This edited collection opens with Jeffrey Hill's excellent historiographical overview, which not only surveys historians of Britain but also draws from work on elsewhere in western Europe. Hill also neatly links developments in the history of leisure with wider historiographical trends. The great strength of Hill's contribution, however, is his evaluation of where leisure history is at the moment and where it might go in the future. He advocates for increased attention to areas such as home-based leisure, the consumption of history as leisure (including both public history and historically based films and television programs), and the consumption boom made possible by the easy credit available beginning in the 1980s. He also calls for more attention to leisure in the colonial context as well as in the medieval, early modern, and post-1945 periods.

The remaining chapters cover some territory that has been well worked by historians of leisure (dancing, the cinema, and football) and some that has received less attention (the circus, television Westerns, and cannabis). In the introduction, Brett Bebber argues that three themes run throughout. The first two are closely related, dealing with conflict over what constituted “proper” leisure activities and attempts to regulate those activities. Brad Beaven, for example, challenges arguments about the power of film to shape popular attitudes with an analysis of audience behavior. In sharp contrast to cinemas with a predominantly middle-class audience, cinemas in working-class areas were often characterized by “wildly active” (76) behavior including catcalls and regular audience commentary on the film. Such behavior, Beaven argues, should put to bed any notion of cinemagoers as passive consumers of entertainment.

Bebber's analysis of the Safety at Sports Grounds Act of 1975 brings the theme of the regulation of leisure, such a prominent part of the scholarship on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, into the post-1945 period. Bebber shows that the increasing violence surrounding football in the 1970s was exploited by both Labour and Conservative politicians eager to portray themselves as the saviors of a hugely popular sport. First proposed under the Heath government in response to the Ibrox stadium disaster of 1971, in which sixty-six people died as a result of the collapse of a stairwell, the act would eventually mandate architectural changes to stadia that were designed to improve crowd segregation and, in theory, reduce violence between rival supporters. While government intervention in football is often associated with the Thatcher government, Bebber shows that such intervention predated the 1979 election and that the Labour government of the mid-1970s was also willing to demonize football supporters in order to burnish its law-and-order credentials.

Chad Martin attempts to understand why Britain has the strictest regulation of cannabis in western Europe, despite general social acceptance of its use. Martin focuses on the late 1960s, when there was an attempt to reconsider cannabis law as part of the larger raft of legal changes in areas such as sexual behavior, censorship, and divorce. Martin asks why cannabis reform failed when so many other reforms were successfully passed. Timing was crucial—by the time Parliament took up the question of cannabis law reform, Roy Jenkins, who had overseen much of the legislation associated with the “permissive society,” had been replaced at the Home Office by James Callaghan, an opponent of reform. Just as crucially, the economic downturn of the late 1960s caused concern within the Labour Party that its traditional supporters had grown tired of social liberalism and desired a greater focus on bread-and-butter issues. In the late 1970s the policies of the permissive society were blamed by Thatcherites for many of Britain's ills, and the Blairite Labour Party showed little appetite for a reform of cannabis law. Martin's contribution demonstrates that the moral panics and attempts at regulation that have been so well documented in earlier periods of the history of leisure continue into the present.

The third main theme identified in the introduction is the relationship between leisure activities and national identity. Sandra Trudgen Dawson's examination of the surprising revival of the circus in the interwar period demonstrates how leisure could become a flashpoint for debates over the nature of Englishness. A hugely popular form of entertainment in the Victorian period, the circus had gone into decline in the early twentieth century. Yet, despite increasing competition with commercial leisure outlets like the cinema, the circus enjoyed a popular revival after the First World War. Dawson credits this revival, at least in part, to the successful attempt by circus promoters to portray it as a reassuringly traditional English institution in troubling times. This was no easy task, however, because at the same time the RSPCA was attempting to label the use of animals in circuses as cruel and un-English.

Kelly Boyd's chapter on televised Westerns in the 1950s also focuses on the theme of national identity. Westerns were the most common genre of non-British programming in the later 1950s, but unlike other cultural forms imported from the United States, they did not provoke fears of Americanization. Boyd argues that the popularity and perceived harmlessness of Westerns can be explained in part by their role as stand-ins for imperial adventure. At a time when decolonization was clearly under way and portrayals of Britons heroically conquering faraway lands were seen as increasingly problematic, Westerns offered British audiences another way to vicariously enjoy narratives of conquest and struggles between “civilization” and “savagery.”

This collection is a valuable addition to the study of leisure in the twentieth century. Hill's overview is a fine starting point for any examination of the historiography on this topic. Some of the individual chapters introduce novel topics in the history of leisure, and even those that cover more familiar ground make useful and thought-provoking contributions.