Since the 1970s there have been some interesting shifts in emphasis in the study of sport. Not least of these is the long overdue acknowledgment of something so blindingly obvious as to have warranted little scholarly consideration: that sport is physical. No matter what else, it is crucially about physical entities encountering other physical entities, manipulating, catching, throwing, batting, and kicking physical objects, overcoming physical obstacles, moving through physical spaces, and, perhaps most fundamentally, in the most physical way, experiencing being. So, in the words of the 1980s song, it is surely time to “get physical” in our approach to studying sport. Work that takes the active body as an object of historical inquiry, examines the connections between sport and body technologies such as medicine, and explores the topographies and geographies of sporting practices does just that very productively. And now Emma Griffin's monograph on English popular recreation in the long eighteenth century is a welcome addition to a fascinating strain in the historical scholarship on sport.

Griffin's focus is on the physical spaces and places that were the main sites for popular recreations, which she construes “loosely” as those “activities in which the poor could, and often did, participate” (21). These are by no means solely sporting activities; they range from civic celebrations and feasts through games of skill such as cricket and knur and spell to animal baits and combats. But sport figures centrally in Griffin's analysis, and the ancient custom of bullbaiting receives an extensive and detailed treatment. Importantly, Griffin makes no claims to comprehensiveness. Rather, she is interested only in those pastimes that throw light on the changing uses of specific spaces. These spaces, each of which Griffin shows to have been more or less available in particular kinds of settlements are commons, wastes, and moors; market squares and streets; village greens; and a constantly shifting kaleidoscopic geography of ephemeral vacant lots and fallow fields. Using three case studies—of provincial market towns, industrial areas, and rural villages—Griffin examines the recreational uses to which these sites were put, marking out contrasts and similarities, charting changes and continuities in usage, and positing the forces and factors influencing these things.

Drawing on the work of urban historians who have studied the symbolic worth of civic spaces, Griffin brings their organizing and analytical principles to bear on the spaces that interest her. Her central theme is that laboring people's access to recreational space and the nature, locus, and timing of their recreation were the outcome of constant negotiation and at times conflict, in short, that spatial politics were crucial in shaping eighteenth-century popular recreation. Viewing her subject matter through this lens, Griffin brings to light previously neglected matters and offers alternative readings of others that have been more extensively researched. Among the former are the key cultural significance of the streets and market squares in provincial towns and of rural village greens and the impact that factors such as civic improvement schemes had on the popular recreational uses to which they were put. The role of moral reformers, and of paternalism, and the specific impact that industrialization had on working people's pastimes are well-worn topics over which she casts a fresh eye. The import of moral reform Griffin judges to have been exaggerated, basing her conclusions on a careful examination of official records that offset the heavily biased accounts and commentaries of those who fancied themselves the standard bearers of the civilizing process. With respect to paternalistic support for popular recreation, generally understood as of declining import during the later eighteenth century, she shows that for rural Cambridgeshire, at least, it was a weighty counterbalance to the loss of recreational space through enclosures and thus helped to sustain established rural pastimes. And she continues the complication of our understanding of industrialization, arguing that some industrial areas were particularly favorable environments for popular sports, showing that “traditional” practices could adapt and survive, and underlining the local and regional specificity of the difference that industrialization might make to popular culture.

With respect to this regional complexity, the resilience of blood sports in the West Midlands, more particularly bullbaiting, stands out against their apparently easy fall from popular favor in other places. Griffin suggests that the particularities of regional employment practices partly explain these contrasting recreational patterns and activities. The more independent, workshop and home-based workers of the Black Country and Birmingham hung on to a “rebellious and proudly unsubmissive” (162) recreational culture and fought against attacks on their time-honored traditions. The development of factory and mill production in Yorkshire, uneven and piecemeal as it might be, worked against such stubborn resistance. So, while blood sports became ingrained into the regional identity of the West Midlands into the nineteenth century and beyond, they quietly melted away from the menu of popular recreations in south Yorkshire's industrial communities and north Yorkshire's market towns and elsewhere.

Griffin employs this kind of comparative methodology throughout the work to produce a fascinatingly complex analysis. She is disinclined to impose any overarching grand narrative—one of the emphases of the work being diversity, heterogeneity, and the absence of a unitary “popular culture”—but she offers some worthwhile general observations, most notably that there were numerous possible points of departure between popular culture and middle-class ideas about it. And she has very successfully shown how space might be brought to bear as a valuable conceptual tool in studying popular recreation.

Given the complexities and nuances that Griffin imparts to her subject matter and emphasizes in her final chapter, it is interesting to note a rather different tone in her discussions of historiographical and conceptual issues. With regard to both, there is something of a tendency to strict categorization and stern judgments and a limiting insistence on the mutual exclusiveness of analytic principles. But these are minor gripes, for this is an engrossing and innovative work, one that adds a great deal to the historiography on British popular culture and recreation.