Category:Steam Fairground

One of the more exciting moments of 2015 was the donation of an almost complete steam-powered fairground set, which we think was built and assembled over a number of years from before World War One (and possibly before 1900) to the 1950s.

The set was in a loft before it came to us, and the donor remembers it being worked on in the 1950s.

Construction

A striking feature of the set is that most of its larger pieces are built exactly like real fairground rides, designed to be broken down into a large number of quite small numbered parts, so that (in a real fairground), the pieces could be easily handled and packed away quickly for stowage in the fair's transport vehicles, to be taken to a new site and reassembled.

This makes the set a rare three-dimensional record of Nineteenth Century fairground construction. We originally thought that parts of the set were so well made that they had to be from an established toy manufacturer – after conferring with an outside expert, it seems that the authentic jigsaw-like construction is just too fiddly and detailed for a commercial toymaker to want to bother with – we now think that the set was originally built by a fairground worker or engineer during the winter down-time, perhaps as an instructional model to show workers how the parts fitted together, or perhaps just for sheer pleasure. A fairground "fixer" who had supervised the original equipment being stripped down and reassembled many, many times, might have a sufficiently detailed mental picture of all the parts and connections in their head that they could build this sort of model, basically from memory.