A British fairground in late summer smells like diesel, sugar, and wet grass that has been turned into mud. If you stand close to the waltzer long enough, you begin to notice things that a child would never notice. Before pulling the lever, the ride operator looks at a clipboard. The certificate was zip-tied to a railing after being laminated. Tucked behind the ticket booth was a small, partially faded inspection sticker. Before 1974, none of that existed, at least not in a structured way. And it’s worth pausing on that because a piece of legislation that most patrons are unaware of, rather than showmen, shaped the fairground that exists today.
In July of that year, the Health and Safety at Work Act was introduced, along with the Health and Safety Executive, a regulator that initially had to make sense of an industry that had mostly self-policed for more than a century. For the new inspectors, fairgrounds were an odd creature. They didn’t neatly fit into the factory-and-construction model that the Act had been written around because they were traveling, family-run, and frequently passed down through generations of the Showmen’s Guild. Rides were constructed in winter sheds, manually altered, and then rebuilt following the season. When there was safety, it existed only in the minds of the men operating the machinery.
That started to change, but not as fast as you might think. In the beginning, the HSE’s strategy for fairs was more advisory than combative. Inspectors came, made notes, and posed inquiries. Reading the earlier guidance documents gives the impression that the regulator realized it was dealing with a culture rather than just a workplace. Excessive pressure could have caused the trade to fail completely. Instead, the regulations were implemented in stages: voluntary codes came first, followed by mandatory inspections and the now-familiar ADIPS program, which has mandated that every ride have an independent engineer-signed Declaration of Operational Compliance since the early 1980s.
All of this might not have occurred in the absence of the 1974 Act. For many years, the fairground industry had opposed outside regulation, citing custom, mobility, and the unique nature of the work. However, a number of high-profile incidents in the 1970s and 1980s made it more difficult to maintain the previous arguments. The inspectors grew closer with every tragedy. The operators were pushed toward standardization with each more thorough inspection.
It’s amazing to see how unnoticeable the change has been to the general public over the course of fifty years. Today, a child climbing onto a dodgem in Blackpool is unaware that the ride’s comprehensive inspection is recorded in a national database, that the operator has a certificate of competence, and that the chassis has undergone non-destructive testing. It still appears to be a fair. The lights are still fuzzy. The volume of the music is still too high. Underneath, however, the fatality figures tell their own tale while the machinery of regulation hums silently. The fairground industry, which was once thought to be one of the riskier sectors of public entertainment, has tracked the decline in workplace deaths across all British industries, which fell from over 600 annually in 1974 to less than 150 by the mid-2010s.
Naturally, tension still exists. Paperwork is a source of complaint for operators. The cost of compliance is a problem for smaller traveling shows. Additionally, the HSE itself, under Sarah Albon, has acknowledged that the same patient adaptation that characterized the first fifty years will be necessary to address emerging risks, such as newer ride technologies, mental health pressures on seasonal workers, and the cost-of-living squeeze on family businesses.
As you pass a contemporary funfair, you can’t help but notice how much of what makes it safe is also what makes it uninteresting. The romance of the fairground was not destroyed by the Act. It simply ensured that the romance ended with the encounter and never progressed to the engineering.
