This chapter argues that the period 1750-1850 was marked by two apparently contradictory processes: an attack on popular leisure, frequently defined as idleness, and an expansion of commercial leisure on offer to the people. The attack on popular leisure focused on the entertainment offered by pubs and on sports like bull-baiting. Crucial to it was the declining availability of space for leisure, due partly to increasing urbanisation. The expansion of commercial leisure was most obvious in the spread of sports where gambling was central and of theatre in its widest sense. Many contemporaries within all classes worried about the increasing separation of the classes in leisure, and there were numerous attempts, most prominently under the label 'rational recreation', to bring the classes together in leisure activities and in institutions free of commercial input. But by 1850 the public parks, libraries and museums were more aspirations than realities on the ground.