Each summer, a 'perpetual fair' plagued eighteenth-century London, a city in transition overrun by a burgeoning population. City officials attempted to control disorderly urban amusement according to their own gendered understandings of order and morality. Frequently derided as locations of dangerous femininity disrupting masculine commerce, fairs withstood regulation attempts. They were important in the lives of ordinary Londoners as sites of women's work, sociability, and local and national identity formation. Rarely studied as vital to London's modernisation, urban fairs were a microcosm...