Greenwich Fair at Easter

Easter Monday and Tuesday were holidays in most London trades, and on the Monday Greenwich Fair began. From dawn working people, apprentices and their sweethearts poured down the roads on foot and in coaches, carts fitted with boards and even coal waggons shaded with boughs, stopping at wayside Gooseberry fairs for donkey races and halfpenny rides. In the park the great delight of boys and girls was to pull each other headlong down the hill below the Observatory, and at night every public house held dancing and drinking until the small hours. By 1825 Hone thought the fair in decline, the police having already put down the fairs at Stepney, Hampstead and Peckham.