When you stroll through any British traveling fair on a soggy October evening, the scene is very similar to what it was thirty years ago. Behind the waltzer, generators hum. Leaning against a hydraulic ram, a man wearing a hi-vis vest examines something on a clipboard that, to be honest, seems too small for the task. The puddles are shaken by the bass of a recycled dance track as the lights become blurry. It doesn’t feel like the front lines of global regulation. And yet it is, more and more.
HSG175, the Health and Safety Executive’s guidelines on fairgrounds and amusement parks, is the document quietly carrying out the work. Co-written with the Fairgrounds Joint Advisory Committee, its third edition was released in November 2017. On paper, it is a very unglamorous read. sections on risk assessments for maturity. updated vocabulary for examining entertainment equipment. Notes on importers and ride controllers. However, in recent years, operators in the Gulf, some parts of Southeast Asia, and even a few U.S. states have begun to refer to it as the closest thing the industry has to a global standard, sometimes in an open manner and sometimes not.
It’s worth stopping to consider how peculiar that is. For a long time, fairground regulations in the UK were thought to be a bit of a mess. The Health and Safety at Work Act was criticized in a House of Commons debate back in 1985 for being “so general when it comes to applications to fairground sites that it is often” impractical. The inspectors were overworked. The majority of showmen, the elite, nomadic group Vanessa Toulmin has described so vividly, were self-policed. There’s a feeling that reputation and trust, not paperwork, were what made the whole thing work.
The paperwork itself underwent gradual change. Instead of operating in opposition to the industry, the HSE started collaborating with it. The MCE/3/4 committee of the British Standards Institution, which deals with fairground and amusement park machinery, began to produce technical documents that were rigorous and, most importantly, readable. The final point is more important than most people realize. The majority of American and European standards are written for lawyers, to put it bluntly, according to an Emirati safety regulator I spoke with a few years ago. He claimed that the British ones were written with the man with the spanner in mind.
That strategy has an almost antiquated feel. It is assumed that the person who must comprehend the rules is the one who is actually inspecting the ride. For example, the MRA framework asks operators to think about how an aging structure behaves differently from a new one, accounting for fatigue, modifications, and peculiarities not found in the original manufacturer’s documentation. Italian and Dutch manufacturers have started referencing the framework in their own documentation, sometimes without giving it due credit.
This is not to argue that the British system is flawless. Industry critics contend that permanent theme parks and traveling fairs continue to be grouped together when they most likely shouldn’t be. Concerns have been raised about the slow replacement of an aging inspector workforce. Furthermore, the awkward overlap between local council licensing and HSE oversight has not been entirely resolved by recent revisions to the document, such as those made in August 2025. Whether the model works well in nations with laxer enforcement customs is still up for debate.
Even so, it’s difficult to ignore the subtle power Britain has amassed in an area that receives little attention. A similar fate has befallen the Event Safety Guide, which was first released in the late 1990s. These documents continue to be used by regulators in nations with no historical connection to British law because, for the most part, they are effective and because creating something from scratch is the alternative.
A standard was exported without any actual exporting. Maybe that’s the most British possible result.
