding ground for vice. In Ben Jonson’s 1614 play Bartholomew Fair, he lampooned the fair as a hotbed of debauchery, where the sacred and the profane collided in a chaotic dance”.
Crime writer Laura Shepherd-Robinson has set her novel The Square of Severns in the 18th century Bartholomew Fair where:
“The showmen had to devise ever more ingenious ways of parting them from their coin. Games of chance and skill included the ‘Wig Dip’, a lucky dip where every prize was a wig; the cock-shy stand where stones were hurled at a live cockerel, the killer of the bird taking home the prize; and the forerunner of the coconut shy, in which balls were thrown at a wooden effigy of a woman, the goal to smash the clay pipes in her mouth. Stalls sold gingerbread and oysters; fans painted with scenes of the fair; puppy-dogs and kittens; quack medicines and musical instruments; and painted wooden dolls known as ‘Bartholomew babies’. “
The Rebel History Calendar provides a political dimension:
“In the 18th century, the fair was the venue for subversive plays, puppetry, anti-government satire & attacks on the Lord Mayor & all established authorities: in 1697 William Philips was whipped for his anti-government satires at the fair”.
Bartholomew Fair 2023 – and before
Matthew started to promote the idea of restaging the Fair when elected in 2017, and succeeded in spectacular fashion when the Corporation committed £1.5 million to a three-week event across the Square Mile in 2023.
Matthew and a group of other Members and residents staged a complementary range of events celebrating the original site of the Fair, Cloth Fair. I put together a website covering both, which you can find here. The City Courant produced a special souvenir edition, and we published that on the site with a programme, and history of the Fair.
- News release on the 2023 Fair
- Bartholomew Fair and Cloth Fair programmes – plus a history of Cloth Fair and Smithfield
- Opening events in 2023 – including ribbon-cutting by the Lord Mayor and a disputation on the theme “This House believes that the love of money is the root of all the nation’s evils”
- City Courant. Souvenir edition
- The history of the Fair – established in 1133 to fund Barts Hospital. Article by Matthew, with other references.
- The story of Bartholomew Fair re-staged – including mention by Matthew of re-stagings by Barts Hospital in 1923.
- Bartholomew Fair re-staged 1923-2018
Bartholomew Fayre 2025
- Booking for the Open House Festival
- The Great Disputation at St Bartholomew the Great Thursday September 18: “The house believes that America is still a shining city on a hill”
Credits
Bartholomew Fayre is part of Open House Festival 2025 and is a partnership event between Barts Heritage, Culture Mile Business Improvement District (BID), London Museum, Smithfield Market Tenants’ Association and St Bartholomew the Great.
The Fayre is supported with public funding by Arts Council England, and with support from the City of London Corporation’s Community Infrastructure Levy Neighbourhood Fund, Cloth Restaurant, Culture Mile Business Improvement District (BID) and Smithfield Market Tenants’ Association.