Place Name
Like its neighbour Fairfield Street, this was laid out over open land where the annual Wandsworth Fair was held since at least the middle of the 18thCentury and survived until the mid-19thCentury. The History of Wandsworth Common website says: “The Fair, one of the largest in London, was generally held at Whitsun (the seventh Sunday after Easter, so generally late May or June), often for several days, in an open area called Fair Field between the Common and the Thames (hence of course Fairfield street near Wandsworth Town Station).” Dorian Gerhold, in Wandsworth Past explains: “By the late 1760s Wandsworth had an annual fair… It lacked any legal authority, but survived an attempt to suppress it in 1771, when it was claimed that ‘players of interludes and other evil disposed persons had… built booths and sheds’ used for plays and gaming, ‘which had manifestly tended to the encouragement of vice and immorality’. That year people departed early instead of ‘staying drinking and committing outrages and disorders til two or three in the morning’. In the 1820s the fair was on Whit Monday for cattle and the following Tuesday and Wednesday for ‘toys and pleasure’.” Although the fair was said to be suppressed in the 1830s it appears to have staggered on in one form or another – not without incident. In 1846 The Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette reported: “A leopard-hunt took place Wandsworth on Wednesday. The leopard escaped from a show at Wandsworth fair and ran to the common; where a man noticed it, and thinking it was a dog he approached it, only to take to his heels when he perceived his mistake. A mob assembled, and scoured the common: the stranger was eventually captured at Battersea by his keeper.” Certainly it was all but over by the time Edward Walford was researching Wandsworth, in Old and New London, published in 1878: “Like Blackheath, Peckham, Camberwell, and other suburban spots round London which we have visited in the course of our perambulations, Wandsworth once had its annual fair, which was abolished only within the memory of living persons. From Merrie England in the Olden Time we learn that at the end of the last century spectators were invited to see exhibited here ‘Mount Vesuvius, or the burning mountain by moonlight; rope and hornpipe-dancing; a forest, with the humours of lion-catching; tumbling by the young Polander, from Sadler’s Wells; several diverting comic songs; a humorous dialogue between Mr Swatchall and his wife; sparring-matches; the Siege of Belgrade, &c.—and all for threepence!’ In the year 1840 the fair was attended by the theatrical caravan of Messrs. Nelson and Lee, and by other lesser attractions.” The last vestiges of joy were sucked from the area when the field was used to build Wandsworth Town Hall.
